Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock, interviewed by Janice Turner in the Times:

In 2018, when the government launched its public consultation into reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), Stock wrote a blog calling upon fellow philosophers to participate: “I asked why they talk such a big game about being able to debate important things yet they can’t handle this.” The liberal academic orthodoxy was that a person’s inner “gender identity” took precedence over their biological sex. Stock found this intellectually flawed. “The whole premise of philosophy is to find a logical, consistent, practically applicable position and this was none of those things.”

Changing the GRA to a process of self-identification, as the prime minister, Theresa May, proposed, was presented by campaigners such as Stonewall as a minor administrative matter which affected no one but trans people. But Stock believed erasing the material categories “male” and “female” had vast implications, especially for women. “My bête noire is middle-class academics sitting around making decisions that impact on women in prison. It’s just so decadent.”

When she pressed “send” on that blog, Stock’s life changed. Instantly philosophers, many in North America, fired off angry responses labelling Stock transphobic. “One graduate student wrote this disgusting post about me saying something like, ‘I’m sure trans women sit around and talk about how they’d like to cut Kathleen Stock up into little pieces…’ It was really graphic. Yet all these supposed feminist philosophers leapt to call me a bigot.”

For Stock, this was the start of her ostracisation, which culminated last month in masked student protests and police advising her she was unsafe on campus. Since then she has been signed off with stress by a doctor before quitting her post. Yet she has spoken out widely, from Woman’s Hour to the Daily Mail, while her book Material Girls has been reprinted.

The rise of gender theory, some six years ago, coincided with the point when Stock finally came out as a lesbian.

“So, yes, I do understand gender identity,” she says. “From the inside. I know what it is to identify as masculine, or with males, more than women.” Referring to the spike in teenage girls identifying as trans she says, “If you could take me back in time, I think I would be very susceptible to a narrative that I was more male than female.”…

Just as Stock was coming out, postmodern gender theory was migrating from US and British campuses into public policy. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asserts that the concepts “male” or “female, “man” or “woman”, are not scientific categories but social constructs. From this the trans writer Julia Serano extrapolated the concept of “gender identity”. “Being a woman” is a nebulous inner feeling unconnected to biological sex.

Stock saw the attraction of these theories. “It means we can change reality through our words alone. That’s a sexy idea. It also places philosophers at the heart of everything because they get to produce the ideas that generate the world.” But Stock had been schooled in female biology by her physiologist mother, Jane, who drew reproductive diagrams to explain periods. (Stock’s sister is a research obstetrician.) She was appalled that gender theorists didn’t care about the real-world consequences of their ideas. “Their minds slide away when you say, ‘Yes, but hang on a minute. There are male rapists in women’s prisons because you changed the categories.’ ”

Following that first blog, Stock was interviewed in the Brighton Argus where, discussing single-sex spaces such as changing rooms, she noted that the vast majority of trans women retain male genitalia. “This is a fact,” she says, “but it was treated as the worst thing I could possibly say.” (Stock’s friend, Professor Mary Leng, calls such a statement of unacceptable truth a “reverse Voltaire”: ie “I agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to prevent you from saying it.”) “That’s where everyone at Sussex’s ears pricked up.”

Academics, especially in English and gender studies, began to organise. The chair of the LGBT staff network – “where I was trying to make friends as a new lesbian!” – petitioned against her. “It was very hostile.” Students formed a Facebook group to discuss how to get her fired and faculty members would post in solidarity. Blogs compared her support for single-sex spaces enshrined in the Equality Act to Jim Crow segregation. Open letters condemning her passed from desk to desk and friends would come under intense pressure to sign. When Stock organised a staff-student forum, trans activists leafleted to try to stop her speaking. In January, when Stock was made an OBE, 600 philosophers signed a denouncement.

Did anyone ever argue with her in person? Stock laughs. “They come up to your bosses. They write to your managers. They used every bureaucratic mechanism against me. But it was very passive-aggressive. It was never, ‘I disagree with you. Let’s argue about it.’ When Stock challenged her most vocal academic opponent to a debate, “She said that my position was beyond rational discussion.”

Over three years, campus life grew ever more toxic. Many times Stock resolved to step back and say nothing. “But I would go to bed and just fume until 4am then get up and write a blog defending myself. I’d press send and feel an enormous catharsis. I had to keep meeting every blow.” Moreover, her Catholic upbringing made her feel this “no debate” trans activism was a form of religion. “It involves special holy days, ceremonies, rituals, mantras and performing acts of ritual self-abnegation. I can see it completely.” Which frames Stock as a heretic.

She was still convinced her logical arguments would persuade fellow philosophers. “But that didn’t happen because the men were all, ‘I’m not going anywhere near that.’ And the women were all, ‘Heretic! Burn her!’ It’s women who have really pushed the persecution.” Why? “Partly because in academia now there’s a career incentive to virtue-signal, to promote yourself as an ethical activist figure.”

How utterly depressing.