Someone starting to realize that GC arguments are actually anti-gay
Kathleen Stock walking it back
Anyway, onward...
May 2024 'Heterodox' interview
I listened to: Trans Rights and Gender Identity with Kathleen Stock | Ep 19 - Heterodox Out Loud with John Tomasi
She said she had arrived in the US just a few days earlier to participate in a talk called Transgender Politics and Academic Witch Hunts (May 1, 2024) "hosted by Heterodox Academy's Campus Community...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." (2:03–2:26)
The interview with John Tomasi was therefore apparently conducted in May, and it was released on YouTube on June 27.
She says there are too many trans boys. "There is strong evidence that, um, 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... there's also been... I think it's 1,500% over 10 years up to 2019 in the in the male population but...the phenomenon with girls is really very striking" (9:18–9:50)
She says being trans is an 'absolute disaster' that carries 'terrible consequences' and is 'aggressive'
Some people have got the idea that this [gender dysphoria] must mean ... this is a problem that needs to be solved through medical means, and that is an absolute disaster, so that's my worry." (14:46–15:00)
“They cannot literally change sex. We are not the sort of species that allows that ... but we have developed elaborate fictions around this — social fictions — that are becoming more and more compulsory to adopt, and with some terrible consequences.” (17:06–17:30)
"In 2015, it [Stonewall] changed its mission to become now we're about, uh, trans, trans rights, as it's put, and their slogan became 'Trans women are women, #GetOverIt.' You know, so it was very aggressive, like, it's literally true." (22:00–22:15)
They talk about the "Open Letter Concerning Transphobia in Philosophy," January 2021, that criticized Stock. Stock responds: "They wanted to say that ... 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." (28:51–29:10)
OK, well, as far as hyperbole and histrionics, let's look at calling trans kids' gender transitions as an 'absolute disaster' that carries 'terrible consequences' and recognizing adult trans people's gender as 'aggressive'. If you've realized that arguing against children's medical care is bad optics for you, then stop talking about it.
From about 32 minutes, they discuss Material Girls. She says she's not convinced that everyone has a "gender identity," given that some people don't have feelings related to being "at home in their sex." She also says there's no such thing as being born in "the wrong body" because people only have "the body you've got, and that's it."
"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 anyway 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." (34:52–35:14) Trans people do really think about what we're doing. Really.
She then expresses concern about "fully intact male rapists" in women's prisons. What would a trans activist, an intelligent thoughtful trans activist, say about about that?" Tomasi asks. Stock laughs, as if to suggest that there are no intelligent, thoughtful trans activists, which indeed is what she goes on to say. She defines a trans activist as someone who fundamentally disagrees with her about the existence of gender identity and whether exceptions can ever be made for it, or else who isn't prepared to have a serious conversation about lowering the risk of violence against women.
"I think the problem is, I mean, I would love to find a trans activist ... 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, what places where it's 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.' ...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, we'll let that one go,' so ... maybe by definition now, the trans activist is a person who says that your feeling about your gender trumps all. Yeah, pretty much definitive... it's definitive of policies on our society. 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, women get raped all the time anyway' ... and is this supposed to show that we should let two sources of rape go? ... 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! You know 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 [for], 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." (40:20–43:11)She says: "There's got to be a better therapeutic way than actually, like, um, 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." (44:55–45:13)
She says that some women simply "don't want to be around men" in lesbian spaces. "Why don't their feelings matter? ... Why are women the ones that have to bear the costs of this in the name of kindness and inclusivity?" (47:06–24) If we remember that trans men exist and participate in gay men's spaces even though some men might not want to be around women, that will shift the nature of her question. It is not, in fact, only cis women who may have to actively include trans women. It is also cis men who may have to actively include trans men. To say nothing of trans people who include cis people every day of our lives.
Changing the subject to trans athletes, Tomasi says, "I think we agree that some people are trans or are transsexual." (47:29–47:37) Stock objects: "There are some people for whom that is a settled identity that turns out to work for them but there's nothing about their brain that determined that there's no way you could ever tell in advance who they were. 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 [real trans people] that other merely superficially transed people don't have." (47:45–48:10)Tomasi then puts forth an idea that one philosopher has proposed, which is that athletes can compete with a sense of honor, knowing that there's no glory in defeating someone in an unfair contest. Stock says that the only fair way to divide athletes is by males and females. She is not open to other ways. She has pre-decided that it always comes down to males and females and that these are always the appropriate categories.
