Just over a week ago, Kathleen Stock resigned from her post as professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, following a relentless three-year campaign of bullying, harassment and character assassination. Students at the university, outside activists and even some of her own colleagues had accused the 48-year-old of transphobia and agitated for her to be fired.
In the end, it was Stock who decided that her position at the university near Brighton where she had worked for almost two decades was untenable.
“I can’t keep working somewhere where . . . there’s such toxicity,” she had told me the previous week, when I’d gone to speak to her at the home she shares with her pregnant wife and two children. The strain Stock was under was palpable — she broke down in tears twice during our conversation; several days earlier, she had been signed off work by her doctor because of stress. At one point, we were interrupted by the delivery of a video doorbell camera, which the police had advised her to install.
“It’s not based on who I am, what I’m like, what I think — it’s just this caricature of a witch in the office next door . . . They don’t want to argue with me, these people. They just want to ruin my professional reputation.”
Three days before I’d met Stock, several dozen activists — purportedly students, their faces covered by masks and balaclavas — had staged a protest at the university’s open day. Demanding her dismissal, they set off flares and held up banners reading “Stock Out” and “Terfs Out of Sussex”.
“Terf” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, a term most often used these days as a slur against any woman accused by activists of transphobia. Stock defines herself as a gender-critical feminist, meaning she believes that biological sex matters and that being born a woman carries certain rights that should not automatically be extended to anyone who identifies as that gender. She stresses to me that she believes in trans rights and protections, has always supported trans students and has good relationships with many of them.
The activists accuse her of implicitly contributing to a history of anti-trans sentiment that they say has mischaracterised trans women as predators, keeping them marginalised and encouraging discrimination and violence against them. In particular, they feel aggrieved by Stock’s trusteeship of the LGB Alliance, an advocacy organisation that they call an “anti-trans hate group”, and her signing of the Women’s Declaration of Sex-Based Rights, a document that aims to reserve the category of “woman” for biological women.
Amelia Jones, the Sussex student union’s officer for trans and non-binary students, who is herself trans, says she and others interpret the declaration as “eliminating trans identity from law”. Jones wasn’t involved in the protests or the poster campaign, but after she defended the protesters’ position on the BBC, one person wrote to her on social media saying they were going to come to Brighton and “chuck [Jones] into the sea”.
This was just one incendiary message in what has become a toxic and bitter fight — for both sides. Earlier in October, posters had been plastered over the walls in the underpass Stock used to walk through to get to campus, saying “We’re Not Paying £9,250 a Year for Transphobia . . . Fire Kathleen Stock”, and “Kathleen Stock Makes Trans Students Unsafe”. Leaflets had been handed out, carrying a “mission statement” also published online in which she had been called “one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes”. The diatribe ended: “Fire Kathleen Stock. Until then, you’ll see us around.”
Those who argue that “cancel culture doesn’t exist” or, as the National Union of Students argues, that “there is no evidence of a freedom of expression crisis on campus”, might say this was an isolated case. But for those who worry that such a crisis is in full swing, Stock’s departure is symptomatic of a culture that prioritises the “emotional safety” of students over robust debate and the expression of lawful, evidence-based opinions, and which is threatening the integrity and reputation of Britain’s universities.
Academics whose views are considered controversial, or seen as “harmful” by certain groups, are facing disciplinary action, being “no-platformed” from speaking events with increasing regularity and in some cases losing their jobs, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a centre-right US non-profit. Their research shows such incidents picking up pace in Britain from 2018. Other scholars say they are wary of expressing their views on incendiary topics for fear of repercussions.
“I do notice a big difference between now and 10 years ago,” says Arif Ahmed, a philosopher at Cambridge who campaigns for free speech in universities. “Ten years ago, nobody felt their jobs might be in danger for what they said . . . Now we’re in a position where, as happened with Kathleen Stock and as I’ve experienced here at Cambridge, when you ask people . . . they’ll say in private they support you, but they won’t speak out publicly.”
