Kathleen Stock



It is essential for the safeguarding of our children that life-changing decisions such as embarking on gender realignment are carefully interrogated. Organisations like Stonewall tend to amplify the myth that “gender identity” is permanent and innate, even when it is at odds with your biological sex. Yet identity claims come and go, and there are a range of background factors relevant to whether or not a child might temporarily reject their biological sex. These include autism, same-sex attraction, a history of trauma, time spent in the care system, a girl's discomfort at impending sexual maturity, or simply being in the grip of a social media fashion. Kathleen Stock is a British philosopher, writer, and self-admitted "contrarian, both by temperament and training." She taught philosophy at the University of Sussex for many years, rising to prominence – and controversy – in the late 2010s, mainly for her "gender-critical" punditry.

Background
Kathleen Mary Linn Stock was born in Scotland in November 1972 to English academics who worked at Aberdeen University. After studying French and philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford, she received a Master of Arts from the University of St Andrews, followed by a PhD in philosophy from the University of Leeds.

At the age of 25, Stock married her long-time boyfriend, eventually having two children with him. The marriage dissolved when Stock was 39, and she subsequently came out as lesbian. She now lives with her wife in Sussex.

Writings and media presence
Stock's academic credentials are in the field of philosophy. Her published work prior to joining the gender-critical bandwagon dealt with literature, music, and aesthetics. That hasn't stopped her from writing extensively about, and presenting herself as an authority on, gender and related issues. Since 2018, her TERF musings have been given space in British newspapers, including The Economist, The Telegraph, and The Daily Fail.

In an article in the journal Women's History Review, Deborah Shaw noted the rarity of Stock's rise to celebrity academic, a status typically achieved through breakthroughs in the "realms of science, the environment or health." However, Shaw concludes that Stock has uniquely emerged as a "totemic figure for a trans-hostile media", fitting into a "pre-existing trans-hostile right-wing media narrative" hungry for "free-speech martyrs." Shaw found that in 2021 alone there were a staggering 78 stories about Stock published in the Telegraph and 40 stories in The Daily Mail. This reflects a wider trend in the British media, with coverage of trans issues growing 400% between 2009 to 2019, according to an IPSO report. The British press has drawn international attention for its toxic and pervasive fixation on trans people since at least 2018.

Material Girls
In 2021, Stock released the book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, billed by its publisher as a "timely and trenchant critique" of the "influential theory" of gender identity. The book was lavished with praise by the UK press, earning rave reviews from The Times, The Evening Standard, The Telegraph, and The Spectator. It managed to find its way to number 13 in the UK non-fiction charts. Nonetheless, Stock seems to have been dissatisfied with its sales figures, demanding that booksellers "start showing some mettle" by putting her "reasonable and warmly reviewed book" on display.

The central thesis of Material Girls, as outlined by Deborah Shaw in Women's History Review, is that trans people – particularly trans women – are "immersed in a fiction" that ruins lives and damages society. In Shaw's view, the characterization of gender identity as an "immersive fiction" by Stock in the book serves to "deny the realities, theories or lived experiences of trans women." As evidence of the alleged dangers of the trans fiction, Stock has offered a litany of "gender critical moral panic greatest hits," all of which "code trans women as predatory, deceptive and delusional men":

Adam Briggle, academic philosopher and father of a trans son, echoed Shaw's criticism in a review of Material Girls for the journal Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective: "This is a motif for Stock: point to a handful of problematic cases and blend them with sexual dimorphism to derive a sweeping trans-exclusionary policy recommendation." He argued that Stock's model of sex divides humanity into the rigid "categories WOMAN and MAN (capitalized by her to indicate that these are concepts and not the entities they refer to)" that are unaltered by "inner feelings of gender identity" due to being "rooted in biological sexual dimorphism." However, behind the seeming weight of these "concepts in CAPITALS" and "facts about sexual dimorphism," Briggle saw Stock's "political prescriptions" as ultimately boiling down to "judgments about balancing harms," in which she invariably shows that "she doesn't think protecting the safety and dignity of transgender people outweighs the 'potential costs' of altering the social norm." In nearly "every instance in the book", Briggle found that Stock presents trans women as "deceivers, rapists, and violent offenders," giving real trans women "all the weight of a feather" against the "great tonnage of mostly conjectural male pretenders on the other side of the scale."