When talking about possible ways to categorize humans, her thinking is rigid, and she insists on applying it to others. That's why she declares her philosophical nemesis to be the 'trans activist' which she defines as someone who refuses to submit to her rigid males and females dictum. A 'trans activist' is someone who says (as Sarah in Labyrinth would put it) you have no power over me.
Regarding athletics, she acknowledges trans men only to say that they have an advantage over cis women: "If you've taken loads of testosterone, then you also have an advantage over most women, but, you know, we can 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 dope." (49:32–51) Attributes like strength and speed are indeed on a continuum, and when we categorize people, it may be appropriate to say that males are generally stronger and faster than females and that trans people (trans men and trans women alike) who go through one puberty and then take hormones to go through the other puberty may be somewhere in the middle. I'm not a sports biologist, so I won't weigh in on this. I'm noting that this is roughly what Stock is saying, and what she is saying may be a valid way of predicting strength and speed. What I do want to suggest, though, is that if you spend time considering the existence of trans men athletes, you are probably going to learn a lot of stuff that will challenge assumptions about sex and gender categories that will have implications for how you think about cis men, cis women, and trans women athletes. I also want to point out that referring to trans men's hormones as "just dope" (i.e., illegal steroids taken for the purpose of cheating in sports) will be a poor foundation for understanding the bodies and genders of trans men in general.
She suggests that she'll use someone's pronouns only if they're not opposed to her or being rude to her: "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..." (54:22–54:34) This gives a lot of insight into the philosophical commitment. Good trans people get rewarded with pronouns. Bad trans people are told that we're fake and that our prononus aren't real so we aren't entitled to them. Unknown trans people can be provisionally allowed pronouns for the anti-trans person's later benefit of performatively taking those pronouns away.
Aren't trans people vulnerable to discrimination and violence? Stock says: "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. 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, um, and you know, so really it just doesn't stack up that this is the most uniquely vulnerable population." (Again, she was speaking in 2024. I'm not sure which "two different laws protecting trans people" she was referring to. Maybe she meant the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and Equality Act 2010, as those were the two that first came to my mind, and (checking my notes) they're also the ones to which she referred at the beginning of her book Material Girls. However, by now, it is 2026, so please consult the status of those laws. If the protections have been gutted, they'll no longer serve as evidence that trans people in the UK aren't especially vulnerable.) She said that nonbinary people are "particularly not" vulnerable given that they "basically can can wear normal clothes." She pointed to herself as an example: "I'm wearing all male clothes, I'm 6 feet tall, I've got really short hair, I might as well be nonbinary." Does she face harassment? "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 the level of victimhood we're talking here." (57:08–58:05) To be clear, her argument is that, because the discrimination and violence hasn't happened to her, therefore it happens to no one and no one need be concerned about the possibility. This conflicts with what she had been saying just 15 minutes earlier in this interview about how it's important to recognize that some men victimize some women and that these crimes should be minimized. I also think that what's she's doing here is performative Stoicism. On some level, she knows that she is vulnerable. Nothing really bad has happened to her yet, but it could, especially given the culture she herself stokes where everyone is subject to gender scrutiny, especially tall women and those whose gender performance is ambiguous. She's trying to excuse the harm by saying that the harm doesn't really sting. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me, goes the rhyme. She's saying that if everyone were as tough-minded as she, no one would be injured by homophobia or transphobia. What her critique elides is that, when someone says to her, I'm sorry, sir, you're in the wrong bathroom, they're going on visual cues like her height, and when she replies no I'm not and they accept her assertion, they're going on the added information of the timber of her voice. Were her voice lower — suppose she had a smoker's voice — speaking might count against her. They might privilege her expertise on this topic for other reasons. She is white. Perhaps the bathroom is in a university or professional setting where old people are trying to be polite and impress each other, which is different than a nightclub where young people are drunk and hostile. Perhaps the person who confronted her is a lesbian and realizes that she's a lesbian too. Another odd part of this is that she doesn't say whether the person who confronts her is a man (outside the women's bathroom, policing it) or a woman (who could be inside the bathroom). She does present the dialogue as "you're in the wrong bathroom," but she uses the gender-neutral singular "they" to represent the person who says it. This is relevant because elsewhere in this interview she talks about the importance of respecting women's feelings about other people's genders and mentions how there's so much pressure on women to be nice, yet she doesn't acknowledge that, in such situations, perhaps the other woman does not believe her but is simply being nice. As someone who might sometimes be assumed to be a man or a trans woman, if she has not experienced overt hostility, she is the beneficiary of cis women's niceness to her. She does not say whether, if a trans person is questioned for being in the wrong bathroom and replies "no I'm not," the person who receives that answer should accept it.
