The Times Magazine 25Among thousands of supportive emails, gifts,
flowers and even a bottle of gin inscribed with
her name were offers to accompany her to
campus. Many are from strangers, none are
from former colleagues. “I find it interesting,”
says Stock, “how those who actually saw
it unfold are either silent or don’t really
acknowledge what’s happened.”
Sitting with Stock, 48, in her cheerful,
cluttered basement kitchen, where her pregnant
wife makes lunch and her 16-year-old gets
ready for college, I wonder why she blew up
her pleasant, bookish life. If only she’d swerved
the toxic gender debate, she’d have kept her
job, her beloved students, continued publishing
in philosophy journals, attending conferences.
But Stock is incapable of uttering words she
believes untrue, whatever the personal cost.
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. How, her critics ask, is she
“cancelled” if she now has a bigger platform?
“I don’t think I’ve ever said I was
cancelled,” she says. “The people [who are]
called in to the head of department and [get]
told not to say it again, and who don’t say it
again, they are the ones cancelled.”
Kathleen Stock has always been anoutsider. Although raised in Montrose,
Angus, a fishing town now dominated by the
oil industry, her parents were both English
academics at Aberdeen University. “I had to
develop this double identity,” she says. Her
Essex-born father discouraged her from
sounding Scottish at home, but at school
an English accent meant “I was called a
snob [and] would get my head kicked in”.
Guy Stock, a geography teacher who at 40
retrained at Birkbeck College as a philosopher,
was a stickler for rigorous thinking. “He
disagreed with everything I said as a child,”
says Stock, “He’d constantly say, ‘How do you
know? Don’t be ridiculous.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t
want to do maths O-level. I want to bewo weeks after Professor Kathleen Stock resigned, she is yet to empty her faculty office,
a task she dreads. The last time she walked through the underpass to campus she found
it plastered with posters saying “Stock is a transphobe”, “Fire Kathleen Stock”, and
retreated in tears. But also for 18 years the University of Sussex was her home. Here
she forged her career as a philosopher, taught generations of students, knew all the staff,T enjoyed drunken parties, raised her kids. “My sons went to the crèche,” she says sadly.
She was ostracised. ‘All these supposed
feminist philosophers leapt to call me a bigot’
Protesters gather at the University of Sussex on October 29DAVID M
CHUGH/BRIGHTON PICTURES