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What happens when public policy meets the complex world of modern gender identity? 

Our guest today is Kathleen Stock, Ph.D., a former professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, author of the critically-acclaimed "Material Girls," and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) awardee. Kathleen joins host John Tomasi to navigate the often-tense intersection of trans rights, gender identity, and academic freedom. Despite facing protests, security threats, and professional challenges, Kathleen steadfastly advocates for open inquiry and reasoned debate.

Today, John and Kathleen discuss the controversial landscape of transgender issues. Kathleen criticizes the medicalization of gender questioning and the societal pressure it places on individuals. She explains how academic and societal frameworks have rapidly evolved with the influence of activism, particularly examining the ramifications for single-sex spaces and public policies.

In This Episode:

• Criticism of the medicalization of gender questioning

• The societal impact of Stonewall’s policy changes and the Gender Recognition Act

• Challenges faced by Kathleen in professional settings due to her views

• Debates over the inclusion of trans women in single-sex spaces and sports

• The role of free speech and reason in academic discourse

• Concerns for the future of universities and academic freedom

Kathleen Stock is a contributing writer at UnHerd and a co-director of The Lesbian Project. She is the author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (Little Brown 2021) and Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (Oxford University Press 2017). Until 2021, she was a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University. In the last few years, she has written for UK national publications on a range of issues, especially on sex, gender, and women's rights. In 2024, she was highly commended for her UnHerd columns at the UK Press Awards; in 2022, she was voted World’s Top Thinker in Prospect Magazine. She was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to higher education in 2020.

Follow Kathleen on X: https://x.com/Docstockk

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Kathleen Stock, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Kathleen Stock: It's great to be here.

John Tomasi: It's really a pleasure to have you.

Kathleen Stock: Thank you.

John Tomasi: When did you come to the States? How long?

Kathleen Stock: I came a few days ago because I was going to Cornell to give a talk with Rebecca Tuvel about, I can't remember what exactly the title was. It was something like Transgender Politics and Academic Witch Trials.

John Tomasi: And you were hosted by Heterodox Academy's campus community there.

Kathleen Stock: Yes, exactly. So it was organized by Randy Wayne, who's an absolutely amazing one-man show at Cornell, bringing in people like me and Gad Saad and Matt Taibbi, Greg Lukianoff. So he's doing amazing work there, totally to be applauded. And, you know, circumstances where let's just say that the general faculty are not like massive enthusiasts for that stuff.

John Tomasi: That's right. He's also, Randy is a force of nature in the sense that he doesn't have any compunction about bringing people. He brought me in to give a talk shortly after the attacks on October 7th to defend the idea of institutional neutrality, which HXA has long advocated, but not at a time when a lot of people were questioning why now all of a sudden with it when it comes to the Jews. So, but Randy, of course, just go full steam ahead and do it. So we're going to talk about your work and your experience. I just want to begin by talking a bit about you and how you grew up. I understand you grew up in Aberdeen.

Kathleen Stock: I grew up in a small town 40 miles south of Aberdeen called Montrose. Aberdeen's in the northeast corner. The northeast of Scotland, yeah, on the coast. It's a fishing town. It's a city, an oil town, and Montrose is a small town.

John Tomasi: You're English, though.

Kathleen Stock: Well, my parents are English. I was born in Scotland, did my entire school life there. I still go back all the time, and my parents still live there. But, you know, I'm not a proper Scot. I'm not genetically Scottish, put it that way.

John Tomasi: And I understand both of your parents were academics.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah. Well, my mom was until she was sort of a junior researcher in physiology, but then she gave it up in physiology to have me and my sister. And my dad was a philosopher.

John Tomasi: Oh, what kind of philosophy did you work? What kind of problems did you work on?

Kathleen Stock: English idealism.

John Tomasi: Oh, nice.

Kathleen Stock: Einstein, F.H. Bradley.

John Tomasi: Nice. Can't.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, big, big thinkers.

John Tomasi: I always like how your English pronounce can't, because we always say, I can't understand him.

Kathleen Stock: Can't? What do you say?

John Tomasi: We say can't. We say can't. Can't. We think we think we think, I think we say can't because we think it sounds English. If we said can't, it would be a little too close to some other word that we want to avoid. I went to English, I went to grad school, and I remember sort of being corrected on can't.

Kathleen Stock: Okay.

John Tomasi: The Immanuel, I can't. Anyway. I'm just curious. So, you had your philosopher for a father. You watched the academic life, at least to some degree, as a child growing up. How did the academic life strike you when you were growing up? You went on to become a little philosopher at some point.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, I mean, I didn't think I would end up there at all. And, I mean, it's just what my dad did, and his friends is what his friends did. Like, my godfather was in the philosophy department in Aberdeen as well.

John Tomasi: Your godfather was a philosopher also?

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, he was Paul Garner.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Kathleen Stock: So, but, I mean, I don't know if I had many reflexive thoughts about it, but I certainly can look back and see that I had a certain kind of training from my father argumentatively. I mean, he really loves discussing deep and complex metaphysical issues, and he's got lots of opinions, and he thought my opinions were all pretty rubbish early on. He probably still does. But, no, yes, that's not fair.

John Tomasi: He does.

Kathleen Stock: He really supports me these days.

John Tomasi: It's not fair. I'm sorry. But, you know, early on, you know, he was… It's not fair because he does think your views are rubbish.

Kathleen Stock: He was very forthright and gave me a, you know, really was quite critical. There's no sort of sense of deference to the young person's views, put it that way.

John Tomasi: Right, right. So, when did you… What's your earliest philosophical memory? Did you start reading philosophy in college?

Kathleen Stock: That's a really good question.

John Tomasi: Well, no, I mean… I guess you grew up doing it.

Kathleen Stock: I remember… You were probably in the crib and they were saying… No, I was coming back from church in the car, actually.

John Tomasi: Oh, you're sorry.

Kathleen Stock: I'm sorry.

John Tomasi: What are you saying?

Kathleen Stock: I was coming back from church. We used to go to this American church because my dad's a Catholic. So, and I said something about my Sunday school teacher. It was this American guy and he was saying that, like, it was quite possible or conceivable that in some time, he was a bit of a weird, crazy guy, this guy, that there could be lots and lots of signs of God, like God could make his presence absolutely unambiguously manifest on the earth. And I was saying this to my father and I said, but then I thought the whole point was that we had to have faith and there would be no faith if we had proof. And my dad just turned around to me like this excited look in his eyes. It's almost like that's the first time he realized she's capable of making conceptual distinctions and he got very excited.

John Tomasi: How old are you?

Kathleen Stock: I don't know. I must have been about eight or something like that.

John Tomasi: Oh, really?

Kathleen Stock: Yeah.

John Tomasi: You're still a mini. And you've written that growing up, you faced some bullying. What was that about?

Kathleen Stock: Oh, well, I mean, I was English, perceived as English. I was extremely tall, still am. I was clever. I don't know, you know, I don't know why people pick on one particular person.

John Tomasi: You didn't like haggis.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, I love haggis, actually. I did my best with haggis. But no, I don't know. I mean, in retrospect, I was quite, I was very reserved, hyper reserved, extremely self-conscious. And just didn't, I was very different to everyone around me. And I got picked on. And then once it started, it sort of snowballs. I didn't stick up for myself in any way. So, you know.