Tomasi asks her if academics these days are open-minded, listening, and conisdering the most charitable versions of their opponents' arguments. She says: "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, I mean, that's a better way of beating them...you make it too easy for them to win if you don't consider the best possible case... This was never 'being nice', this was just the norms, the rules of the game." (1:01:31–1:02:03) She goes on: "I think some philosophers...particularly the ones that would sign letters against me...they didn't even bother to read my book... They're not even acquainting themselves with my arguments. They won't listen to this" (1:02:04–20)
Well, I have read her book and wrote several thousand words about it, and I have also listened to this video interview.
She complains about a Cornell University philosophy professor who helped organize an "alternative event" (alternative to what, I don't know) "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... this is a faith-based movement. And that's what happens in this area. People just stop using argument and they start...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 [sic] some kind of high priestess." (1:03:11–1:03:53) This is absurd. Trans people write poetry and drink soda. When we get together to hang out, our fundamental assumption is that we exist, that we are creating space to read poems and drink soda together, and that we acknowledge each others' identities, and that it's OK to seek support from each other as poets, as friends, or in other capacities. That's solidarity, and if that also counts as "political," so be it. If it is a trans poetry event and hangout, we are not spending our refreshment dollars and university activity fees to encourage non-trans people's "disagreement," i.e., their criticism of our bodies, clothing, or language. Let there be one Wednesday night when such opinions are unsolicited and frankly unwelcome. I don't know what Stock is saying here about how poetry and refreshments supposedly imply religion and politics. They do not. Also, since she did not attend the event, I don't know why she feels equipped to comment on what it was, given her previous comment about the importance of people reading her book and listening to her interviews before taking an opinion.
Tomasi then puts "the broader question" in starker terms: "What does this mean, that we have this trans movement that has these characteristics of not wanting to engage in debates with people who see the world differently? Are there broader issues here at play?" Then he pulls a Some People Say. "I've heard people say that, um, some people worry that the way the trans arguments have been presented, or the trans position is being presented, is in some sense an assault on truth, objectivity and reason. Is that too strong?" (1:03:58–1:04:25) Jesus. (Oh, sorry. Is that word religious?) He then rephrases: There's a difference between "a claim about a feeling to policies that should reflect that feeling's significance in the real world, that is, policies and so forth. There's a direct movement from something like feeling to policy and prescription. It's a remarkably straight line. Is that itself an assault on truth, objectivity and reason?" Yes, Stock agrees. It's a "power grab," a "naked" one; "it's like a toddler power grab," based on the person's feelings, which can change. She hears trans people as saying "I feel this way; you must alter your entire social fabric to accommodate my feelings." (1:04:44–1:05:30) Excuse me, who defines, owns and controls the "social fabric"? Can we dig into that assumption?
Then she alleges that, because "most people still don't really understand the consequences for children, for teenagers, for sports, for you know all prisons" — the consequences of what, of trans people existing as we have always existed? — that it, whatever it is, amounts to an "elite" power grab, one that is "happening in universities" with "language [that] 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 in the original sense?" (1:05:55–1:06:25) This is astonishing. In 2024, after a decade of public scrutiny on trans people, she is claiming that most people still can't make reasonable assumptions about the direction of the type of transition that's being discussed (assigned-male-at-birth to woman, or assigned-female-at-birth to man) because the respective terms trans woman or trans man are just too confusing. People who haven't been to university cannot possibly figure this out, she implies! Not after a decade of relentless references to trans people's existence in tabloids and on social media, not after the lifelong opportunity to meet real trans people in their neighborhoods, listen to trans people narrate our life experiences, or reflect for themselves on why they care, if indeed they do care. She is simultaneously saying that everyone should care, but also that it's impossible to communicate about trans people with people who haven't been to university, because such people can only understand the terms "male" and "female," which are synonymous with "man" and "woman," and any attempt to throw in another one-syllable adjective will hopelessly confuse them.
