Trans Bullies Won't Make Women Wheesht
The bleak irony that a lesbian academic accused of “endangering” people with her views is now concerned for her personal safety. My @thetimes column on Kathleen Stock & academic freedom. https://t.co/FNmhHkzH8c
— Janice Turner (@VictoriaPeckham) October 8, 2021
Janice Turner in The Times mounts a powerful and passionate defence of Kathleen Stock who believes that women's rights to single sex spaces should be respected and protected, as they are by the Equality Act 2010.
Stock is no right-wing bigot but a mild-mannered, dry-humoured, left-wing lesbian. An acclaimed philosopher who received an OBE last year, she teaches trans students, respecting their pronouns, and has written repeatedly in support of their human rights. It is bleakly ironic that she is accused of “endangering” others just for holding heretical views, when police have warned her to stay off campus and take security measures for her personal safety.
Yesterday morning a demonstration at Sussex demanded Stock be fired. Ten people, faces concealed, showed up. How many more students are secretly horrified at this bullying? How many vice-chancellors have kept their heads down? How many academics have sent supportive messages to harassed female colleagues saying, “I wish I could speak publicly but I daren’t . . .”
It’s time to come out of the shadows, sign open letters, show a tiny portion of the courage Kathleen Stock shows every day in refusing to bow to ideologues as totalitarian as they are deranged.
Yet for sharing and speaking about her views Stock has been the target of a vile, threatening, bullying campaign.
With reputations shredded and lives blighted, at last a university chief has defended free speech in the gender debate
By Janice Turner - The Times
On Tuesday, ten minutes before her lecture, the philosophy professor Kathleen Stock found stickers in the ladies’ loos accusing her of voicing “transphobic shit”. Shaken, she moved her talk online. On Wednesday morning, she found the underpass leading to the Sussex University campus plastered in posters demanding she be sacked. “The tunnel was bustling with students and staff. When I saw my name, I stopped dead. It was like a terrible stress dream,” she says.
Hyperventilating and crying, Stock had a panic attack. She went home, just missing masked figures letting off flares beside a sign reading “Stock Out”. A menacing new Instagram account, Anti Terf Sussex, which has 1,100 followers, states: “Our demand is simple: fire Kathleen Stock. Otherwise you’ll see us around.”
That an art historian who’d sat next to Stock at the last university open day tweeted support for her bullies was no surprise. Two years ago when she was asked to give a lecture, graduate students organised a simultaneous talk to denounce her. “Forty faculty attended,” she says. “I was very upset. I cancelled my lecture and went off sick with a breakdown.”
Through two years of threats, Stock has had no support from the University and College Union. Some union officers have sided with her tormentors. But this intimidation and outcry has finally led Sussex’s vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, to uphold academic freedom. “In polarised debates,” he told Radio 4’s Today, “we need to get back the nuance and compassion, rather than if I shout loud, I will be the one who dominates.” The university, he said, had “strong policies on both freedom of speech and inclusion”.
Except, in the gender wars these concepts are irreconcilable. In her book Material Girls, Stock asserts that although a person’s professed “gender identity” should be respected, biological sex is immutable and, in some circumstances — prisons, rape counselling, sports — must take precedence to protect women’s rights. This mainstream opinion is protected under the 2010 Equality Act. Yet her persecutors believe trans people literally change sex. They believe that in granting her academic freedom, the university fails to be trans inclusive. “We are not up for debate,” they say.
That such unscientific, magical thinking has become sacrosanct is calamitous for academics, especially feminist scholars who study how women are historically oppressed via their reproductive role. An Edinburgh lecturer in gender and education tells me she offered students both LGBTQ and feminist reading materials. “As with any subject, I tell them to examine all sides, to think, talk, then form a considered view.” For this she was reported to the staff Pride network, which solicits student complaints, and then quietly dropped from lecturing on gender.
Across British campuses women academics — and it is always women — face threats, witch-hunts and lost livelihoods for holding gender critical views. The Oxford historian Selina Todd required security at her lectures. When Essex University invited Professor Jo Phoenix to speak on prisons and trans rights, a leaflet saying “Shut the f*** up, TERF” showing a figure holding a gun, was circulated on campus. Instead of investigating this violent threat, Essex cancelled Phoenix’s talk and then blacklisted her. Later it no-platformed feminist law lecturer Rosa Freedman.
The Reindorf Review of these two cases was scathing about Essex’s failure to allow legitimate views to be aired because of nebulous accusations of transphobia. It highlighted institutional capture, principally by Stonewall, which had created a culture of fear so even academics and students who abhor campus censorship felt silenced.
Now trans activists are trying to flex their economic muscle against universities. Posters at Sussex said: “We’re not paying £9,250 a year for transphobia”, and “Fire Stock. . . whose salary comes from our pockets”. Running up £40,000 debts makes students consumers. Add that to a social media block-and-mute culture which breeds intolerance and you create a customer-knows-best undergrad who doesn’t seek a challenging intellectual experience, but courses which uphold their worldview. Universities, like all brands, fear Twitter pile-ons over minor ideological infractions, which might lose them future customers.
This stifling of thought horrifies academics. “These young people, our future teachers, civil servants and leaders,” says one, “are being taught to believe some ideas cannot be challenged. It is deeply dangerous: the death of critical thinking.” Another notes that true “cancel culture” is not about speakers being no-platformed but “the chilling effect of being ostracised, subjected to complaints and so on just for stating a perfectly legal view”.