John Tomasi: I asked that. Maybe it's a bit obvious. I asked both those questions about how you grew up with a philosopher, father, and that. I was bleeding. It's a connection there. Yeah, I'm sort of putting these one and two together. Well, I'm actually looking for the sum of torture-related experience that we're going to talk about now about what happened in your career. But if you had a philosophical background, get some experience being bullied.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, I mean, I feel self-conscious now talking about it. I mean, you're mentioning it because I've mentioned it in the past because people do draw parallels with what happened to me later. But, you know, I was, it's true that I was exposed very early on to being out-grouped, let's just say, on a sort of epic scale at my school. And I think it kind of toughened me up quite early. So I'm not, this is not a sob story as far as I'm concerned, although, you know, I can see how it might sound that way.

John Tomasi: Yeah, it doesn't sound the way to me. Okay. I want to start moving now towards some of the issues. And again, you said that growing up, I'm just going to quote you from a media piece. You're quoted as saying, quote, 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 of that label, just as adolescent girls are doing today, close quote. Can you say a bit more about that and how prevalent that phenomenon is today?

Kathleen Stock: Well, it looks quite prevalent. I mean, it'd be nice to know for sure. But unfortunately, as I'm sure we'll go into, you know, the university context is not very conducive to doing that kind of research. But there is strong evidence that, well, there's been this massive rise in trans identification in the female, teenage female population in the last 10 years. I mean, like 5,000% at least. And there's also been a, I think it's 1,500% over 10 years up to 2019 in the male population. But the phenomenon with girls is really very striking. So what's going on there? There's a lot of things going on there. The internet is going on there. But, you know, one of the things that's going on is, for some of these girls at least, is that they don't feel comfortable with the norms of femininity, this very sexualized, pornographic environment that they suddenly emerge into in adolescence. And as I think Abigail Shrier says in her book, you know, they're not fleeing towards manhood so much as fleeing away from womanhood, you know, to something else. They're non-binary.

John Tomasi: Do you mean to say fleeing away from womanhood? Or what you said was there's a, I'm going to add a word, toxic, pornographic kind of culture they're getting themselves involved, that they're entering. That's what they're fleeing from.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, I mean, fleeing away from womanhood is a shorthand for fleeing away from the kind of cultural, in this case, what I mean in this case. I don't think woman is a cultural state, but I think that womanhood, as in the kind of norms and values and things that are expected of you and the sexual attention you suddenly get and the massive kind of imagery around you through social media platforms and through just media of pop stars and influencers all being highly sexualized, showing lots of bits of their body, being extremely, having certain kind of body shapes. I mean, girls have always been hypercritical of their bodies. That's not new. And they've always sought, you know, whatever's around in the culture to kind of alleviate their distress, not always in healthy ways. So, 15 years ago, when I was teaching, lots and lots of girls that I was teaching at teenagers or early 20s, women had scars all over their arms because they had been self-harming. There was, you know, there's anorexia, there's bulimia, there's cosmetic surgery, there's 20-year-olds in universities getting botox in their faces. And, you know, so there's all sorts of ways to modify yourself and to express how you feel inside. And if you feel miserable, as many teenagers do, you grab what's around you. But the thing, the difference is that there's this narrative now that's absolutely embedded in kind of so-called progressive cultures, including university cultures, which says, Oh, it's fine, you know, maybe you're really a boy or maybe you're not a girl. And once that narrative becomes solidified, you're much more likely to end up on a track towards medical modification that you will not be able to take back when the feelings alleviate if they do. And sometimes they do.

John Tomasi: I want to talk with you about the feelings and the role they play. Can I just pause for a minute? Because you've been describing what I think I heard you say is kind of a rising sexualization, new surgeries that are available to people, cosmetic surgeries, Botox, younger implants, all different kinds of things. That's fairly new with this generation. Was there a moment perhaps in the last 15, 20 years when people seeing that change in our culture and how it was affecting young women coming of age? And they might have said, let's push back against the culture and make it less toxic rather than some other direction?

Kathleen Stock: I don't know what that moment would be because I know even as a teenager myself that I was aware of girls getting nose jobs, you know, boob jobs. Every teenage girl pretty much worries about some aspect of their physiognomy. But there's also, now that we are starting to understand, and maybe this speaks back to your question more directly, but now we're starting to understand the profile of the females that are socially or medically transitioning. We're finding that a high proportion of them are same-sex attracted. So that's another dimension. There's also a high proportion that are autistic. And then there's other background factors. There's significant amounts of kind of trauma in your background or looked after kids, kids that have been in care. You know, there's definitely trends here, patterns that you can pick out. But being same-sex attracted in an environment where heterosexuality and sexuality is extremely important socially, you've got a choice. You know, am I a lesbian or maybe I'm a boy? Maybe I'm a heterosexual boy trapped in a girl's body. Some of my lesbian friends, like mature lesbian friends, had periods in their life, actually not even just the lesbian. Many of my friends had periods in their life where they wanted to be called a boy's name. They wanted to pee standing up. You know, when they were very little, they would wear boy's clothes. And it was fine. And it is fine. It was just playing. The parents didn't freak out. They didn't take them off to the clinic. They didn't say, oh, well, maybe this reveals you in a metaphysical state. But the difference is now, very unfortunately, across huge swathes of our culture, some people have got the idea that this must mean something that needs to be solved. This is a problem that needs to be solved through medical means. And that is an absolute disaster. So that's my worry. And I think I could have easily fallen into that.

John Tomasi: Let me ask you just about some of the historical steps in your career and your experience. So when did you start teaching at the University of Sussex? Was it 2003?

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, it was 2003. I'd had two one-year temporary jobs at Lancaster and UEA.

John Tomasi: And you arrived as a lecturer in philosophy? What was your position?

Kathleen Stock: I was just a lecturer. I was at the bottom of the rung, the career ladder.

John Tomasi: And when you were received then, were you working on these issues at all yet? What kind of things were you working on?

Kathleen Stock: No, no. I was working on imagination and fiction. And my thesis was on imagination and fiction film.

John Tomasi: May I ask, what fiction and what films?

Kathleen Stock: Well, there was no specific, you know, you're an analytic philosopher. We don't actually do.

John Tomasi: You're distracted away from that. It's like the platonic form of the film.

Kathleen Stock: No, I mean, I did have some examples. But basically, I was trying, I can't even remember. I have not read my thesis for so long. But it was about...

John Tomasi: Isn't that remarkable, by the way? Did you ever think that you could... I'm familiar with this phenomenon. The most important thing in your life.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah. I sort of already knew no one was ever going to read it. Not me again, that's for sure. But yeah, it was imaginative responses to fiction. Like, how should we understand our mental attitudes towards the fiction film in particular? Later on, I just became interested in how we understand imagination in relation to other mental states like beliefs or desires. And also, what fiction is. And I thought, I wrote a book saying that, you know, you can't really understand the imagination without understanding what fiction is. And you can't understand what fiction is without understanding what the imagination is. So I tried to develop a kind of dual account. I also did a bit of sort of so-called feminist philosophy on the side. So I wrote articles about sexual objectification, mainly. And I had an interest in other things. This all became very relevant in the trans stuff, because as far as I'm concerned, as I have argued in my book on this, we're engaging in a fiction when we say people can change sex. I mean, they cannot literally change sex. We are not the sort of species that allows that. We're not sequential hermaphrodites. We, you know, you're born male, you die male. But we have developed elaborate fictions around this, social fictions that are becoming more and more compulsory to adopt and with some terrible consequences.