Last December, Ahmed managed to thwart an attempt by Cambridge’s University Council to change its policy on free speech in a way that would have required staff, students and visiting speakers to be “respectful” of the views and identities of others. Ahmed argued that this was “a direct attack on academic freedom because it is restrictive, subjective and vague”, and asked more than 100 colleagues to back him in forcing a vote to amend the wording so that it would require other opinions to be “tolerated”, rather than “respected”. Most declined to support him publicly, but he finally managed to get the 25 public signatures he needed to force the vote. When it came to the ballot, which was secret, 86.9 per cent voted in favour of his amendment.
“There is an atmosphere of rather subtle intimidation in many areas,” says David Abulafia, a professor of history at Cambridge who is involved in History Reclaimed, a website that aims to push back against “ideologically driven distortions” about history. “It’s generated by a reluctance to challenge some of the theories of critical theory, particularly critical race theory,” he adds.
Earlier this year, ahead of a training session entitled “Race Awareness: Whiteness and being a White Ally”, during which Cambridge academics were taught to “assume racism is everywhere”, they were advised that “this is not a space for intellectualising the topic”.
At Sussex, in the wake of Stock’s resignation, the university did come out in support of her, with vice-chancellor Adam Tickell writing to staff saying, “I would like to make it very clear that it is unlawful to discriminate against someone on the grounds of sex and philosophical belief”, and thanking her for “so many vital contributions to the field of philosophy”. But Stock would have appreciated more support from the university earlier.
“One of the problems has been the sense of isolation . . . There’s all sorts of comms they could have done around academic freedom, around employees’ right to work unharassed for their views and, until recently, they haven’t been doing it,” she says. “Into that void rushes all this misinformation, rushes lecturers bad-mouthing me in lectures, lying about what I say to their students.”
But Ivor Gaber, professor of political journalism at Sussex, says the idea that a climate of intolerance at the university has widely taken hold is wrong. He participated in a Zoom call held by the dean of the School of Media, Arts and Humanities in the wake of the protests, in which the dean “very strongly defended” Stock’s right to academic freedom, he says. According to Gaber, there were “no dissenting voices” among some 120 staff members on the call.
Stock, Ahmed and others I spoke to cite the 2010 Equality Act as a factor in universities becoming so anxious about offending students. The act describes unlawful verbal harassment as behaviour that “has the purpose or effect of . . . creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”, which some university administrators have interpreted as an invitation to police speech or other behaviour they deem offensive as “microaggressions”.
Another consequence of the act has been an increase in the number of non-academic administrators in universities, working for example for “equality, diversity and inclusion offices” that seek to fulfil the requirement to “advance equality of opportunity between people who do and do not share a protected characteristic”, such as race or disability. But the guiding principles of these administrators are often at odds with those of academics — they are geared not so much towards encouraging free expression and the exploration of ideas as the so-called student experience, which focuses on keeping students feeling happy and comfortable.
Although the debate around free speech on university campuses concerns all sorts of issues, from allegations of anti-Semitism to homophobia and racism, the one that has become particularly incendiary in Britain is the debate over trans rights.
Civitas, a right-leaning think-tank, published a report last December that analysed the past three years of “campus censorship” in all 137 of Britain’s registered universities. It found that 53 per cent of universities had “experienced alleged ‘transphobic’ episodes that led to demands for censoring speech”.
Britain’s “Terf wars” — as the disputes between trans rights activists and feminists such as Stock are sometimes called — have been rumbling for a few years, especially since 2018, when the government launched a consultation into whether the 2004 Gender Recognition Act should be reformed to de-medicalise and speed up the process of changing gender. It decided against the reform, but the argument gained prominence last year when author JK Rowling shared a piece about “people who menstruate” on Twitter, taking issue with the fact that the word “women” wasn’t used.
Stock, along with other academics I spoke to, said Stonewall, an LGBTQ+ lobby group that advises hundreds of UK public and private-sector institutions, including Sussex, has made the argument more pernicious. The group has been criticised for its stance on issues such as “self-ID” — the right to legally change gender without a medical diagnosis — and accused of trying to close down the debate.
In response to the question of whether it shuts down debate, Stonewall says it “simply provides guidance and support employers can follow to make their workplaces more inclusive for LGBTQ+ employees . . . It is not our role to debate whether people’s identities are real or an ‘ideology’. Trans people exist, which has been settled in law since 2004.”
