If you want to discover the limits of free speech nowadays, talk about sex and gender. On social media, on a university campus or in the public square, try saying that a woman is an adult human female, men cannot become women and there is no such thing as a transgender child. The response will be immediate and, sadly, predictable. There will be protests, perhaps police intervention and, almost always, censorship.

This was the point I planned to make in a public lecture organised by Canada’s Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) later this week. This open lecture, free for anyone to attend, was to be held at the London Public Library in Ontario. Not any more. In an irony clearly lost on the library’s managers, they have cancelled my talk about censorship. They have stopped me from saying that discussions of sex and gender are routinely censored. In doing so, they have stopped members of the public from discussing one of the most fundamental issues of our time. And they have clearly proven my point.