John Tomasi: I've heard the genre of fiction described as involving something like a willful suspension of disbelief. The writer, for example, invites the reader to suspend disbelief and actually enter into the world.

Kathleen Stock: It is a bit like, I mean, it's something that you do, you can do it relatively automatically, but you certainly have control over it. And the things that would normally pull you out of that state, you ignore. So at the theater, for instance, you don't notice, you don't pay any attention to the pristine arch or the fact that there's curtains or the guy next to you is chewing gum or whatever. Or the plot hole.

John Tomasi: Yeah, or the plot hole.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, absolutely. There's all sorts of things that we routinely screen out.

John Tomasi: Right.

Kathleen Stock: Because fictions don't have to make internal sense in the way that sets of beliefs do. And this is the sort of, you know, this is highly relevant to the sorts of things, you know, 10 impossible things before breakfast that we're being asked to believe in the realm of trans activist claims. We are supposed to just ignore the plot holes, as it were, because it's a kind attitude that we're supposed to take. But unfortunately, as I'm trying to argue, there are many costs, real world costs doing this. So when I started talking and intervening in this more controversial area, some of my critics in philosophy would be like, what's your specialty? You know, because they love to suddenly get very hung up on expertise.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Kathleen Stock: Only the right people can talk about this with the right ideas. And I was like, you know, I've got lots of specialty here. It's a fiction. I'm your fiction girl.

John Tomasi: Well, let me ask you about that. So 2018, you publicly criticized changes to the UK Gender Recognition Act. Well, proposed changes, which never went through, although they were being pushed at the time by the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. So that's three parties. Can you give us some general sense for what was the debate about that?

Kathleen Stock: We have two laws in the UK, which personally, I've never had any ambition to change, although I think one of them is a bit pointless. But most importantly, we have the Equality Act, which is great and which protects sex, but that is biological sex, although there's some ambiguity about that. Sexual orientation separately and gender reassignment separately. So that means that there are carved out legal categories. So you can't find some, sorry, you can't fire someone for gender, going through a gender reassignment process. You can't fire them because they're pregnant. You can't fire them because they're gay. And you can't bully and harass on those grounds. And there's a number of, there's also age, maternity. You can't hire on the basis of sex, for example. Well, there are exceptions built in, or there should be, but they've been massively misunderstood. So that sometimes it will be okay to discriminate, in inverted commas, against someone on the basis of being in the male sex. For instance, when they want to come into the women's changing room. That would be a sort of technical discrimination, but it's okay because it's a legitimate portion, it means to a legitimate end, I think is the phrase. And it could be sports teams. Yeah, so that material was all there. Now, the proposed changes to the law that were being pushed by major LGBT organizations were that we need to change gender reassignment to gender identity. So it becomes this inner feeling, you don't need to have had any physical intervention whatsoever. It's just your feeling, I feel like I'm a man, or I feel like I'm a woman. And that's the thing that should be protected. And I already thought, well, this is weird, protect a feeling, irrespective of like behavior. And secondly, they wanted to kind of get, Stonewall is on record as wanting to get rid of these exemptions. So there was just no possible situation in which you could say, I'm sorry, but this is a female-only sports team or changing room for the purposes of fairness or privacy or dignity or safety.

John Tomasi: And Stonewall is an LGBT organization.

Kathleen Stock: Yes, it's a major, very influential one. It's like GLAAD or HRC. It had big connections to establishment organizations, to the media through its sort of victories in the area of gay rights. And then in 2015, it changed its mission to become, now we're about trans rights, as it's put. And their slogan became, trans women are women, hashtag get over it. You know, so it was very aggressive. Like, it's literally true.

John Tomasi: And by the way, that's an echo from an American ear, from the American ear. That's an echo of, we're queer, we're here.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, exactly. So there's a precedent for this. But they took the language of feminism and of gay rights quite often and put it in this very sort of assertive tone that you are now going to have to accept that, A, trans women are literally women, and that there isn't any place that women had that trans women couldn't be. And at the same time, they've redefined trans women to mean any man who feels like he's a woman. There's nothing else required. So they also wanted to change our Gender Recognition Act at the same time, get rid of two doctors diagnosing gender dysphoria to get rid of the requirement that you need to kind of, in inverted commas, live as a woman or live as the opposite sex for a year. So these were radical changes and nobody in academia, well, maybe a couple of exceptions I can think of, but they were immediately ostracized, was saying, hang on, this is a radical restructuring of the social fabric. You know, we have had single sex changing rooms for a long time. And we've also had feminists have built rape crisis centers on the basis that they can be female only and that domestic violence shelters can exclude men because they trigger traumatized women who are fleeing violence. And all of that got unpicked very quickly. The laws did not actually change, but what did happen was that Stonewall advised pretty much every organization, you should do it anyway. And they did. So there was just this big sea change of policy changes at institutional level, including in every university. So sports teams would say, well, we're inclusive now. If you are a trans woman, come and join our rugby team. You know, not thinking, well, maybe there's a problem with contact sports here with a massive great male body coming up against a female body. A body that's gone through adolescence, for example. Yeah, it's gone through a testosterone-fueled puberty. So that was all happening. Sorry, this is a long answer, but, you know, that's why I started writing blog posts, because I just could not stand, A, the silence, which I knew was based on fear. And B, I could see some philosophers, people that were supposedly, you know, in the same discipline as me, just talking about TERFs. And that's the sort of pejorative term for someone who thinks like I do. And just being incredibly snide and dismissive of any of those concerns, like, oh, you know, pearl-clutching moral panics and all the rest of it, all the language that comes out. And I thought, hang on a minute, this is women. This is vulnerable women. It's not pearl-clutching to worry about that. So that's why I got involved. And so that was around 2018. Yeah, that was it. Yeah, 2018.

John Tomasi: And around here at Heterodox Academy, we see 2014, 2015 being a time when some important things started to change at universities. There was a kind of a new way of thinking about critical theory and how that applies to norms about equal treatment, free speech, free speech for whom, and unmasking these ideas as being props for power. That was a movement that started intellectually way before that, in the 60s or so with Marcuse, at least with Marcuse. But then we started seeing it now going mainstream around the time that you were starting to speak out. At the end of 2020, you were recognized in a positive way by being appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire, the OBE.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, that all sounds so terrible. It's just an honor that's given out. I do nothing on behalf of the British Empire, just to make clear.

John Tomasi: Is that what the British Empire thinks when they chose to give it to you?

Kathleen Stock: Let's not get into that. So J.K. Rowling has this title, so does David Beckham.

John Tomasi: Does she? I don't know that.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, Keira Knightley.

John Tomasi: David Beckham.

Kathleen Stock: Okay, me and David Beckham.

John Tomasi: Yeah, Keira Knightley too.

Kathleen Stock: Okay, excellent.

