Kathleen Stock: ‘No matter what I say, to trans people I’ll always be a villain’

Kathleen Stock, scourge of transgender activists, vilified academic pariah and all round evil cartoon feminist baddie is smiling broadly. It suits her, completely altering the lines of her suddenly handsome face. It’s also unexpected; the former professor of philosophy at Sussex University hasn’t had much call to smile over the past few tumultuous years, what with the online hate campaign, the abuse heaped on her by colleagues and students and being hounded out of her job for expressing what are – or at least were – entirely mainstream opinions about womanhood and women’s rights.

In public appearances she often looks tense and guarded because she is usually on the defensive against those who would dismantle single sex spaces in order to accommodate the angry and the militant who insist that those born biologically male are female if they say so.

“It’s hard to believe now, but when all this started, I genuinely thought 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,” she says. “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.

“That’s their story. But it’s not my story. It’s still slightly bewildering because I never planned any of this, I was quite a boring philosopher, having deeply academic discussions with other philosophers; I was never an activist, there was no Plan B.

“Plan B was thrust upon me once I entered the debate.”

Here in the cosy Sussex home she shares with her partner, Laura, and their one-year-old daughter, her imperious long-haired cat, the fabulously-monikered Jessica Fletcher (as in Murder, She Wrote), is padding out through the French windows into the sunny courtyard and the mood is anything but sombre.

“At my lowest point I would lie on the floor crying my eyes out and drinking gin,” she says. “I suffered from insomnia, I felt desolate but life had to go on, and despite the invective and hostility I still got up every day and went into work. It’s what you do; only when the bullying stops can you take a breath and begin to process what has happened.”

The 51-year-old, who also has two teenage sons she co-parents with her ex-husband, (she came out as lesbian aged 40,) stands 6ft tall and as she folds herself into an armchair I wonder aloud how she reacted when Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, announced on live radio that “clearly a woman can have a penis”.

“Ed Davey looks like a completely conventional middle aged man in a suit, and if he’s spouting this sort of thing, it’s a reminder of what a mad situation we’re in,” she says. “I don’t agree with him, I doubt he believes it and I suspect the subject was workshopped and this answer was seen to be the best vote-winning strategy. And as he’ll discover, it’s not going to impress the public.”

For her part, Stock is once again preparing to step into the spotlight on Tuesday when she takes up an invitation from the Oxford Union committee to discuss free speech. Controversy has dogged the event for weeks now, with some colleges calling for her to be no-platformed and other students rounding on them for seeking to silence her. There have been allegations of death threats and harassment against the committee members and the LGBTQ+ society is expecting hundreds of students to join the protest “to show support for the trans community”.

More than 40 Oxford academics warned students earlier this month that free speech was in peril in a letter to The Daily Telegraph. It was signed by dons including Prof Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, and Prof Nigel Biggar, the theologian, and stated that universities exist to “promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument”.

“I felt pleased that some prominent academics still understand the value of institutions that foster open debate, and were prepared to say so,” she tells me. “Oxford students are going into the world with a huge amount of advantage, given their educational background, and a bit of humility wouldn’t go amiss. No one group of students should be the judge of what others get to hear. That’s not how free speech works.”

She is bracing herself for her entry into the lion’s den: “It’s never pleasant to be called a bigot and to be screamed at in the street by people who hate you so much they have actually bothered to put your name on a placard,” she says. “I have a habit of saying yes to challenges, telling myself I can always drop out later, but I never do. Something makes me keep going – probably stubbornness.”

Stoicism too. And a burning sense of purpose. The auguries aren’t promising. Last November during a debate at the Cambridge Union in which Stock argued in favour of the right to offend, the undergraduate speaker who was meant to be on her side, stood up and humiliatingly denounced her from the floor. “That was quite a shock,” Stock says. But although visibly shaken she went on to win the debate. Whatever the outcome it will surely make headlines, but arguably far more interesting, and with much greater reach is the Channel 4 documentary Gender Wars to be broadcast the same evening.

Here we see the extent of the polarisation between the trans lobby and the gender critical (the term used to describe anyone who disagrees that men can become women and vice versa). One of the participants, Katy Jon Went, a transgender woman and “campaigner for trans dialogue”, who self-describes as non-binary offers a glimmer of hope in calling for a cessation of hostilities to enable a constructive exchange of ideas.

Having seen the programme, it strikes me that this gender battle is very much about emotion versus analysis, political principals versus personal experience.

“There has to be a way of rising above the personal and the culture of victimhood,” says Stock. “We need new narratives about strength and courage and fortitude; something is out of whack and we as a society need to address that.”

To understand how Stock came to be the lightning rod for so much fear and loathing and how she managed to survive the ordeal you have to examine her own back story. One of two children, her parents were English academics who taught at the University of Aberdeen – her father is also a philosopher – she grew up in the coastal town of Montrose.

“I didn’t fit in,” she says. “I was very tall very early on. My parents were English. I was a swot. I had blue National Health specs and I was unfashionably dressed with a terrible haircut. I was also very self-conscious and shy to the point of almost being mute. So I was bullied on an epic scale; in every class I would be called names. Objects would be hurled at my head and whenever I was paired with anyone for an activity everyone would laugh their heads off. I was a joke; it was pretty brutal.”

