Inaya Folarin Iman vs. transgender people

Inaya Folarin Iman is a British television presented and anti-transgender activist. Iman is an officer in the anti-trans Free Speech Union and is an a dvisor to anti-trans group Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. Iman has written for anti-trans publications, including the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and Spiked.

Background

Inaya Folarin Iman was born on November 8,1996 Iman earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Leeds in 2019. From 2019 to 2020 Iman was a project manager at Index on Censorship.

Iman was a founding officer in the Free Speech Union and served as founding project director from 2020 to 2021. In 2021, Iman joined GB News, writing, hosting The Discussion, and presenting news there until 2022. In 2022, Iman was named as a senior consultant for Civic Future. In 2023, Iman became a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4’s show Moral Maze.

In 2020, Iman founded the Equiano Project. From 2021 to 2025, Iman served on the board of trustees for the National Portrait Gallery.

In 2023, Iman described feeling that college lacked “viewpoint diversity”:

I often talk about a particular example of an event that I went to on so–called “decolonising gender”, and it essentially argued that there was no sex difference or recognised gender difference in pre–colonial Africa, and that actually, it was a kind of Western imperialist endeavour in order to organise people in particular societies around labour and reproduction. And to me, this seemed purely conjecture, and one of the evidence that was presented was the fact that, in the Yoruba language, many terms are not gendered. So as you have with Spanish or French, there’s a feminine and a masculine way of saying things, but for Yoruba, there isn’t apparently the same thing. And that’s a huge statement to make about precolonial social organisation based off of that.

Iman was a supporter of Brexit and a critic of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Anti-trans activism

In a 2022 article on the trans toilet panic in the UK, Trans Safety Network noted:

On March 26th, GB News presenter Inaya Folarin Iman tweeted an image from a pub in Belfast claiming that, while the men’s toilet was separate, there was no separate toilet for women, only a gender neutral toilet. Twitter users were quick to point out that the narrative accompanying the photgraph was directly contradicted by the photograph itself, with the sign clearly stating “Gender specific toilets are available on every floor” (emphasis ours) in direct contradiction to the claim that there were no separate women’s toilets in the building.

References

Oldfield, Elizabeth (June 21, 2023). Inaya Folarin Iman on Race, Immigrant Conservatism, and the Importance of Free Speech. Theos https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2023/06/21/inaya-folarin-iman-on-race-immigrant-conservatism-and-the-importance-of-free-speech

Sherwin, Andrew (March 2, 2021). Andrew Neil’s GB News signs ‘woke opponent’ Inaya Folarin Iman as a presenter. i https://inews.co.uk/news/media/gb-news-signs-woke-opponent-inaya-folarin-iman-presenter-andrew-neil-894524

Anti-trans coverage

Oliver, Amy (January 30, 2021). Students fed up with woke culture at universities launch free-speech group to embrace wide-ranging opinions amid fears debate is being stifled. Daily Mail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9206069/Students-fed-woke-culture-universities-launch-free-speech-group.html

Selected writing by Iman

Iman, Inaya Folarin (April 16, 2022). Social justice warriors see themselves as arbiters of morality. But there’s nothing moral about the damage they’re doing to our schools, says campaigner INAYA FOLARIN IMAN. Daily Mail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10725041/Theres-moral-damage-social-justice-warriors-schools-says-campaigner.html

Iman, Inaya Folarin (September 24, 2021). Inaya Folarin Iman: Leaking Kemi Badenoch messages helps create culture of paranoia and cynicism in politics. GBNews https://www.gbnews.com/opinion/inaya-folarin-iman-leaking-kemi-badenoch-messages-helps-create-culture-of-paranoia-and-cynicism-in-politics/131775

Media

Spiked with Konstantin Kisin, Inaya Folarin Iman, Rakib Ehsan, Tom Slater, and Fraser Myers (Oct 31, 2023). How the Tories capitulated to trans ideology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P3Eg7zeUwI

GBNews (August 3, 2022). Tavistock: ‘people are fearful of being called transphobic’ says Inaya Folarin Iman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhilpTYOgU

GBNews with Andrew Doyle, Eric Kaufmann, and Inaya Folarin Iman (June 12, 2022). Andrew Doyle is joined by Eric Kaufmann and Inaya Folarin Iman to discuss the rise in LGBT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIY-NuwxEs0