John Tomasi: There you go. If I may just indulge me with an aside, I was a grad student in England at Oxford, and I was, for some reason, elected the president of the Middle Common Room, the Graduate Common Room. And among my duties was to host various luminaries and so on. And one of the speakers we brought in to give a talk and then to have a dinner with us was Iris Murdoch. Wow. And I loved her work. She does literature and philosophy, as you know. And I made a sign myself with a pen, as I remember, but I put it to advertise the fact that, as I put it, Dame Murdoch was coming to give it. And I was pillory because I was the first American, at least in memory, to have been given this position of the president of the Middle Common Room. And here I am just on a sign showing my incompetence because it's supposed to, it's Dame Iris, not Dame Murdoch.

Kathleen Stock: Dame Iris, yeah.

John Tomasi: So you're not Dame Stock.

Kathleen Stock: No, no, no. I'm not a Dame at all. Actually, I was at Cornell last night. No, I'm not a Dame. That's got nothing. I'm hopeless.

John Tomasi: All these years have you.

Kathleen Stock: Well, you're not the only one because last night at Cornell, I was introduced, my tour was introduced as Dame Kathleen Stock. So I had to immediately say, it's not a Dame. I'm not a Dame. No, Dame is like much, much higher, much bigger on. I'm only a lowly OBE. There's OBE, then there's commander of the British Empire, CBE, and then there's basically a knighthood or a damehood. And I'm at least two below that. So let's just put that one to rest.

John Tomasi: Well, when that happened, when you were given that award, I read the letter and as I remembered, it said something like, this might be wrong, but help me. They said something like, we respect your academic freedom and your right to say things, but we don't think you should be given, this person should be given this honor.

Kathleen Stock: Well, it was that, but it was, I mean, I'm sure they said that, but they also made a number of erroneous claims about, I mean, factually erroneous. So they said that I wanted to, I think they said I wanted to repeal the Gender Recognition Act, whereas as I've just said, I was against changes to the Gender Recognition Act, wasn't it? I mean, that may sound technical, but it does make a difference. They also said that I, I mean, this is ironic in the light of what's come out about what's going on with children and medical transition with children and adolescents, but they wanted to say that, they said that I was, I wish to deny life-saving treatment for trans children. You know, it was all incredibly hyperbolic. I think they said that I was propping up the patriarchy. It was just a load of nonsense, the usual kinds of histrionic claims. I have to say also, this was not like the first, my first rodeo on the open letter front. I'd had quite a few before that. I'd had protests at my talks. I'd had, you know, heightened security every, every, every time I went to give a talk.

John Tomasi: So on campus, you were, it was already.

Kathleen Stock: On campus, but no, also at the University of York. I was a keynote at the Royal Institute of Philosophy and some YouTuber did a letter campaign, which got, and got all his thousands of followers to do a campaign. So they had to, they were very worried. The Aristotelian society. They were worried about security. They were worried about security. There was also, I mean, also just, it just put all these extra constraints on the event. So I, from the stage, I was there with Tommy Curry and Onora O'Neill and the chair said, Kathleen, are you transphobic? To me, the session wasn't even on anything to do with that. It was on diversity. Trans didn't come up. But, you know, as soon as you're back on the back foot like that, you're constantly being asked, are you or are you not transphobic?

John Tomasi: Let me just pause on that one for a minute. So I take that to be, for a person to turn to you like that in a professional setting and ask that question, I'm going to sympathetically think what I think they're doing. You can help me.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah.

John Tomasi: You can be charitable for me.

Kathleen Stock: I'll try.

John Tomasi: I think what they're trying to say is that there are some boundaries that are beyond the pale. And to be in the conversation, you have to be sure that we're all within the boundary.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, but look, they could just have read my stuff, you know. I mean, it's very aggressive. I mean, I think what was going on, and it's a frequent enough occurrence, is that the chair feels forced to ask you this because pressure is being placed upon them. Because, you know, all of these accusations are flying around. Now, I think that it is open to a chair to say, these accusations, I've looked at the evidence, the accusations are really not well-founded, so I'm not going to ask that question, especially since she only asked me and she didn't ask anybody else, you know, what their commitments there was. But, you know, that was just one example. You just basically, I became a pariah. It was very difficult for a few years. Then that open letter happened, which made things. Yet more difficult, although there was a counter letter from philosophers, which I was very appreciative of.

John Tomasi: And there was a much smaller signatory basis, I remember.

Kathleen Stock: Yes, but the people that were signing it were a lot more senior.

John Tomasi: People like Dawkins signed that one.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, exactly. And Jeff McMahan, it was a good letter.

John Tomasi: Interesting. Let's talk about Material Girls.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So, in 2021, you published a book, Material Girls, Why Reality Matters for Feminism. I love the subtitle. Reality. Reality matters for everything, as it turns out, including feminism. Who knew? What philosopher knew? And, you know, the main line of argument is that there's this inner feeling known as gender identity. And the view you want to critique is that this feeling is more socially significant than, for example, biological sex. Can you say something about that idea, about the inner feeling? What does that inner feeling mean? Do you think it has personal salience in a person's life?

Kathleen Stock: Yes.

John Tomasi: Interjectionist political movement? How do you navigate that?

Kathleen Stock: I mean, there are people on my side of the fence who just get harumphed, you know, and get very cross when people start talking about gender identity. And they say it's a made-up thing and nobody has one. I mean, certainly, the sort of hyperbolic claim that's made by trans activists that everyone has a gender identity is ridiculous, as far as I'm concerned.

John Tomasi: And that's the claim there. That claim would be that every person has a sense.

Kathleen Stock: Everyone has a sense. Well, it's then when you try and cash it out, it gets very hazy. And I believe, you know, there's just a paper come out in the Journal of Controversial Ideas by Alex Byrne and Thomas Bergadas where they've tried to pin that down. So, but, you know, roughly, it's not an inner gender identity. It's not supposed to be just looking down at your body and going, oh, okay, well, I'm a girl. I'm a woman. It's supposed to be something that detaches from your sort of visible physical characteristics. It's really like whether you feel at home in your sex. I think that's the best way of putting it. Now, some people don't feel at home in their sex or not at home in their sex. They just don't feel anything about that. But I think some people do have a feeling of, like, some kind of disconnect with their sex, whatever that means. Now, you can psychoanalyze that and say, well, is it because you feel uncomfortable with the norms for your sex? Or is it because you've got a body that's atypical for your sex? Or is it because your sexual orientation is atypical for your sex? There are probably lots of reasons why people end up there. But I do actually take it seriously that there is such a thing for some people as a feeling of, like, being really quite at odds with the sex you've got. I would never put it in terms of being born in the wrong body. That's literally false. Nobody's born in the wrong body.

John Tomasi: Can you say more about that? Why is that wrong?

Kathleen Stock: It makes no sense. I mean, the wrong body... Well, let's take seriously the idea that you just mentioned earlier. You will never get the body you want. The thing is, you cannot change sex. So you might really wish that you've been born in a different body. But no match of surgery or testosterone or pubertal suppression is going to give you the body you want. So there is no right body. There's the body you've got. And that's it. So I really don't think it's very healthy for a society to encourage people to think that, you know, there's a correctable fact here. There's no correctable fact here. There are things you can do to alleviate your... If this is a very distressing thing for you, if you have gender dysphoria in the sense of feeling incredibly distressed, and if that's a relatively permanent state that, you know, passes into your 20s and you're still feeling like this, you can then, as an adult, make choices to modify your body any way you want. And I have no ambition to stop that, although I'd like people to really think about what they're doing because they won't be able to go back. But it's still not going to make you change sex. You know, I think we need to be clear about this. We're not clownfish. You know, we're not sequential hermaphrodites. Artificial testosterone or estrogen is precisely that, artificial. It's not endogenous.