In a double review of Material Girls and Helen Joyce's Trans for the blog Critical Legal Thinking, law professor Alex Sharpe commented that both books "set themselves against trans rights activism" and thus "advance broader toxic politics that embolden the Christian right, free-speech absolutism, and government attacks on higher education." Sharpe deemed Material Girls to be the stronger of the two titles, highlighting the contrast between Stock's "forensic, Jesuit-like" writing style and Joyce's "zealous, born again" voice, but found both authors united in "their mission to slay 'sacred cows.'" She concurred with Shaw and Briggle in finding that Stock argues for trans-exclusionary policies "not by providing credible evidence of harm," but through assuming trans women to be a "risk on the basis, presumably, of gendered forms of socialisation and biological drives."

Other activism
In 2019, Stock endorsed the WHRC's "Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights," making her one of its earliest signatories. The Declaration calls for the "elimination" of the "practice of transgenderism." Many unsurprisingly find rhetoric calling for the "elimination" of a minority group to be deeply disturbing.

Stock submitted written evidence to the consultation in January 2021 along with law professor  and sociology professor Alice Sullivan. This submission relied heavily on the so-called "Swedish study," a 2011 paper that has been widely misrepresented by TERFs to push an anti-trans agenda, much to the frustration of its lead author. Christa Peterson, a PhD student at the University of Southern California, noted that parts of the submission's text appeared to be borrowed from another source.

In May 2021, Stock was appointed as a trustee of the -run astroturf group LGB Alliance, but was no longer listed among the trustees by early 2023. Stock founded a lesbian advocacy group called the Lesbian Project with Julie Bindel and tennis champ-turned-arch-TERF in March 2023. In an interview with the BBC radio programme Woman's Hour, she promised that the Lesbian Project wouldn't become a "single-issue focus group," since there are "many more issues to talk about for lesbians than just the issue of gender identity." However, in an interview with The Times, she offered the well-worn lesbian erasure canard, arguing that the lesbian community is currently facing a "crisis in which young lesbians don't want to be associated with the word," instead identifying as queer or non-binary. In an op-ed for The Guardian, she expressed the Lesbian Project's exclusionary aims more plainly, describing its aim as "put[ting] lesbian needs and interests back into focus" and "stop[ing] lesbians disappearing into the rainbow soup."

Early tensions
Stock taught philosophy at the University of Sussex from 2003 to 2021. Her vocal opposition to trans rights began causing friction on the campus in 2018. In July of that year, Stock gave an interview with The Argus, a local Brighton and Sussex paper, in which she stated "many trans women are still males with male genitalia." This and other public statements by Stock around the time spurred the Sussex Students' Union to release a statement denouncing her:

Stock compounded tensions in November 2018 when she sent an email to every student in her department expounding on her gender-critical views. This message included a list of TERF talking points, such as whether "biologically male, genitally-intact trans women" should be allowed in "female-only spaces where females undress and sleep," and the alleged "unprecedented rise in transitioning teenagers and children."

In October 2018,, a professor of gender studies at Sussex, sent an email to colleagues expressing the view that "trans people at Sussex are feeling quite unsafe at the moment," citing current events such as the Trump administration's anti-trans policy proposals, Viktor Orbán's attack on liberal education in Hungary, and the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil. Phipps asked her colleagues to voluntarily place transgender pride flags she had distributed on their office doors as a "way to start communicating to trans people that this is a safe place for them to work and study." Stock referenced this incident in a Times Higher Education interview in January 2020, stating that she had been asked to teach in a different academic building, only to find the flags near her classroom upon her arrival. She took this show of support for the trans community personally, calling it an example of the "grey area where, in apparently being kind [to one group], you can get away with some very targeted behaviour." This interview set off a fresh wave of media support for Stock. It also unleashed a torrent of online harassment against Phipps.

The University of East Anglia postponed a seminar that Stock was slated to give in late January 2020 on the "philosophical issues surrounding diversity and inclusion." According to Stock, the university informed her that it was concerned about the prospect of student protests, and wanted to secure a bigger venue with more security and a trans speaker for the week after her. In a statement to student paper Concrete, the UEA affirmed it is "proud of [its] reputation for thinking without borders" and "welcome[s] debate from all points of view", but stressed that "as a community and as a society we need to find a way for these opinions to be debated in a respectful way, while being mindful of the impact on individuals." Stock accused the UEA of having "no platformed" her, telling the Telegraph that the move was "part of a wider pattern where an invitation to speak is given in the normal way, and then senior management panic in response apparently to some kind of protest" In a statement to Concrete, Stock claimed that universities are "heavily influenced by trans activist organisations such as ," charging that the UEA is involved in Stonewall diversity and inclusion programmes. Stock had previously signed a June 2019 letter to The Times from 30 academics urging British universities to "sever their links" to Stonewall on account of its diversity programmes allegedly existing "in tension with academic freedom."