Another gender-critical academic who shares Stock’s views is Selina Todd, a historian at Oxford who has also been branded a transphobe. Last year she was disinvited from a women’s event at the university — an event she had helped organise. Like Stock, she bemoans the lack of support she has been given by her university.
“I’m very dubious that this is an institution which is fulfilling its legal obligation to uphold freedom of debate,” she says. “Could Oxford be the next Sussex? Yes it could, very easily. I could be the next Kathleen Stock, and I think a lot of us are thinking that right now.”
Todd says one of the factors preventing universities from sticking up for their academics, and making them pander to the demands of young, idealistic students, is money. Students are now treated as paying “consumers” who have to be pacified, rather than members of an intellectual community, she says.
Is there any possibility that this era may be shortlived and that we might get a more tolerant, less censorious future? Stock says that if Stonewall and other lobby groups were removed from universities, academic freedom might stand a chance. Her supporters say that students need training not just in inclusion and “unconscious bias” but also in the importance of academic freedom and debate, and that the “therapeutic culture” that pervades in universities, which prioritises keeping students safe from “emotional harm” needs to be rethought. After all, as Ahmed, who is British-born and of Muslim and Indian origin, points out: “Speech is not a kind of violence; it’s a substitute for violence.”
I tend to agree with Ahmed’s view that using words denoting physical danger to describe emotions is unhelpful. But, speaking to trans students at Sussex, I could tell they were sincere in feeling that their hard-won identities were somehow under threat. Jones told me trans students felt unhappy about having someone whose views they consider transphobic teaching at the university, and that about 40 of them had turned up to a one-hour “safe space” session Jones had organised “at the last minute” the week the posters had been put up.
“If I was being taught by her, academically I wouldn’t feel safe,” says Val Knight, head of communications for the Sussex LGBTQ+ society. “I would feel like: will this put me at risk, being trans in this environment, knowing that we have a trustee of the LGB Alliance teaching us which, at the very minimum, is not entirely trans-friendly? . . . Trans people are students at Sussex — we’re not discussing some kind of theoretical concept.”
They also said that being trans makes them feel more physically unsafe — Knight once had a chair thrown at her by a stranger in Burger King. And they worry that having a professor on campus who opposes self-ID — a policy that is already in place across the university — might encourage incidents such as trans women being filmed using women’s toilets, as has happened in the US.
Most of the academics I spoke to were sceptical that the battle over freedom of expression can be legislated away. But the government hopes its new proposed free speech bill — which would instate a new “free speech champion” in the higher education regulator and would extend universities’ existing duty to protect free speech to student unions — could change the culture. “Vice-chancellors will not be able to turn a blind eye until it’s too late, or bury their heads in the sand any more,” Michelle Donelan, the universities minister, tells me.
What does seem clear is that the issue will not solely be addressed by the universities changing their behaviour. When I spoke to students in Sussex’s student union, words such as “unsafe”, “trigger” and “harm” cropped up often. Of the more than 30 students I spoke to, not one spoke in defence of Stock; some attacked her as a transphobe who “harmed” trans students while simultaneously admitting they weren’t familiar with what she actually said on the issue.
One provided a glimmer of something different — a 24-year-old trans graduate student, who doesn’t agree with Stock’s views and disagrees even with the way Stock has articulated them in some of her writing, but is still able to provide a nuanced reflection: “I feel like it has been taken a bit out of context, I feel like people are reading their own ideas into what she’s saying and I just think . . . it’s very odd how it has become so sensationalised that she has this opinion, whereas five years ago that was pretty much a common opinion.
“And everyone at Sussex can put their pronouns on their email bio, but no one has ever asked me: do you actually feel ‘safer’ as a trans person? I think it’s all performative.”
Some will argue that far from being “cancelled”, Stock’s star has only risen after the recent controversies. Her latest book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, has sold out in many bookshops, and she has been publicly supported by much of the mainstream press, as well as in government. She was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 New Year honours list — which more than 600 academics protested against in an open letter. But Stock would have really just liked to carry on being a teacher and philosopher.
“I didn’t want this. I wanted to have a grown-up conversation in the public space, responsibly, and that’s what I’ve done,” says Stock. “Maybe somebody else would be braver than me and stay. But for me, it’s not a way to live anymore.”
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