Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock interviewed in today's Sunday Times:

Kathleen Stock wants to speak to the students who once tried to get her sacked. The philosopher and writer, who resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 after being accused of transphobia and harassed for her views on gender, was vindicated last week when her former employer was fined £585,000 for failing to uphold freedom of speech.

“I’d love to know what those protesting against me think now,” she says in her first interview since the ruling. “I wouldn’t shame them — I’d have a public conversation with them. Well, not the dicks who threatened me, but the girls with their banners — where are they now?”

Well yes. There haven't, as far as I'm aware, been any public renouncements by any Sussex Uni demonstrators now looking back with remorse at their youthful follies. But it's a lot easier to forgive the students than to forgive those hundred or so philosophy academics who signed a letter of protest accusing her of using her status to “further gender oppression”. How do they feel now? No wonder Stock's happy to be out of academia.

Stock now calls herself a “recovering academic” and makes her living from writing. What made her so sure in her opposition to gender self-ID? In part she says it was being a lesbian, which meant she knew biological sex mattered to sexual orientation, and that she felt immune to the “bewitching” power of gender nonconformity. But her background in philosophy played a role too. “I didn’t believe in the power of words utterly to change reality,” she says.

Universities were once bastions of free speech — how did they become places of censorship and moral cowardice? “Some disciplines in the humanities and social sciences became extremely ideological in the 1970s,” Stock replies. “When I was trying to raise the alarm about this to philosophers, I was stuck between the ideologues attacking me, and a bunch of others who thought, ‘Why are you wasting your time with this when it’s clearly stupid?’ But I could see it would have massive implications if we didn’t stop it.”

Stock emphasises this is not unique to Sussex: “I think there’s contempt in universities for ordinary people’s attitudes … on race, immigration or feminism.”

But she also sees signs this is improving on campuses, with academics setting up groups to promote free speech. The other side of the gender debate has “gone to ground”, she adds, a shift she attributes in part to the work of grassroots campaigners — Fair Play for Women, Sex Matters and Transgender Trend. 

Let's hope she's right. But Sussex University vice chancellor Sasha Roseneil is going all out to fight the OfS fine, so the message hasn't reached her yet. And no doubt she'll be receiving a lot of support from more of those brave academics.