Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock, together with Julie Bindel and Martina Navratilova, is launching the Lesbian Project, a group that intends to champion UK women who are same-sex attracted. She's interviewed in the Telegraph:

The idea that lesbians still need some kind of protective body may seem almost laughably anachronistic, not least since the 2013 same-sex-couples marriage act. But the project isn’t so much battling homophobia as preventing lesbians from being overlooked in favour of newer, more “fashionable” sexualities.

“We’ve got a report coming out that will show millions of pounds are going into LGBT but increasingly that funding is going to trans projects, while for lesbian-only projects it’s vanishingly rare,” Stock says.

Increasingly, the notion that sexuality isn’t fixed means millennials and Gen-Z under-45s are eschewing “old-school” “straight” and “gay” for ambivalent labels such as “pansexual” and “bisexual.”

“Lesbians will always exist but we’re in a crisis in which young lesbians don't want to be associated with the word. Some of them want to describe themselves as queer and some of them prefer not to see themselves as women but as non-binary.” In fact, Stock adds wryly, the only place where lesbians retain a high profile is in “porn, where it continues to be one the most popular search terms.”

At the same time, TikTok and Instagram are packed with videos suggesting girls attracted to girls are not gay but in “the wrong body”, encouraging them to transition – despite often irreversible consequences. “A high proportion of the [controversial gender-identity clinic] Tavistock girl patients are same-sex attracted, and that’s a tragedy when you consider they were being funnelled into altering their bodies irrevocably and some may well come to regret it,” says Stock.

“The solution,” she says, “is to try to make lesbians more visible, to have all these lesbians confidently explaining it’s OK to be a lesbian. There are high-profile lesbians but they don’t often talk about their relationships.”

Stock herself has seen how it works. Trans women are women, supposedly, so it's transphobic for lesbians not to want to have sex with them, despite the male genitalia. If you object and state that sex is real and can't be changed by a simple declaration, well, you're on the wrong side and must suffer the consequences. In her case she was hounded out of Sussex University, and her position as philosophy professor.

Yet, Stock notes, colleagues’ “welcoming” attitude to her sexuality cooled when she began saying things they disliked. “As soon as you go against the grain your membership of a minority becomes irrelevant to the narrative.” I compare it to vilified black Tories. “Exactly, they’re often told they’re only superficially black.”

It’s those peers Stock can’t forgive. “I can understand students: when you’re forming your ideas it’s very, very important to not stand out. It’s much, more worse when it is 40-year-old and 50-year-old academics and activists. Philosophy’s a quite tight-knit profession; some people would be all friendly and smiling to my face then saying shocking things about me on social media. Reading a nasty tweet really hurts when it comes from a person you consider in your group. At times I struggled to get out of bed. You feel very exposed, but then you realise it’s point-scoring, it’s not for my benefit – it’s for onlookers: what message do they want to convey to their peers about how virtuous and brave they are.”…

“I wasn’t cancelled, I’m still here. But what cancel culture does is make examples of high-profile people in order to frighten less high-profile people into submission. There are lots of ordinary cases, which won't hit the headlines, of people biting their tongues or losing their jobs, their boss having a word with them, being disciplined or being ostracised in some way for their beliefs.” But Stock and her ilk will be looking out for them.