John Tomasi: On the idea about this inner feeling that people have about their gender identity. So there'll be some cases where you think that feeling might be more robust and meaningful.

Kathleen Stock: I'm stronger. I wouldn't say robust. I mean, that makes it sound like an argument. It's like, for some people, it's a very, very persistent, distressing feeling. For some people, it stays that way. For some people, it passes. And we can see that from the phenomenon of desisters or detransitioners who, in their teens or 20s, felt extremely strongly, strongly enough to want to have radical double mastectomies or to remove their primary sexual organs. And then afterwards, when they, you know, they got to their late 20s, thought, what the hell did I do to myself? You know, I don't feel that way anymore. The feeling has gone. I now actually feel identified, re-identified with my femaleness or my maleness. And then there's a huge amount of regret and also physical compromise because you've lost quite important bits.

John Tomasi: So, in Material Girls, you talk about the personal, people thinking about that feeling on the personal level and then sort of jumping across over to that feeling being now institutionalized as a matter of public policy, education, law, institutions. Can you say more about that?

Kathleen Stock: Sure. I mean, so if this was just about gender identity, I mean, so the idea these days that's in currency in many places is we need to affirm gender. That means if you say to me, actually, Kathleen, I'm about to tell you, I've got a gender identity. I feel female. I immediately have to affirm you, meaning, oh, that's great. From now on, I'm going to call you she. I'll give you, you know, I'll do whatever you want. And that should, if I was a doctor, I should give you the drugs you want. If you're joining a sports team, you get to move sports teams, like anything to affirm your gender.

John Tomasi: And let me just go on. Society around us needs to change its structures.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, everyone needs to change. You've got basically everyone over a barrel at this point because, you know, you get to decide how they speak to you, where you go in physical space, where you go in social space, whether you get to join the women's college or the women's football team, all of that. But the reason why this is so disruptive, this making the leap from how people feel to what should be done for policy, the reason why it's so disruptive, I'm going to use the word disruptive, intentional. It's disruptive because so much of our social structures do have a sexual differentiation.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Kathleen Stock: And it's been going, obviously, there's been very good reasons. If you think of, so if we just take the case of women's safety, single sex spaces where the norm, the social norm is males don't come in. I mean, it's not like anybody's at the door saying, I need to see your birth certificate or like there's no policeman saying you can't come in. The only way these operate is through a social norm that says if there's a man in the change room, you go, excuse me, sir, you need to leave. We put those in place very early on for very good reasons. And I'm sure everybody knows those reasons because a small number of men sexually predate. They are responsible for the vast number of attacks on women. And Catharine MacKinnon made that so vivid years ago. And women are physically smaller on average, weaker and less fast, slower. So, and that's not a diss on women. It's just a fact because we have different things, different bodies produced through estrogen versus testosterone. So we put those things in as safeguards, basically. They were, they were safeguards. They were not perfect safeguards. People still get raped in changing rooms. Terrible things will happen to women, but they stopped worse things happening or more things, more bad things happening. We have taken those things away. And now we have this incredible, insane situation. For instance, in women's prisons, there are male, full body, full intact male rapists saying, I'm a woman and they've been put in a woman's prison. Along with low offending, already emotionally traumatized women who have often come from very impoverished backgrounds or abused backgrounds. And they're living cheek by jowl with fully intact male rapists who say, my identity determines where I get to go. And, you know, I can see what's wrong with that. I'm pretty sure everyone listening to me can see what's wrong with that. But still, it persists in America, Canada, Ireland, the UK, and so on.

John Tomasi: And what would a trans activist, an intelligent, thoughtful trans activist, say about that?

Kathleen Stock: Well, I mean, I think the problem is, I mean, I would love to find a trans activist. I set the challenge. Someone who really thinks gender identity is more important than sex, but says that in certain contexts we should have exemptions. I have never yet met one. Because the trouble is, once you start unpicking the fiction in a particular domain, like sports or prisons, places where it seems obviously producing unfair outcomes. Then you've lost the central conceit of the thing, which is that trans women are women, get over it. You know, and they're not women sometimes, they're women all the time. They're not women for the purposes of polite conversation, but not for the purposes of prison convictions. They're women all the time. So actually, to be honest, I've never, I've met plenty of trans people who agree with me, but they're not trans activists. I know lots of trans people who think this has all gone too far. Of course, trans women aren't women. I never thought I was. If I was a woman, I wouldn't have had to transition in the first place. You know, they'll say that sort of thing. But I've never met someone fully signed up to gender identity is really important. We have to affirm it. Who then says, ah, but no, prisons will let that one go.

John Tomasi: And so that view is that a person with that position, maybe by definition, the trans activist is a person who says that. Your feeling about your gender trumps all.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, pretty much.

John Tomasi: It's definitive.

Kathleen Stock: It's definitive.

John Tomasi: It's definitive of policies on our society.

Kathleen Stock: The other thing they might do. I mean, it's not an intelligent move, but it's a common enough one is to denigrate all the things I've said about risk. So they will say you're pearl clutching. Actually, the risk isn't so great to women. Don't be silly. You know, women get raped all the time anyway. You think, you know, they'll talk about prison guards. That's the classic sort of what about, you know, well, women in prison get raped by prison guards. And I'm like, well, yes. And is this supposed to show that we should let two sources of rape go? You know, people act like they lose their minds in these situations. Even feminist philosophers have said to me things like, well, women will get raped anyway. I'm like, you're a feminist philosopher. Safeguards never claimed to be doing everything to making things perfect. They were basically there to do the best we can. And we would never accept that argument, you know, protecting children from pedophiles. Well, some children will be abused anyway. So let's get rid of these safeguards. We just wouldn't.

John Tomasi: Do you see women or biological women?

Kathleen Stock: Women.

John Tomasi: As the primary?

Kathleen Stock: That was spear banning. And girls.

John Tomasi: Do you see them as the primary people who are paying the costs of this movement? Or do you see a male cost as well?

Kathleen Stock: I think they are primary. In terms of these changes to social policy, no one seems to have given a toss about this. I cannot understand how people can watch the male just streaking ahead on the sports field and say, well, this is kindness and inclusivity and not think about all the women athletes who have been displaced on the podium, who've trained for years. I mean, it's just unbelievable the way that women's interests can just be sidelined. But I also think this impacts gay men. It impacts lesbians, so women, but, you know, women in a particular way, because this is all being done in the name of the L and the G. You know, we are being forced into this coalition and our name is being used to promote it. Plus, we have the extra problem. Lesbians have the problem that some trans women are lesbians now. You know, lesbians with penises, get used to it, which completely redefines our spaces, our dating pools and all the rest of it. So, yes. And then the other loser amongst men is young boys, you know, the boys that are now moving into trans identification. And I've read some interesting stuff recently that hypothesizes that they are, a lot of them, again, autistic and very full of self-disgust and seeking a way out of what they think covers the norms of masculinity. So, that's their losers, especially if they end up losing body parts.

