Francis initially planned to speak in Bendigo in September, but the event has been indefinitely postponed after La Trobe refused to make the Art Institute on View Street available.

Francis is the national and overseas co-ordinator of the Endeavour Forum and her talk was to focus on “the issue of transgenderism”. She compares gender realignment procedures to lobotomies, and claims the procedures are forced on unwilling children.

The event was organised by former Rise Up Australia candidate Sandra Caddy, who has previously hosted events at the Art Institute including a talk from anti-climate science speaker Christopher Monckton in 2014.

Ms Caddy said the university’s acceptance of taxpayer funding meant it should accept her booking for Francis to speak.

“La Trobe’s refusal to hire their venue is a case of using political correctness to facilitate their system of political indoctrination and to justify their intolerance and bigotry,” she said.

“Your tax dollars are at work, but by using political correctness the system functions not to educate but to produce a ‘group think’ mentality that continues to undermine and discredit our heritage and the values of everyone who does not align with their so called ‘progressive’ ideologies.

“Whatever happened to a ‘fair go’, freedom of speech and open and public debate?”

La Trobe University has positioned itself as a safe institution for LGBTIQ students, including dedicated queer support groups.

It also provides gender neutral toilets and allows students to enrol themselves with the gender-neutral term Mx, rather than gender-specific terms Ms, Mrs, Miss and Mr.

Third year student Ashlyn McDonald, who came out as transgender in 2016, said hearing views such as those expressed by Babette Francis were harmful to the mental health of gender diverse people.

“It’s less of a free speech issue, and more about protecting trans students from hate speech,” she said.

“She’s more than free to say the things that she likes, and organisations are free to respond how they like.

“I’m paying a lot of money per semester to be in this environment and so are other trans students.”

Ms McDonald grew up in Deniliquin and moved to Bendigo to study, and believed attitudes were continually evolving in regards to transgender people.

“I hear people say that trans people are a recent phenomena, but we’ve been working forever to get recognition in the past,” she said.

“Babette Francis seems to start out from the point that this is a bad thing and works back from there.”

La Trobe Bendigo student Vibhawari Jammi, also a member of the LGBTIQ community, said it was pleasing to see the university taking a stand against an event that she believed could cause harm to transgender students.

A La Trobe study found that half of gender diverse and transgender young people suffered depression and two-thirds had experienced verbal abuse.

The study, which surveyed 189 people, also found that peer and school support made a “huge and positive impact” to their wellbeing.

A spokesperson for La Trobe University said bookings are “carefully considered” and decisions are made on a “case-by-case basis”, considering criteria such as whether the event will “provoke hatred, racism or violence”, if it will affect the safety and security of students, and if the content conflicts with established scientific evidence.

Francis described La Trobe’s decision as “racial, religious and political discrimination”.

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