DESPITE everything that’s happened – the campaign for gender self-ID, the arguments for it and against it, Sturgeon v Rowling, the protests at Holyrood, the passing of the bill, the blocking of the bill, and a notorious prisoner called Isla Bryson – we have at least been arguing about it, openly and freely. Haven’t we?

Let me tell you about Edinburgh University and see what you think. Last December, a group of academics decided to stage a screening of a documentary called Adult Human Female. You may have heard about it. It’s a film that sets out to explore the impact of gender self-ID on women’s rights and it comes at the subject from a gender-critical standpoint i.e. you cannot change your biological sex and biological men should be excluded from women’s single-sex spaces.

Now, you may agree with that position; you may not. A lot of people don’t, including many students, and on the night of the scheduled screening of Adult Human Female, a small group disrupted it and stopping the film from going ahead. The group later issued a statement which said they’d taken action because the film promotes intolerant views and that shutting it down was an assertion of their right to feel safe on campus.

It’s fair to say the academics who wanted to show the film – and I’ve spoken to a few of them in the last few weeks – were pretty shocked by what happened. All of them accept the idea of peaceful protest – indeed, some have been involved in the past – but they also believe one group of people should not be able to decide what another group of people can and cannot discuss and they expected the leadership of Edinburgh University to defend that principle and stand up for them.

In theory, that’s what the university is doing. I spoke to the management last week and their spokesperson said they were committed to upholding freedom of expression and facilitating an environment where staff and students can discuss challenging topics. The spokesperson also said the university was working with the organisers of the Adult Human Female screening to reschedule it.

But are they really? The organisers have been trying for weeks now to get a new venue and a new date, but the university has been insisting they use a specific lecture theatre which is heavily booked in advance and has no availability on any of the dates the academics have tried to secure. Management have also required the audience to be limited to staff or students only and no more than 100.

The university managers are possibly being careful here about people’s physical safety and everyone accepts that’s important. But the fact that whenever the organisers have tried to book a date they’ve been told it’s unavailable raises the suspicion that, while publicly espousing the principle of free speech, in private the management is hoping if they drag their feet and make it difficult for the organisers, they’ll eventually give up and go home.

For everyone’s sake, I hope they don’t, and I don’t expect they will. Lisa Mackenzie, a former civil servant and one of the activists who’s been involved in the arguments over gender self-ID and women’s rights, has written to the Provost of Edinburgh and I’ve seen the letter and it’s strong stuff. In it, she says it looks to her like the university is throwing obstacles in the way of the screening and is therefore failing to uphold freedom of speech on campus. The academics who’ve been trying to screen the film also issued a statement saying they were dismayed it was so difficult to discuss women’s rights at Edinburgh University.

This is a pretty straightforward argument, and should be hardest to resist on university campuses, and yet the young people who shut down the screening don’t see it that way. One of them, Dylan Hamilton, has talked online about the motivation for targeting the screening, and said this: “Films can spread hate and some films need not to be shown because they’re going to give people specific ideas that are dangerous so that was our logic behind it: you’re not sharing this dangerous thing in a place of learning.”

My opinion on this – expressed openly and freely – is that Dylan Hamilton is wrong: gender-critical feminists aren’t spreading hate and their ideas aren’t dangerous and even if they were, we should, and must, be able to discuss them in universities.

What also makes this important is the activists making the opposite arguments appear to be able to talk about their ideas without any hindrance at all: not long after the screening of Adult Human Female was shut down, an Edinburgh University event with the trans activist Katy Montgomerie went ahead without a hitch. The point is: an event such as Katy’s should go ahead but so should the screening of Adult Human Female.

I would hope that most reasonable people – whether they oppose self-ID, support it, or haven’t made up their mind yet – could accept this argument. The feminists I’ve spoken to make the entirely logical point that we’re not going to get through all of this until people can get together and talk through the issues and understand why the “other side” thinks the way they do. What they’re saying is we should listen and engage – and if you can’t do that in universities, where can you?

There is one other area of concern here, which is that one side of the argument, the pro-self-ID side, has become embedded in universities – indeed, there are now academics whose careers depend on it – and that will make it harder for universities to maintain and defend free speech on the issue. Indeed, one of the gender-critical activists I spoke said she thought that, despite the furore over Isla Bryson, it would take much longer for things to change in universities. I find that utterly depressing: as a supporter of trans rights, as a university graduate, but most importantly as someone who can express my opinion freely.

Which is why I think everyone at Edinburgh should think hard about the way forward here. The management needs to accept discussion cannot be closed down on campus and act accordingly. That means actively facilitating a new date for the screening rather than dragging their feet. It also means ensuring the screening and discussion can go ahead as originally planned without limiting or restricting the audience.

As for the rest of us, we should all be engaging with the debate in an open-minded way. The point the academics are making is that Adult Human Female needs to be seen and discussed by people who disagree with it. They are also encouraging their critics to come and say why they disagree and I would urge them to do that. We’re not going to get through this by accusing each other of being hateful or dangerous and we’re not going to get through this by shutting each other down. We’re only going to get through this by talking, and listening, to each other, openly and freely.