Stock never retaliated. She never complained about the hitting, spitting and hair-pulling. Her world was dominated by horrible experiences but even now she refuses to succumb to self pity. “I can’t abide sentimentality. Yes it marked me, but it didn’t ruin my life. It’s given me qualities I’m grateful for; I can handle being socially ostracised, which is what it was then and is now.” In parallel to this, Stock’s father schooled her in the principles of logical thinking and how to interrogate and defend an argument. In response she gravitated towards the study of French and philosophy at Oxford, later completed a masters at the University of St Andrews and then won a scholarship for a philosophy PhD at Leeds. After one-year contracts at the Universities of Lancaster and East Anglia, in 2003 she took up a full-time post as a lecturer at Sussex University.

Her sexual awakening came late; she married her first boyfriend, Gregor, at the age of 25 and had her first child a year later. She remains on excellent terms with her ex-husband, who lives nearby. “I’ve got nothing but love and respect for him. In a different life I might have come out sooner, but I was busy building a career and I was committed to my marriage.”

Here again, Stock’s personal experience is important. Miserable as a teenager, she felt uncomfortable with her “heavy, cumbersome” body and was frustrated that she “just wasn’t very good at being a girl”. As it transpired it was her sexuality not her sex that was the root cause of her discomfort; but she acknowledges that had the new transgender orthodoxy prevailed back then, she would have been in a very vulnerable position.

“If I had been told that because I didn’t feel like a girl I must therefore be a boy, I would have seized on that narrative, that label, just as adolescent girls are doing today,” she says. “Had I been offered the opportunity to alleviate my psychological suffering through surgery I probably would have taken it and then lived to regret it. That is frightening – why I always urge parents not to simply acquiesce to a child when they say they are non-binary and want to transition by taking heavy duty medication or alter their bodies. But it’s your job as a parent to safeguard them until they are old enough to make adult choices.”

I share her concern about the way absolutely natural bodily discomfort due to hormone surges and puberty is invariably dubbed “dysmorphia” in the echo chamber of social media. “Every generation has a new way of challenging the status quo,” she points out. “Right now it’s labels; it used to be anorexia and self-harm. Now people are creating communities around themselves with hashtags like neurodiversity or spoonie which brings chronically ill people together. The only thing different from every other generation is that adults are going along with it and effectively encouraging it.”

For Stock, blessed psychological relief came as soon as she discarded all stereotypical trappings of femininity.

“I stopped wearing make-up as soon as I came out, and shortly after just got rid of every single skirt and dress I owned.

I binned my size eight heels, cut my hair short, changed the way I walked – and I felt a million times better.”

As she gained promotions at the University of Sussex, so she grew in confidence. Fast forward to 2018 and what she calls her Sliding Doors moment, when she fired off a blog, tweeted it, and everything changed. A low key sort of feminist, by the late 2010s Stock had begun to notice that in the academic world, men “identifying” as women were starting to encroach on resources and spaces reserved for females. Then in 2018, as proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act were being discussed she made her views known. “I honestly didn’t think I was being controversial,” she recalls.

“I just said the idea of self-ID, where people gain access to spaces and resources of the opposite sex on the basis of simple declaration, needed to be discussed and that womanhood was biologically determined and wasn’t something you could choose.”

All hell broke loose. Stock was compared to a racist, a homophobe and an anti-Semite for daring to intimate that biological men should be excluded from female-only spaces. Online the invective from her peers in the world of philosophy was shocking. At her university, colleagues warned students that she was a danger to them. “I can understand and sympathise with the students who believed what they heard and were afraid of the existential threat I was supposed to represent,” she says. “It was the colleagues of mine in the workplace who perpetrated the lies and misinformation and encouraged the inflammatory rhetoric that I can’t forgive. It felt like a very personal shaming and that hurts you on a very primitive level because once your tribe turns on you, where do you go? It was hard to bear.

“I’d read something nasty online, feel wretched for 12 hours then get up at 3am to formulate a response; fighting back with words, which were the only tools I had.”

When she was made a professor in 2019 there was an outcry. There were complaints in 2020 when she was awarded an OBE for services to higher education; no fewer than 600 philosophers signed a document denouncing her. And then in 2021 she published Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism in a bid to provide clarity on her position – but the deluge of threats, intimidation and insults continued. Unsupported by her university, alienated from her students, the frenzy of protests reached such a crescendo she was cautioned to stay away and teach online. The university’s head of security advised her to install CCTV in her home and consider hiring bodyguards. Shortly afterwards, in October 2021 she left quietly after 18 years. None of her colleagues got in touch to check on her welfare – nor has anyone contacted her since.

“The relief was incredible,” she says. “I no longer had to put on a brave face and endure the insults.

“But I had lost my job and had no idea what to do next. Then the University of Austin, a new institution in Texas devoted to academic freedom, asked me to be an ambassador. I started writing on media platforms and newspapers as well.

“I have no desire to ever rejoin academia again.”

I get the sense that she is ready to, if not hang up her gender critical boots forever, then at least pass the baton to the next generation.

She agrees. saying: “Right now, the whole movement is resting on the shoulders of a few individuals and that can’t continue. I would far prefer the general population standing up and saying ‘no, we’re not going along with this’. Stock intends to shift her focus on to the institutions bowing to the focus of transgender militancy.

Her forthcoming appearance in Oxford will be sure to furnish her with material. But before I go she turns and tells me that a newspaper had been in contact. “They want me to write a column,” she says. “On anything I want. Not just on the usual issues. It’s an amazing feeling.”

The war of words is not yet over but no one can blame Stock for wanting to briefly take back control of her own narrative.

At least until the next headline-grabbing gender skirmish.

Gender Wars airs at 10pm on Tuesday May 30 on Channel 4