Stock is no right-wing bigot but a mild-mannered, dry-humoured, left-wing lesbian. An acclaimed philosopher who received an OBE last year, she teaches trans students, respecting their pronouns, and has written repeatedly in support of their human rights. It is bleakly ironic that she is accused of “endangering” others just for holding heretical views, when police have warned her to stay off campus and take security measures for her personal safety.
Yesterday morning a demonstration at Sussex demanded Stock be fired. Ten people, faces concealed, showed up. How many more students are secretly horrified at this bullying? How many vice-chancellors have kept their heads down? How many academics have sent supportive messages to harassed female colleagues saying, “I wish I could speak publicly but I daren’t . . .”
On Tuesday, ten minutes before her lecture, the philosophy professor Kathleen Stock found stickers in the ladies’ loos accusing her of voicing “transphobic shit”. Shaken, she moved her talk online. On Wednesday morning, she found the underpass leading to the Sussex University campus plastered in posters demanding she be sacked. “The tunnel was bustling with students and staff. When I saw my name, I stopped dead. It was like a terrible stress dream,” she says.
Hyperventilating and crying, Stock had a panic attack. She went home, just missing masked figures letting off flares beside a sign reading “Stock Out”. A menacing new Instagram account, Anti Terf Sussex, which has 1,100 followers, states: “Our demand is simple: fire Kathleen Stock. Otherwise you’ll see us around.”
That an art historian who’d sat next to Stock at the last university open day tweeted support for her bullies was no surprise. Two years ago when she was asked to give a lecture, graduate students organised a simultaneous talk to denounce her. “Forty faculty attended,” she says. “I was very upset. I cancelled my lecture and went off sick with a breakdown.”
Through two years of threats, Stock has had no support from the University and College Union. Some union officers have sided with her tormentors. But this intimidation and outcry has finally led Sussex’s vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, to uphold academic freedom. “In polarised debates,” he told Radio 4’s Today, “we need to get back the nuance and compassion, rather than if I shout loud, I will be the one who dominates.” The university, he said, had “strong policies on both freedom of speech and inclusion”.
Except, in the gender wars these concepts are irreconcilable. In her book Material Girls, Stock asserts that although a person’s professed “gender identity” should be respected, biological sex is immutable and, in some circumstances — prisons, rape counselling, sports — must take precedence to protect women’s rights. This mainstream opinion is protected under the 2010 Equality Act. Yet her persecutors believe trans people literally change sex. They believe that in granting her academic freedom, the university fails to be trans inclusive. “We are not up for debate,” they say.
That such unscientific, magical thinking has become sacrosanct is calamitous for academics, especially feminist scholars who study how women are historically oppressed via their reproductive role. An Edinburgh lecturer in gender and education tells me she offered students both LGBTQ and feminist reading materials. “As with any subject, I tell them to examine all sides, to think, talk, then form a considered view.” For this she was reported to the staff Pride network, which solicits student complaints, and then quietly dropped from lecturing on gender.
Across British campuses women academics — and it is always women — face threats, witch-hunts and lost livelihoods for holding gender critical views. The Oxford historian Selina Todd required security at her lectures. When Essex University invited Professor Jo Phoenix to speak on prisons and trans rights, a leaflet saying “Shut the f*** up, TERF” showing a figure holding a gun, was circulated on campus. Instead of investigating this violent threat, Essex cancelled Phoenix’s talk and then blacklisted her. Later it no-platformed feminist law lecturer Rosa Freedman.
The Reindorf Review of these two cases was scathing about Essex’s failure to allow legitimate views to be aired because of nebulous accusations of transphobia. It highlighted institutional capture, principally by Stonewall, which had created a culture of fear so even academics and students who abhor campus censorship felt silenced.
Now trans activists are trying to flex their economic muscle against universities. Posters at Sussex said: “We’re not paying £9,250 a year for transphobia”, and “Fire Stock. . . whose salary comes from our pockets”. Running up £40,000 debts makes students consumers. Add that to a social media block-and-mute culture which breeds intolerance and you create a customer-knows-best undergrad who doesn’t seek a challenging intellectual experience, but courses which uphold their worldview. Universities, like all brands, fear Twitter pile-ons over minor ideological infractions, which might lose them future customers.
This stifling of thought horrifies academics. “These young people, our future teachers, civil servants and leaders,” says one, “are being taught to believe some ideas cannot be challenged. It is deeply dangerous: the death of critical thinking.” Another notes that true “cancel culture” is not about speakers being no-platformed but “the chilling effect of being ostracised, subjected to complaints and so on just for stating a perfectly legal view”.
Stock is no right-wing bigot but a mild-mannered, dry-humoured, left-wing lesbian. An acclaimed philosopher who received an OBE last year, she teaches trans students, respecting their pronouns, and has written repeatedly in support of their human rights. It is bleakly ironic that she is accused of “endangering” others just for holding heretical views, when police have warned her to stay off campus and take security measures for her personal safety.
Yesterday morning a demonstration at Sussex demanded Stock be fired. Ten people, faces concealed, showed up. How many more students are secretly horrified at this bullying? How many vice-chancellors have kept their heads down? How many academics have sent supportive messages to harassed female colleagues saying, “I wish I could speak publicly but I daren’t . . .”
It’s time to come out of the shadows, sign open letters, show a tiny portion of the courage Kathleen Stock shows every day in refusing to bow to ideologues as totalitarian as they are deranged.
