Profile: Kathleen Stock, who with a smile defies attempts by the trans lobby to silence her | Conservative Home

Kathleen Stock has a sense of humour. Her critics generally speaking don’t.

On Good Morning Britain earlier this week she ridiculed Ed Balls in a most amusing way as she questioned whether, as he asserted, he knows “what most people in the middle think” about whether it is possible to change sex.

Balls knew he was being held up to public view as a ignorant and self-important man, but could not think how to defeat his friendly, smiling opponent. Here was a small illustration of how split the Left is on the trans issue.

On her Twitter account Stock describes herself as “Sapphist sophist or vice versa”, a double joke against herself: she implies that it doesn’t matter what order her words go in, and the specious connotations of “sophist” are embraced.

Like most authors – what a commercial lot we are – she uses Twitter to promote her work:

“Reminder for brave, resilient types who think they can bear to face my ideas on gender identity – my book is on a kindle deal for 99p at the moment. (NB Extra counselling is available for Oxford students affected by this news)”

Another joke! Her performance earlier this week at the Oxford Union was opposed by trans activists, who said they might need counselling to cope with the hurt she inflicted, though as is often the way, the national newspapers were far more excited by this dispute than most of Oxford was.

In a recent debate at the Cambridge Union Stock told the undergraduates, in her amused way:

“Your generation is terrified of causing offence. You may not admit this. It’s even a taboo to admit that you’re terrified of causing offence…”

Touché. I’m not an undergraduate, but couldn’t help thinking this applied to me too. I’m terrified of causing offence on questions to do with sex and gender. It would be so unkind to get the answers wrong, and I might be denounced as a bigot.

Which is why, when I interviewed James Kirkup about these matters for ConHome in 2018, I proceeded with caution, and attracted no attention at all.

Kirkup observed that Janice Turner, Helen Lewis, Julie Bindel and Sarah Ditum had suffered far worse abuse than he had for saying much the same things.

Trans activists go for women. They went for Stock, who in 2021 was drummed out of her professorship at Sussex University because she had expressed opinions which the trans lobby considered unacceptable.

Stock holds you cannot change your sex: “that’s not biologically possible,” as she told Balls. She is one of a considerable number of feminists who have reacted with indignation to the idea that trans women should be allowed to share women-only spaces in prisons, changing-rooms etcetera.

She is by training an academic philosopher, and when the trans argument began, she assumed, as she reiterated in an interview with The Daily Telegraph earlier this week,

“that people didn’t understand the issues and if I just explained them, they would concede that transgender women are not women and that facts have to triumph over feelings…

“It seems terribly naive, but I’ve learned you can’t change the minds of fanatics. It doesn’t matter what I do or say, or how often I reiterate that trans people should be afforded the full protection of the law, to them I will always be a villain.”

Trans activists tried to bully her into submission. This was not for Stock a new experience: she had suffered worse as a child, as she last year told Mandy Rhodes, editor of Holyrood:

“Growing up in the east coast town of Montrose in Angus, Kathleen Stock suffered relentless bullying at school. Too tall, too clever, too bookish and coupled with her blue NHS-issue specs, and an occasional headguard attached by rubber bands to a metal dental brace to fix her wonky teeth, there was no escaping the fact that she stood out.

“She was also Catholic. The added dimension of having ‘larger than life’ English parents, both academics at Aberdeen University, gave her tormentors further ammunition to pick on her for being English [despite being born in Aberdeen], a snob [she wasn’t] and a swot [she might just give them that].”

She read French and philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford, became a philosopher specialising in aesthetics, married her first boyfriend, had two sons, when her marriage broke down came out aged 40 as a lesbian, and is now married to a woman, with whom she has a small child.

Stock is at pains to explain, as she put it to Rhodes, that her objection “is not to trans women, as such, it’s to males”.

She believes the trans lobby wants to confuse women into thinking

“that someone has stepped out of the male category somehow, including out of all the patterns of sexuality, and predation and sporting achievement, and anything else you’d like, that would normally be associated with males, because they’ve now said, I’m a woman, or I’ve got a dress on, or whatever, and that’s nuts, no magical act has occurred.”

Most people, she points out, know this, but women have long been expected “to make space for others”, and “it’s very hard for women to say ‘no’”, and “quite scary for others” when women do say no.

It is one thing, as a courtesy and a kindness, to go along with a trans woman’s insistence that she is a woman, but quite another thing, Stock observes, to be ordered to say things which aren’t true.

Her philosophical training stiffened her determination not to do that. She instead wrote a book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, in which she set out to demolish

“the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling about our sex, known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex.”

At Sussex University, the campaign to drive her out became ferocious after she gave an interview to the local paper in which, while discussing single-sex spaces, she noted that the vast majority of trans women retain male genitalia.

Any hopes that she might lead a relatively normal life at Sussex were, as she later put it in The Spectator, “definitively extinguished”.

Yet she is a woman of the Left, and insisted that writing, along with other feminists, for The Spectator did not change this:

As far as I can see, rather than feminists like Julie Bindel becoming more right-wing by appearing in The Spectator, Spectator readers are becoming more feminist by reading articles by Julie Bindel. And that’s fine by me.”

Again, a joke. But it was Rishi Sunak who this week defended Stock’s freedom of speech at the Oxford Union, while Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Ed Davey, the knights who lead Labour and the Liberal Democrats, maintained an unchivalrous silence.

For if either of them had defended her right to speak, they might have been asked to explain their recent declarations that trans women are women.

It is, of course, possible to believe both things, but trans activists tend to be strident opponents of freedom of speech. They consider themselves in possession of truths which it would be intolerable to question.

Stonewall, which had campaigned with brilliant success for gay rights, got into terrible difficulties when (as described in this profile on ConHome in 2021) it not only espoused trans rights, but attempted to compel agreement with this new orthodoxy.

“All fanaticism is a strategy to prevent doubt from becoming conscious,” the theologian Harry Williams once suggested. The fanaticism with which the trans lobby promotes its views, its yearning to silence Stock and others, looks very much like a strategy to prevent doubt from becoming conscious.

And it is having the opposite effect. Never has Stock been so visible as she has been this week, and how lightly she wears her considerable learning as she explains why the trans lobby has got it all wrong.

Stock yesterday published an amusing account on Unherd of her experiences at the Oxford and Cambridge Unions – the latter managed “a stunning piece of theatre” when a speaker supposedly on her side instead denounced her as “disgusting”.

But she thinks that at every university in the land, there are students

“who long to have robust arguments and vigorous disagreements…free from the fear that they will say something offensive and be punished accordingly.”

Such students are not interviewed by journalists, for they do not fit the “culture war” narrative which the media wishes to report, and which led to such excessive coverage of the paltry trans protests on Tuesday evening in Oxford against Stock’s visit. In her view, these unreported students

“are a largely untapped asset to the project of detoxifying the current discourse around identity politics. Thanks to their relative youth, they tend to be sensitive, curious, idealistic but not fanatical, and genuinely want to understand the world. But they also want to play — with ideas, with jokes, with each other. Many have sufficiently rebellious or anarchic instincts to shrink from blatant attempts to manipulate and guilt-trip them. They are sick of being imprisoned in other people’s shame, guilt and paranoia. All we have to do is set them free.”

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