Academics are acting in 'naked self-interest' on the transgender debate, not pursuing truth, ousted professor warns
Academics are acting in “naked self-interest” on the transgender debate rather than pursuing the truth, a feminist professor who quit in a row with activists has warned.
Prof Kathleen Stock, an expert in analytic philosophy, faced death threats and accusations of transphobia in a campaign to have her fired from Sussex University.
She was advised by the police to have CCTV installed at her front door and put a marker on her phone for automatic 999 call-outs to her house.
After posters demanding “Stock out” were plastered around campus, she quit British academia in November and became a founding fellow at the University of Austin, a new “anti-cancel culture” university that welcomes academics treated like “thought criminals”.
Reflecting on the experience, Prof Stock took aim at academics rather than students, saying they are “taking a cue from their role models, the adults around them” who are “all in their own little bubbles” but have not “actually read what I think”.
“There’s a lot of not just enabling but inciting individuals in this story; as soon as I arrived I was obviously, I deduce, a massive threat to them,” she said in an interview with the website UnHerd.
Gender identity theory is “egregiously false, terrible philosophy” that undermines the concept of biological sex, she argued, such as through the belief that trans women are the same as those born as women. In turn, she argued this can undermine the sex-based rights of women, girls and lesbian people.
Prof Stock asked: “How could it be true that psychological identity claims mean that we should just ignore material categories and pretend they don’t exist, when they clearly have all these impacts in medicine, sport, science, education, and everywhere you want to look?”
“If I’m right, then they [fellow academics] have built their careers on sand…So I can see why they had a vested interest in shutting me down.”
She added: “They will just chuck everything. And some of these are paid academics - so we’ve moved very far away from the stereotype of the responsible truth-seeker, it’s just naked self-interest now."
New post with a 'bigger platform'
But Prof Stock defiantly told her critics: "I'm not going to stop and actually in leaving Sussex I've become even more able to speak out and I've got a bigger platform, so the joke’s on you."
She described one occasion when she was delivering a talk about her research, unrelated to trans matters, but around 40 of her colleagues attended a rival event on Zoom at the same time attacking her “philosophy and anti-trans thought”. She likened it to a “struggle session in the cultural revolution”, a Maoist form of public humiliation.
Prof Stock, who denies all allegations of transphobia, said one way of making British universities less hostile around the trans debate was challenging the influence of lobby groups such as Stonewall, to which she said many senior managers are in thrall.
She said she was not a “free speech absolutist” and challenged the “preposterous framing” of the trans debate as academic freedom versus the safety of students, arguing: “All we’re doing is setting up basic facts of biology.”
The scholar recently published a book questioning the idea that gender identity is more “socially significant” than biological sex, and has questioned opening up women-only facilities such as changing rooms to men who identify as female.