Campaign for removal from post
On October 6, 2021, Sussex students belonging to a group called Anti Terf Sussex launched a campaign for Stock to be removed from her post, arguing that "transphobes like Stock are anti-feminist, anti-queer and anti-intellectual" and are "harmful and dangerous to trans people." The group staged protests and demonstrations against Stock on and around the Sussex campus." This included putting up posters at a train station near the campus with messages like "Kathleen Stock makes trans students unsafe — Sussex still pays her" and "We're not paying £9,250 a year for transphobia — fire Kathleen Stock."  In an on-campus protest, black bloc-clad students carried a banner reading "Stock Out," setting off coloured smoke bombs to draw attention to it.  An anti-trans Twitter commentator pronounced there were now "masked paramilitary men walking around [the Sussex] campus armed with God knows what beyond smoke bombs threatening one of [its] female professors."

By Stock's account, she encountered a poster "defaced" with the group's slogans on campus during the time the protests were ongoing, causing her to "burst into tears and [run] back to the train station" to return home. She has stated that police advised her at the time that she "may need to be accompanied by bodyguards on campus" and should install CCTV surveillance outside her home. A spokesperson for the Sussex Police confirmed to the Daily Mail that they received a "report of harassment of an employee at the University of Sussex" on October 6, stating that it was "being investigated as a report of harassment, including by use of posters and online."

On October 12, the Sussex branch of the released a statement, extending its "solidarity to all trans and non-binary members of our community" in light of "recent events on campus and ensuing public response on social media." While stressing it did not "endorse the call for any worker to be summarily sacked" and opposed "all forms of bullying, harassment, and intimidation of staff and students," the union urged the university to launch an "urgent investigation into the ways in which institutional transphobia operates at our university." Stock, though not personally named in the statement, charged that her "former union branch" had "effectively ended my career at Sussex University."

The call for Stock's sacking provoked a furious response from the Freeze Peach crowd. Stock and her supporters accused the students of trying to suppress her academic freedom. The LGB Alliance, in a moment of supreme tone-deafness, invoked Martin Niemöller's poem: "If politicians, regulators, governors and above all fellow academics don't defend @Docstockk they’ll soon be able to say 'then they came for me'. And it will indeed be too late." Toby Young declared the attempt to "bully a courageous woman" into silence to be "cancel culture at its absolute worst" in a piece for The Daily Mail.

Largely absent from the media conversation about Stock was the fact that the student protests were also an exercise in free speech. In an interview with BBC Radio 4 on October 8, then the vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex, decried the "masked protesters, putting up posters, calling for the sacking of somebody for exercising her rights to articulate her views," but unironically vowed "if they're students, and we can identify them, we will certainly take investigations and disciplinary action." In an October 21 email to students, Tickell threatened to "take action" against "discrimination based on protected characteristics, including sex and philosophical belief" while maintaining that the university "vigorously and unequivocally" supported Stock in "exercis[ing] her academic freedom and lawful freedom of speech." Stock announced that she was resigning from her position at Sussex of her own accord on October 28. The university released a statement supporting her, holding that there were "no substantive allegations of wrongdoing made against her," and thanking her for her "significant contributions as a teacher and academic."

Nathan Oseroff
Despite claiming that she was "silenced" and chased out of academia by rowdy activists, there have been multiple reports of Stock retaliating against less-established academics. The first alleged act of retaliation occurred against Nathan Oseroff, a graduate student at King's College, in September 2018. On September 8, The Times ran a hit piece accusing Natacha Kennedy, a lecturer at Goldsmiths University, of "orchestrat[ing] a smear campaign against academics across the UK." Kennedy had sought, through a private Facebook group, to compile a list of gender-critical academics, in the hope of helping students avoid signing up for courses taught by hostile professors. Stock offered her thoughts on this purported example of academic persecution in the Times article: "What would make a philosophy department unsafe is if its academics weren’t allowed to challenge currently popular beliefs or ideologies for fear of offending. Deliberately plotting to have my department lose students, or to have me dismissed, through covert means, is surprising behaviour from a fellow academic." Oseroff shared a screenshot of this quote on Twitter with his own critical commentary: "You know what makes a philosophy department unsafe? Publicly advocating bigotry and intolerance. Campaigning to deny others their legal rights." Stock quote-tweeted Oseroff, asking her followers not to "start [a] dogpile" but telling Oseroff "for my own satisfaction, just this once: oh do fuck off, you complete and utter dickhead."

