The Times Magazine 29dates with women and thought, ‘Oh my God!’
I didn’t even particularly like these women!
But suddenly everything made sense. It was
an epiphany.”
It was, she says, like taking off a mask. “It
changed my whole life. The way I walked even.
I’d had long hair, wore make-up every day
and was really awkward and self-conscious,
touching my face and my hair all the time.”
Overnight, Stock threw away all her skirts
and dresses, sold her size 8 stilettos on eBay
and cropped her hair. Kathleen Stock, the
androgynous, lesbian academic, happy at last
in her own skin, emerged.
“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.”
Thus followed what Stock sees as her long
delayed adolescence, going a bit wild, dating
“really unsuitable women”. Then, six years ago,
she met Laura, 37, who became her wife. Now
they live outside Brighton, with Stock’s two
sons alternating between her and Gregor’s
home nearby. Laura is pregnant with a girl
due in February. The father, a friend, will be
involved in the baby’s life. “It’s another layer
of complication, but we get on well with him
so I’m excited. I was stressed having kids the
first time, but Laura and I are such a team.”
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.”
As lockdown began, Stock started to
write Material Girls, which seeks to analyse
gender theory using philosophical tools. It
is so unflinching you can see why some are
incensed. Stock compares trans identity to
an “immersive fiction”. She insists she is not
saying a male living as a woman is “deluded
or lying or there’s anything wrong with this.
You’re participating in an activity that can
be really life-enhancing. However, it also
has limits. And there is a difference between
fiction and truth.” Stock points out she taught
trans people throughout her career, always
using their preferred pronouns. “I’ve had
emails from former trans students saying,
‘I respect and support you. Thank you for
everything you did for me at Sussex,’ and,
‘Your class was my favourite.’ ”
Material Girls was published in May, but
it was not until October, when in-person
teaching resumed, that protests intensified.
Stock started noticing stares as she crossed
campus, how colleagues stopped talking when
she approached. “Trans flags appeared on
faculty doors. There were lots of rainbow
masks... Performative compensation for the
mere presence of me.” Then an Instagram
group called Anti Terf Sussex formed to
plaster the campus with posters and stickers,
let off flares, protest in masks at an open day.
Until Stock was sacked, they said menacingly,
“You’ll see us around.”
But it was the statement from the
University and College Union that finally
made her quit. The university’s outgoing
vice-chancellor had firmly supported her
academic freedom (far too late, says Stock)
but the UCU instead declared its support
for trans students’ right to protest and, while
opposing “summary sacking”, refused even
to state her name.
Tired of confrontation, she has no desire
to return to British academia since every
university has “people like those at Sussex,
who’ve got a light in their eyes, who want
social justice according to a very narrow
conception that does not involve employing
me”. She has agreed to be a founding fellow
at the University of Austin, along with other
heterodox thinkers such as Bari Weiss, Steven
Pinker and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But this new
institution is at the “nascent germ of an idea”
stage, and she’s received a one-off sum but not
a salary and won’t move to Texas.
Instead, Stock plans to write another book
and await her new baby. “It’s been personally,
very, very challenging.” she says of the furore.
“I’ve been low. But also it’s given me a sense
of purpose I didn’t have writing stuff that
nobody was reading or really cares about.
And I do feel I’ve made a difference to a lot
of women. I feel proud of that.” n‘It’s been personally very challenging. I’ve been
low. But also it’s given me a sense of purpose’