John Tomasi: And they're losers because they could have those feelings and they might, those experiences, probably go beyond feelings in some cases. But they get those experiences and then find other, more therapeutic ways to respond.

Kathleen Stock: Well, there's got to be a better therapeutic way than actually, like, taking drugs that give you permanent breasts or removing your penis and testicles. I mean, those are the most extreme solutions and they're not solutions. So, of course, so if trans activists want, everyone's very keen to change society around these claims, but I don't, we could equally try to make masculinity more acceptable for young feminine homosexual boys, for instance. And for girls who are tomboys, you know, we could easily work on that rather than telling them that they've been born in the wrong body.

John Tomasi: The more acceptable means a different conception of diversity and acceptance or inclusion, for the better word.

Kathleen Stock: Well, inclusion, I mean, I'm so allergic to the word inclusion now, but the status quo. Well, because the status quo, you know, so inclusion is the term that is used, one of those nice sounding propagandistic words like kindness, inclusion, that no one ever, you know, you need, as philosophers know, you need to work out what behavior constitutes kindness. And sometimes it can look painful in the short term for long-term gain or inclusion. If we're talking about inclusion, you can't include everyone into an institution. There's always going to be some constraints depending on the purpose of an institution. The university doesn't include everybody. It's extremely exclusive. Yes, exclusive. So, a lesbian space that says, I'm sorry, this is a lesbian space, you go off and have your own spaces. There can be mixed spaces, there can be other kinds, but we are just for same-sex attracted females. It's inclusive of lesbians. It's exclusive of other people. But as soon as you say, oh, no, actually, this is an inclusive space, so we have males in it who call themselves lesbians. Now, quite a lot of the lesbians will self-exclude, you know, because it's no longer their thing. It's not for them. They don't want to be there. So, there's always a cost to opening up a female space to men. Some women, particularly those traumatized by violence or just who don't want to be around men, will leave. And so, why don't their feelings matter? You know, why do they get pushed out? Why are women the ones that have to bear the costs of this in the name of kindness and inclusivity?

John Tomasi: I ask you, I'm not sure how close to the policies you are, but with sport, I think we agree that some people are trans, are transsexual.

Kathleen Stock: Well, what do you mean by that?

John Tomasi: That there are some people for whom, I'm sure you don't like the phrase being born in the wrong body.

Kathleen Stock: No, and of course not.

John Tomasi: There are some people for whom that is a settled identity that turns out to work for them.

Kathleen Stock: But there's nothing about their brain that determined that. There's no way you could ever tell in advance who they were. You know, it's like saying someone's a lifelong Liverpool fan. You know, it turns out Liverpool was their team. But there's not this kind of real, robust thing inside them that other, merely superficially trans people don't have. There's no difference.

John Tomasi: So, is there a legitimately trans category of athlete that we need to slot somewhere? Is that a dilemma?

Kathleen Stock: I mean, what are legitimately trans? Basically, there are people, right? There's males and females. That's what there are. That's all there are. There's some who've taken...

John Tomasi: And you think sports should be divided on that line?

Kathleen Stock: Well, yes, because there's a 10% at least performance gap between males and females of the same athletic level and age. It's absolutely predictable. It is not negated even by reducing testosterone significantly anyway. You know, there was a time in which the International Olympic Committee was trying to say, well, if you could reduce your testosterone for two years, you can compete in the female academy. But you went through puberty, you've basically got longer limbs, faster twitch muscles, bigger lungs, a range of things that... Skeletal leverage. Nothing will... Yeah, exactly. Nothing is going to take back. And you have an unfair advantage. And so now we can have categories if we want. We can have open categories for those that want to join them if you really feel like you want to race against... Like a trans man might not want to race against women. And that actually might be appropriate if you're taking loads of testosterone. Then you also have an advantage over most women. But, you know, we can be creative with the categories, but we have to preserve categories for women that do not include men and do not include testosterone-enhanced females. Like, that's just dope. It's like doping. And we seemed fine excluding people who doped.

John Tomasi: I read an article by a Japanese cyclist, a woman, who was struggling with these issues, just trying to think, thinking that there was an athlete who had been in races where a trans woman had beaten her and was trying to find her way through it all. A woman who was an advocate of women's sports. And she had this idea that maybe there was some, there's a, there's a possible way to think about it in terms of assigning people to sports teams or sides, divisions, based on conceptions of honor.

Kathleen Stock: That's very Japanese.

John Tomasi: It was. So let me just try it.

Kathleen Stock: Sounds like an inner feeling again.

John Tomasi: Well, so, but it's also a cultural thing. And the idea, or it was a social concept of honor. And the idea was that sport is about beating people who are your competitors on the right class for you. If you went and played soccer or bicycling against children and you beat them all the time, you wouldn't have much honor there. And her thought was that maybe in some sense there could be some, you could use the idea of concept of honor, which is a basic part of sport. You want to beat people.

Kathleen Stock: Well, it used to be, but apparently not. I mean.

John Tomasi: Well, her thought was, this might not be helpful.

Kathleen Stock: Okay, fine.

John Tomasi: Her thought was that if you made honor central to the experience of sport and what it means to win and why we value people who win.

Kathleen Stock: Okay.

John Tomasi: Then having them choose the correct category of.

Kathleen Stock: But we, I mean, I see where she's going, but I think like, to be honest, if you were, so you get some children and you're trying to explain honor in sport and you have to say, well, what looks like they might be like, well, what's on what's an example of honorable behavior? And you'd have to say, well, what's an example of a male? So eventually, in order to explain what counts as honorable, I think you're still going to have to use the language. And that's the problem. You see, people are tying, especially well-meaning, university educated people are tying themselves in knots to find a complicated answer to it when there's a simple one staring us in the bloody face, which is sex segregated sport. And, you know, I've had, there's a, there's a feminist philosopher, and I use that term with inverted commas these days, who said to me, why don't we rearrange sport by weight? You know, so like.

John Tomasi: This is like honor.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, weight. So I, I'm six foot. So now I'm going to go up against someone who weighs the same as me. So is he going to have the same rough height as me? So maybe we should do height and weight. And, you know, but then, you know, I've got smaller arm muscles. So maybe we need someone who's got the same size, arm muscles as me. Basically, at some point, we're going to go, let's just make it males and females. There is no way out of this. There is none. And people need to find the courage. Let's talk about courage, you know, to say it is incredibly unfair that Lia Thomas, a fully intact male, gets in that swimming pool as a woman, then goes into the changing room as a woman. And there's lots of testimony from her, his, I will say his fellow teammates about that, that, you know, they were having to cover themselves with towels because there's a man with a penis walking around in their changing room. And then he gets in the pool and wins the cup. It is preposterous America.

John Tomasi: I'd like to ask you about your experience at Oxford and Cambridge at the unions. Was it Cambridge?

Kathleen Stock: It was both. But at Cambridge, it was a resolution.

John Tomasi: Is there a right to be, is there a right to offend? Is there a right to offend?

Kathleen Stock: Yes.

John Tomasi: So you were, you were, tell us about those experiences.

