Kathleen Stock: No freedom of speech means I will never work in a British university again

A professor cancelled because of her comments on trans rights has said that she will never work in a British university again because there is no freedom of speech.

Kathleen Stock said that academic institutions treat students like customers and the “grown-ups” no longer tell anxious young people that someone saying something that they disagree with is not actually harming them.  

The philosophy professor said that she will now speak from outside the academy so she is not being constantly watched for a mistake. 

She made the comments during a debate about how institutions have been “captured” by ideology surrounding trans rights at the annual LGB Alliance conference in central London.

She was joined by campaigner Julie Bindel who warned that the bitter debate is “about misogyny” which allows men to try and silence feminists.

“The reason why so many people have latched on to this, why it's captured the liberal masses, why it's captured our institutions is primarily because feminism is hated,” she told the audience to applause.

“This is the old intolerance by the way, not the new. feminists like me that speak about male violence, and point the finger at male perpetrators, are hated, including by men on the left.”

She said that the trans debate had “given them an opportunity” to criticise feminists in a way “they never could before” and still be seen as "being on the right side of history”.

Prof Stock told how she was forced out of her post in the philosophy department of Sussex University after she began to state the difference between biological sex and a person’s gender identity and raise concern about the erosion of women’s rights.

The campaign against her saw protests on campus where she was “detained” by masked men.

Prof Stock left Sussex University in October last year and she is “never going to teach in academia again”, at least in the UK.

“I’m now writing and thinking outside the academy, because I find that it’s much easier to do it,” she said.

“I can now say exactly what I want to say, without feeling like I’m being watched all the time by my colleagues, by managers, by students who are constantly waiting for me to put a foot wrong, which is basically what was happening.”

She said that her “spidey senses” started tingling that there were issues with the debate when she saw Stonewall t-shirts with the slogan “trans women are women” and an “aggressive” attitude from campaigners.

This “collided” with a growing issue in British universities where there was “increasing anxiety coming out of the student population” connected in part to “social media, the internet and smartphones”.

Universities, with increasing tuition fees, also started competing for students and “to think of their students as customers that they have to please, which is not good”.

She said: “If someone is anxious, you really actually shouldn’t necessarily validate all their worries and tell them that they are in fact genuinely threatened and harmed by the world. But that is increasingly what's happening in universities.

“So that creates this environment where a student says ‘she is harming me through her words’ and the grown-ups in the room are less likely to push back and say ‘no, no, she isn't, she's only saying something that you don't like and that is different’.”

‘It doesn’t make sense’

Prof Stock said that “you don't hear that said very often in universities anymore” and are more likely to see “trigger warnings and content warnings”.

She called on senior “well paid” academics, especially male professors who write to her telling her she is brave, to also speak up. 

“What is the point of them?” she asked. “They have one job.”

Her comments were echoed by Dr Shereen Benjamin, who received death threats when she spoke out about women’s rights whilst working at the University of Edinburgh and was labelled as transphobic.

She says she was told there was “no debate” and wondered “how can there be no debate” when they were working in a university as “it doesn’t make sense”.

The conference also heard from a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who spoke about parents of three-year-olds who brought their children to the NHS Tavistock claiming they were trans when they just wanted a child of a different sex.

Dr Az Hakeem said that the way the NHS’s gender identity clinic was treating children was “madness” and it became a “transing factory”.

He added that some of the children he saw had “transhausen by proxy” – a reference to Munchausen syndrome where a parent makes up symptoms to make their child appear sick.

‘It was just a transing factory’

He worked at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust for 12 years until 2012 and now works in Harley Street.  

He said “You had three-year-olds coming in… I saw these parents who had a son but wanted a daughter, or the other way around. And these three-year-olds coming in, and the parents were saying ‘oh, Johnny has never looked like a boy. So we’ve changed his name and put on a wig’.

“I was thinking ‘this is mad’. And this was 20 years ago. GIDS at the time, the multidisciplinary team involved Mermaids. It was just a transing factory.

“I remember saying to them ‘this is madness, what we’re doing is madness, these are children, these are three-year-olds’.

He added that over his time at the clinic he realised “there was an overrepresentation of people who had lost a child and then suddenly got pregnant again. Almost through unconscious communication, this child had become a surrogate for the lost child.”