In another tweet, Stock defended her distemperate reaction by accusing Oseroff of defamation, and stated that he was "hardly powerless" as "editor of the American Philosophical Blog." However, Oseroff wasn't the editor of the blog in question, but merely one of several editors. That didn't stop Stock from contacting American professor, who published an article on his popular philosophy blog, Leiter Reports, accusing Oseroff of "libelous stupidity" against Stock. Not satisfied, Stock emailed the lead editor of the blog,  complaining about Oseroff's comments about her. The lead editor subsequently contacted Leiter to inform him that Oseroff had been suspended from the APA blog for "misconduct." A screenshotted email, released by Oseroff to Berkeley academic Grace Lavery, indicates that publicly apologizing to Stock and "any others who may have been hurt by your comments" was a condition of his reinstatement as a blog editor. In October, Oseroff tweeted an apology, but was let go a few months later.

Katie Tobin
On November 23, 2018, student reporter Katie Tobin published an article concerning Stock in The Tab, the University of Sussex's campus newspaper. The article touched on Stock's controversial statements, including the transphobic rant she had CC'd to every philosophy student earlier that month, and charged her with "creat[ing] a hostile and unwelcoming atmosphere within the university towards trans students."

In a November 26 tweet, Stock, displeased with the critical press, warned the Tab she would be "seeking legal advice." The paper subsequently pulled Tobin's article, issuing a "correction" in February 2019. This "correction" asserted that Stock was committed to "using her students preferred pronouns" and believed "all trans people share legal rights to be free of violence, discrimination and harm." However, in her CC'd rant, Stock had cited a laundry list of clearly ideologically-based concerns.

Tobin reported Stock to the university for the influx of harassment she received as a result of Stock's tweet linking to her article. The university cleared Stock of wrongdoing, but nonetheless decided to award Tobin the princely sum of £250, conceding she had experienced a "moderate" level of "distress and inconvenience." In a follow-up email to both Stock and Tobin, a university official requested they each "respect the confidentiality of the other" and not publicly discuss the investigation, warning that this would force them to release the entire report "in the interest of fairness to both of you." This effectively placed Tobin under a gag order, since the report contained personal information.

Amelia Jones
In October 2021, the Sussex Students' Union officer for trans and non-binary students, Amelia Jones, made several media statements criticising the official university response to the student campaign against Stock. In an appearance on the BBC news programme  on October 13, Jones raised multiple objections to Stock's commentary on trans issues, including her signing of the "women's declaration of sex-based rights which wants to eliminate trans people in law." This was in reference to Stock's endorsement of the "WHRC Declaration", which does call for the repeal of the through which the UK grants trans people legal recognition. Jones's assessment of the Declaration's legal ramifications was thus grounded in fact. However, Stock complained to the BBC, resulting in an official "correction" being read during the October 14 broadcast of Politics Live, which uncritically repeated her assertion that "the text of the declaration she signed does not amount to the claim that trans people should be eliminated in law."

Post-cancellation career
In November 2021, it was announced that Stock would be joining the faculty of the (hypothetical as of March 2023) an unaccredited "anti-woke" online university that promises it will offer "forbidden courses" in place of actual degrees. The project has deservedly been met with a "withering" reception, with many observers drawing comparisons to the fraudulent Trump University. Stock later clarified that her position was "not a full-time role," and as such she would not be relocating to Texas.

She wrote a foreword for  a book written by Louise Perry. It's written from a sex-negative feminist perspective: in opposition to the sexual revolution, sex-positivity, BDSM, porn, and prostitution (see also: SWERF). Meanwhile, Perry takes a position supportive of marriage.

"Very fine people on both sides"
I'm pro-choice. It may surprise some to know I talk to people who are positively pro-life. Not just their pro-choice political allies, who you also revile. But the full-on pro-lifers. They have fine qualities. I refuse to do this splitting.