Kathleen Stock: Well, that was an interesting experience because I was there, obviously, to debate that motion. I was, suppose I was invited because of my notoriety, because I offend many people, as I probably just have. And I was arguing that there is a right to offend. Or maybe it's like, is there, maybe the motion was like, is there a right to be not offended? I can't remember. But basically, I was saying, you cannot possibly say that there is a right to be not offended.

John Tomasi: I think the resolution was, is there a right to offend?

Kathleen Stock: Okay. As we will, as I'll explain, I had a, I was having a bit of an experience, emotional experience myself that day. Because basically, a six foot male, non-binary person, as it turned out, auditioned to be on my side of the debate. And Arif Ahmed, the philosopher, was on, was also on my side. And then he started, I'll say he, you know, he would want me to call him they, them. But, you know, I think these things are courtesy and he showed me none. So I'm just going to refer to the appropriate sex-based pronoun. He then started this debate on my side, allegedly, and then basically halfway through turned around and started denouncing me. So that has never happened at the Cambridge Union before. He auditioned under false pretenses. He gave a different speech. We'd just been to dinner together. We'd had a polite chat, you know, he's wearing a tuxedo. And you had no indication that this was coming. No, no, no. He dressed as a male, as fully like, everyone's wearing tuxedos. He dressed as a male. He is a male. He's had no alteration. I mean, he would be male even if he had. But, you know, there was nothing about this. And then he revealed, the big reveal is, I am a trans, non-binary person. And I think Kathleen Stock would never have been invited. And I mean, it's all on video. So that was, and it was a very hostile environment with a protest outside. You could hear them banging drums. It was all for me. So that was quite an intense experience, which is probably why I can't remember exactly what the emotion was, as it were.

John Tomasi: And at Oxford, just tell us briefly that they couldn't find someone, no one would accept, as I remember, no one accepted the position to debate the other side against you. Is that right?

Kathleen Stock: I don't know that that's true. Maybe that's true. They never told me that. I think the way they presented it to me was, we're just going to have a discussion about the chair, who was the union president, will, you know, give you objections, basically. So he was going to, and I knew that that's what I wanted. I wanted him to really try and object to me in your strongest terms. And then there was an opportunity for people in the audience to come up to the lectern and ask me questions, too. Now, that's a great format, and I enjoyed it. But, you know, again, there was a big protest outside. And then there was a protest in the chamber where one protester glued themselves to the floor in front of me. So that took about half an hour to get them detached. The police came in and kind of did all sorts of very sensitive things.

John Tomasi: And again, just to state what's obvious, but I'm just going to state it anyway. They were objecting to you speaking.

Kathleen Stock: Yes, yes, yes. The objection is always to me speaking, to me being platformed.

John Tomasi: And the objection is that, and I'm not sure if this is charitable or naive, but I'm going to just go with charity for a moment more. The objection is that you're speaking and saying the things you believe is a real harm to people. In fact, I think people would say harm to the most vulnerable. Yeah, they would say the most vulnerable people on earth.

Kathleen Stock: I am deliberately harming them.

John Tomasi: And what do you think of that? What do you make of that claim?

Kathleen Stock: There's a number of ways in which I might object. One, I really don't, I'm afraid, looking at evidence, think that the claims of victimhood are, I mean, not in the UK. They're not, you know, in the UK we have an incredibly liberal society, two different laws protecting trans people. And most people are very fine with that, including me, you know, so actually rates of violence against trans people in the UK are extremely low. And racism is a much bigger problem, as far as I can see. And, you know, so really it just doesn't stack up that this is the most uniquely vulnerable population, particularly not when now we've got non-binary people in the mix who basically can wear normal clothes. I mean, I don't know if your audience can see me, but I'm dressed like a, I'm wearing all-male clothes, I'm six foot tall, I've got really short hair, I might as well be non-binary. And I'm telling you, nobody, I mean, occasionally someone says to me, I'm sorry, sir, you're in the wrong bathroom. And I say, no, I'm not. And they go, oh my God, I'm so sorry. You know, that's, that's the level of victimhood we're talking here.

John Tomasi: But there are, but there have been some studies about suicide rates being higher among people.

Kathleen Stock: Well, yeah, but people need to look at those properly because actually, and we don't have enough data. That's one of the constant themes here because people, nobody wants to look, but now we are starting. People like me are pushing for this. So one study of the waiting lists for the childhood gender identity clinic in London suggests that suicide rates are five times higher than the general population. Now, put that in context, anorexia makes, I think, gives you eight times more, you know, being autistic makes you more likely. So as always with gender, the activists pick out one fact, give people no context with which to understand it. So it sounds very alarming. And often they will over-egg it. So they will say, you know, 50% of trans kids have tried to commit suicide. That's just not true. Actually, even the Tavistock, which has been closed down, used to have a note on their website saying suicide is, in fact, extremely rare. So, yes, it is a distressed population. Suicide rates, attempted suicide rates are higher. But that is true of so many distressed populations and teenage girls, just on their own. As Jonathan Haidt is pointing out, suicide rates are going up significantly there. So we cannot take these things in isolation and build a whole political case out of them responsibly.

John Tomasi: There's something that you've been quoted as saying that I wanted to just ask you about, too, in terms of what the role of reason is in these debates. What other kinds of platforms people are launching their interactions from other than reason? And that seems to be going on from what you just described. Sometimes activists are almost defined by people who care more about things coming out their way rather than presenting reasons and arguments. Yeah, just get to the conclusion you want, basically. There's a line of yours that was in a Telegraph article that I was fascinated by, and I'm just going to read it out loud to you. You're quoted as saying, quote, It's hard to believe now, when all this started, I genuinely thought that people didn't understand the issues. And if I just explained to them, they would concede that transgender women are not women, and that facts have to trump over feelings. It seems terribly naive, but I've learned you can't change the mind of an addict, close quote. So, you know, I asked about how you grew up, and I asked about your parents, and I asked what it meant for you to be an academic and to become an academic. Part of what we think it means for an academic at HXA is to, although some of these virtues we have on the wall that we were talking about before we started, about make your case with evidence, be intellectually charitable, be intellectually humble, be constructive, and perhaps be yourself. Bring your whole self. Do you think those are, are those norms of the academy still?

Kathleen Stock: Well, I think it depends on the discipline. I mean, I, I think in philosophy, to be fair to philosophy, and it's the one I know, many people still follow those norms. I don't know about be yourself. I don't know. I still, as you know, I have reservations about that one. But I think we were trained.

John Tomasi: I'd be disappointed if you didn't have some objection.

Kathleen Stock: Yeah, we were trained to basically think there were things we didn't know, that we, we were, I mean, I don't know about you, but I was bloody terrified to be shown up for making mistakes. So we were very hypervigilant about the possibility of making mistakes in public. So that made us cautious. and charity is just built in. You just have to do the best possible, sort of case for your opponent because otherwise you, you, I mean, that's a better way of beating them, basically. Like you make it too easy for them to win if you don't consider their best possible case. So all of this, this was never being nice. This was just the norms, the rules of the game. Now, do I think people are still behaving like that? I think some philosophers in particular, the ones, particularly the ones that would sign letters against me, yeah, absolutely not. They didn't even bother to read my book. I mean, that's the thing. They're not even acquainting themselves with my arguments. They won't listen to this. I'm afraid last night I was at Cornell doing a talk with Rebecca Tuvel. As I said, the Cornell philosophy department organized a counter event to happen at exactly the same time. It was like, it was called diffusing the trans specter because obviously the, the implication is that I am conjuring up this terrible trans specter. It has to be expiated for, but rather than coming to your, no, nobody could go to both and raise it.

