Holly Lawford-Smith

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Holly Lawford-Smith (born 1982) is a New Zealand–Australian philosopher and author. She is an associate professor of political philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Her work covers political philosophy, feminism, climate ethics, and sex and gender.

Education: BA Hons and MA from the University of Otago; PhD from the Australian National University in 2010.

Career: She has taught at the University of Sheffield and has been at the University of Melbourne since 2017. Her research focuses on radical feminism and gender-critical feminism.

Views and public work: Lawford-Smith is known for her gender-critical views on transgender rights; some have described these views as transphobic. In February 2021 she launched No Conflict, They Said, a site collecting anonymous stories about transgender women in women-only spaces. Some Melbourne colleagues criticized the site as transphobic and a concern for research integrity.

In May 2022 Oxford University Press published her book Gender-Critical Feminism, despite petitions against its publication; OUP defended it as rigorous scholarship.

She is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Political Philosophy and The Journal of Controversial Ideas, and she writes monthly for Quillette. Website: hollylawford-smith.org.