Everybody knows the adage that undergraduate politics are vicious because the stakes are so low. When student spats make it on to the news pages, the context is often lost — that a seemingly huge existential issue with broad ramifications for the future of British society may actually be about four people who haven’t ever really had jobs and aren’t beyond cooking pasta in a kettle.

Something like this may well be going on with last week’s kerfuffle in Durham University’s philosophy department. To summarise, Angelos Sofocleous, a philosopher, was sacked from his post at Critique, a philosophy journal, for tweeting that people with penises were not women. This, he was told, “belittled trans experiences”. He then got kicked off another student newspaper, too.

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