Universities can’t leave LGBTQ+ researchers to manage the backlash alone

The last few years have seen growing scrutiny of social and political understandings of sexuality and gender.

In 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that sex in the Equality Act should be legally defined as biological sex, understood as the sex assigned at birth. This led to the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission to publish a series of guidelines which recommend segregated public spaces, for example changing rooms and toilets, based on biological sex. As trans organisation Gendered Intelligence has explained, “these exclusionary changes have a chilling effect on trans people’s participation in public life [resulting in] an atmosphere of fear around basic access needs [and] lead[ing] people to self-isolate.”

Internationally, LGBTQ+ rights have also narrowed, with the US defunding DEI initiatives, Ghana’s further criminalisation of LGBTQ+ identities, and a rollback of LGBTQ+ rights, protections, and rhetoric.

Amidst these regressive policies, LGBTQ+ research stands as one model of resistance, to evidence inequalities and unmet needs, as well as documenting LGBTQ+ lives, knowledge, and experiences. Even so, LGBTQ+ researchers are themselves part of the social and political environments they study, and subject to the same issues that their research seeks to understand and challenge.

In practice, this means many researchers completing work attempting to redress gendered and sexed inequalities will themselves have to navigate queerphobia and transphobia when communicating their research findings.

Managing risk alone

Recent research we undertook highlighted the gravity of these issues.

We spoke to researchers working on LGBTQ+ topics, as well as the professional services staff supporting their research communication. In doing so, LGBTQ+ researchers spoke extensively about the issues they experienced in trying to work in this area. They described social media harassment, significant career implications, and a need to assess and confront risks in deciding how or whether to conduct and publish LGBTQ+ research.

For many, these risks were intensified because making their research visible also made aspects of their own LGBTQ+ identities more publicly visible, blurring the boundaries between their personal lives and professional profiles.

I found definitely social media a really difficult space – somewhere I don’t want to promote my work at all. In that way, I’ve constantly felt like I’m getting in my own way […] obviously you want the work to be out there, otherwise what’s the point, but at times I definitely didn’t feel confident enough to put my work out there.

Our research found that LGBTQ+ researchers’ risk management is often conducted individually, with little guidance from higher education institutions. Many participants described feeling alienated or isolated as a consequence of not knowing who to turn to for support.

Where and who do you turn to when this thing happens [e.g. abuse online]? Like, who can you email? Who can you…? It doesn’t necessarily have to be someone that can immediately solve all those problems, but people that can go, like, yeah I was attacked by that journalist – here’s that thing, like how do we connect?

Our study also engaged with research support staff who listed similar issues in trying to support LGBTQ+ research communication.

While grappling with redundancies, centralisation, and increasing expectations due to REF, research support staff indicated that there were no mechanisms of support or training to help them when working with LGBTQ+ research, or other scholarship that might receive heightened social scrutiny.

Much of this came down to a lack of resources, but the lack of will to accommodate LGBTQ+ research within traditional university structures is also a factor.

When I just list out all these considerations for safeguarding and taking care of LGBT researchers, all the training and the mental health support and stuff like that, I think there’s just a reticence to put that level of money and effort and resource into researcher wellbeing.

Even so, many of the research support staff we interviewed showed a commitment to supporting LGBTQ+ researchers, to the point that they tried to independently develop guidance or support mechanisms within their contexts.

Whose responsibility?

It is evident that LGBTQ+ research is under threat. Our data show how LGBTQ+ researchers and research support staff are well aware of this, and actively attempt to navigate these challenges in their day-to-day roles.

What is less clear is what we should do about this as a sector.

In completing this project, we have returned repeatedly to the question of who should be responsible for the care of researchers working on politicised topics. Our participants tended towards the belief that universities should do more to support researchers:

I think if a university is willing to host the research, they should be willing to protect the researchers and to protect the researchers’ wellbeing.

In a context of streamlined neoliberalism, funding cuts, greater competition for resources, and growing contestation over the role of the university in public and political life, researcher wellbeing might not seem like a key priority. Yet, the findings from this research highlight that these pressures make institutional responsibility even more important.

Although universities cannot prevent all forms of controversy or hostility, they can take responsibility for how their structures and cultures shape researchers’ experiences of public and political engagement, and ensure that individual employees are not carrying these challenges alone.

This requires more than responding to specific incidents of abuse or providing support after harm has occurred – universities and the sector as a whole also need to consider how their cultures place demands on researchers in the first place. In particular, universities should rethink academic career structures so that progression and recognition do not depend on public visibility.

Researchers in LGBTQ+ studies should not have to choose between having a sustainable academic career and accepting the fear, harassment, and exposure that can come with public-facing research.

We set out clear recommendations for achieving this in our recent report. We also provide mixed-media toolkit materials to facilitate discussions of these issues, with the hope of making a better environment for LGBTQ+ researchers and research support staff across the sector.

It is clear that in the context of intensifying polycrises, we – as a sector – need to position care, solidarity, and community at the heart of what we do. In our research context, this means better grappling with the tensions between academic freedom, public life, freedom of speech, and the right to work in safe and supportive environments.