John Tomasi: But the professors raising their hands as philosophers, making objections.

Kathleen Stock: No, they wouldn't do that. I mean, one of the people contributing is a very well-known feminist philosopher at Cornell. The moment I started writing my sort of relatively moderate kind of blog posts, raising questions, she basically blocked me on Twitter and started saying that I was a transphobe and she's never really stopped. And she, she was part of the organization for this alternative event, which to be honest, from the outside, having seen the posters, looked like a religious event. There was poetry, there was refreshments, there was statements of political solidarity with trans people. There was no, exploration of disagreement. There was, you know, you are with us and this is a faith-based movement. And that's what happens in this area. People just stop using argument and they start saying sort of strange, making, you know, reciting mantras and reciting dogma and saying, ah, but you haven't, haven't you read what Judith Butler says on this area? As if she's some kind of high priestess.

John Tomasi: Right. We're coming to the end of this conversation, but I just wanted to ask you or invite you to, share with, share with our audience, any thoughts you might have on, on, on sort of the broader question of what does this mean that we have this trans movement that has these characteristics of not being wanting to engage in debates with people who see, see the world differently? Are there broader issues here at play? I've heard people say that, some people worry that the trans, the way the trans arguments have been presented or the transposition to being presented is in some sense assault and assault on truth, objectivity, and reason. Is that too strong? Do you, do you see the, there's, there's some, here, let me put the, let me put the question this way. There seems to be some special heat on the trans question. And we know, as you, as you, you know, really skillfully point out it, there's a, there's a transition from a claim about a feeling to policies that should reflect that feeling's significance in the real world. It is policies and so forth. So a direct movement from something like feeling to policy prescriptions. I mean, a remarkably straight line. Is that, is that, is that, is that itself an assault on truth, objectivity, and reason?

Kathleen Stock: I think so. I do. I think it's a power grab, actually. And it's ironic. It's the sort of thing Foucault was always writing about, you know, I mean, it's really quite naked. It's like, it's like a toddler power grab, you know, I feel this way. You must, you know, alter your entire social fabric to accommodate my feelings. And incidentally, part of the narrative is, you know, the feelings can change all the time. I'm gender fluid tomorrow. I might feel differently, you know, and you need to accommodate that too. So, yeah, there's some big questions scoping out as to how we got into this situation where we felt like, I didn't feel it, but, you know, lots of people feel perplexed. Partly, I think, because the language is so arcane, no one understands really what it means. The consequences have been yet to be really fully understood. Most people still don't really understand the consequences for children, for teenagers, for sports, for, you know, prisons. So, it's an elite kind of power grab, I think. It's happening in universities. You know, the language is so incomprehensible to most people. They don't know what assigned at birth means. They don't know whether a trans woman is female or male. Not as a matter of faith. They literally don't know. Are we talking men here or women here in the original senses? So, all of it just throws up dust and somehow it's worked. And I think we all need to think seriously about how we let this happen because of the consequences, which I predict, as people understand them better, they will be outraged.

John Tomasi: And do you think some of the patterns are the same? To me, there are some similarities to the patterns we see with the trans arguments and disputes with two disputes about racism and anti-racism. There's not exactly the same move from feeling to a fact, but there's something about what counts as an aggression, what counts as a racial aggression, which seems to be tied to some set of feelings, which may be more socially malleable than the defenders might like it to be. There's also, I think, maybe connection that just perhaps to some of the conflicts on campuses right now about Israel and Gaza and the idea that there's all good things go together. I sometimes think of all sort of victim classes go together. Is that too much to connect all those two things with the trans?

Kathleen Stock: Well, I mean, there's going to be differences, so I don't want to be too broad brush, but this tyranny of feeling that is occurring in all of these domains. Now, of course, sometimes the feelings are intense and rooted in deep injustice and we should want to listen to them. But we've developed a set of kind of ideological structures around feelings now, which means we're very ill-equipped to test them and to say, well, hang on a minute, you know, sometimes feelings like explode in a vacuum. Sometimes the more space you give them, the bigger they get. Sometimes, you know, in listening to you and saying, oh, do you feel unsafe? I actually, you become, you start feeling more unsafe rather than less. You know, sometimes if you're not tested and made to face your fears, you will get more anxious. So anxiety is spreading, the concepts are creeping, everything's traumatic now, everyone's got PTSD, you know, it's all getting bigger and bigger. And university administrators and also people in normal institutions are struggling to manage people's feelings. Like, what am I, when can I say, sorry, you know, you may feel unsafe, but you blatantly aren't. You know, there's absolutely no objective evidence for you being unsafe right now. So we need somehow as a, collectively to recuperate distinctions between mainly feeling something and it actually being the case. And we haven't helped ourselves with all this standpoint in epistemology. And, you know, if it's, if it's perceived as hate, then it is hate and all that. It's just.

John Tomasi: My last question is about, about the university and where you, where you see it going. There's been, just, and in your case, you know, we've seen around 2018, 2020, sort of a piling on. There was some glimmer, I think, perhaps from the, after the Oxford Union episode, where there was a group of professors who wrote a letter on.

Kathleen Stock: Oh, yeah. And actually, I have to say at Oxford, just to be, just for the record, the, the, the audience, cheered me. And at Cambridge, our side won the debate. You know, most kids think this is nonsense too. They're just too frightened to say it because their seniors are not showing them the way.

John Tomasi: And what do you think, you know, kind of a crystal ball, I'm aware. But do you, do you, are you optimistic about universities? Do you think, do you think things are good? Are we heading for more of the same or, or worse still, more categories coming?

Kathleen Stock: I'm not optimistic. I'm not, I'm afraid. And I'm, I'm out of the system now. I feel absolutely liberated to say all of this. I might not have been able to say it had I been in a university, to be honest. I think people are so frightened of losing career position or, students, you know, everyone's compete, all the, in the UK, the institutions are competing with each other. So they have to keep pandering basically to what students want. And I feel academics really, I'm afraid I'm just a bit disgusted with the average academic, for pretending these things are not problematic. There's still, a lot of people are still in denial about this. As you know, they're not such, oh, it's a right-wing conspiracy, et cetera. I'm on the left. The free speech should be an absolute core value for the left. And academics gave, gave that away and left an open goal for the right. They've left all this trans stuff, an open goal for the right. When the consequences emerge, you know, academics will be seen to have blood on their hands, literally almost, because, you know, there are going to be ruined lives as a result of this. And universities, academics just don't seem to be able to find the spine to stand up to it. So I'm afraid, I would love to be wrong though. Please prove me wrong.

John Tomasi: Well, I would love to be able to end this podcast by thanking you as Dame.

Kathleen Stock: I'm not a Dame.

John Tomasi: No, I can't do that. But Kathleen Stock, thank you so much for appearing on Heterodox Out Loud.

Kathleen Stock: Thank you for having me, John. That's been great.