"So all of it just throws up dust," she says. Anything a trans person says, or anything a trans-inclusive person says in support of a trans person, amounts to stomping in the dust to create an atmosphere of low visibility, coughing, and confusion. That's her assumption. Why, then, would she ever stop to listen to a trans person's experiences, beliefs, or arguments? They're using confusing, elitist words like trans, which she can herself only barely understand, having a PhD in philosophy! "Somehow it's worked," she says — non-trans people have allowed trans people to throw dust. "And I think we all need to think seriously about how we let this happen." By being foolish enough to listen to trans people? Exactly, as doing so has created a problem, and it matters, "because of the consequences" — of the social inclusion of trans people — and, "I predict, as people understand them better, they will be outraged." Right, but one of the challenges is, in her view, that people who haven't been to university can't possibly understand trans, so any discussion of trans is just an obfuscation of a discussion that ought to be about men in women's spaces. (1:06:27–1:06:46)
Stock then makes a case for paying less attention to trans people's feelings. While some feelings are "rooted in deep injustice and we should want to listen to them," on the other hand "we're very ill equipped to test them" — I suppose she means whether they're the type of feelings worth listening to, or else whether, having listened, we can properly understand what those feelings mean. The thing is, with feelings, "sometimes, the more space you give them, the bigger they get." If she asks "Do you feel unsafe?" the person she's speaking to may "start feeling more unsafe." She wouldn't want her attention and empathy to harm anyone! (1:07:43–1:08:09) In some cases, "you may feel unsafe, but you blatantly aren't," she says. If "there's absolutely no objective evidence for you being unsafe right now," she thinks the person should confront that. (1:08:29–1:08:44)
She alleges: "Most kids think this is nonsense too. They're just too frightened to say it because their seniors are not showing them the way." (1:09:28–36)
She states: "I'm on the left. 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." This doesn't make a lot of sense. I think the point she wants to make is that people left-of-center have shut down her speech and the speech of other anti-trans people within the left, and that this infighting somehow weakens the left, meanwhile allowing the right to gain political power by becoming the center of anti-trans positions which supposedly a majority of people want (or will want, when they get sick of left-wing misbehavior). But you could take a different approach, which is to say that trans people ought to have freedom of speech to call ourselves women or men and explain why we believe that or live this way, and our friends should have the freedom of speech to recognize our genders and stand with us in solidarity. This should be a core value for the left, yeah? "When the consequences emerge," she says, "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." I don't quite know what she has in mind by "ruined lives." I think she means trans people will victimize cis people or that cis people will somehow suffer from living alongside us. But the thing is, again, that trans people have always been here. If there were going to be consequences, those consequences would have emerged already. I do not know what vigil she was keeping in 2024 for as-yet-unmanifested consequences. (1:10:26–59)
2026 column in the Times
On April 20, in the Times, Stock wrote a short column about whether gay rights are about being ‘liked’. I wrote about it here: ‘Other People Didn’t Have to Like It.’ Nope! But Raise a Glass to Respect!
2026 reference in Prospect Magazine
On May 6, 2026, Prospect Magazine published this book review (Go gentle: assisted dying and the old) by Kate Clanchy, who doesn't directly mention Stock's anti-trans opinions but indirectly praises her for them:
"The transformation of Kathleen Stock from battered academic to charismatic public intellectual is one of the wonders of the cancellation age. It points to heroic levels of personal resilience—and quantities of journalistic instinct, besides. Stock seems not just willing to identify the most difficult issues in our public discourse, but to be positively drawn to them, inspired.
She entered the assisted dying debate in late 2024, driven, she said, by disgust at the “childishness” of “simplistically emotive” politicians advocating for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, sponsored by Kim Leadbeater, which was then sailing through the Commons."
Clanchy, however, disagrees with Stock's opinion against assisted dying. Clanchy perceives value in allowing people to die naturally and according with their wishes, an opinion she formed especially after experiencing the deaths of her own parents.
"I won’t go on about my father. Stock is intolerant of deathbed stories like his, where death is willed and welcome. Sentiment, she says, is “laid on with a trowel”. We should rather, she says, be “cementing the taboo against suicide,” and developing “compelling narratives about psychological resilience in the face of even great suffering”.
So I’ll put down my trowel and tell you about my mother instead."
She closes the essay this way:
"When Stock herself has suffered so much from dictums of “no debate”, it is surprising to find her arguing in favour of silence and even warning that suicides will follow if the wrong words are spoken."
The thing is that there isn't really a "no debate" dictum, except insofar as some topics (I'll let them remain here unnamed) might really be inappropriate for so-called "debate," where debate means unsolicited dismissive comments masquerading as inquiry from people who have no expertise in the topic and no stake in the outcome. It isn't at all clear that Stock has "suffered so much." In 2021, she resigned a university position, which many, many people do for many, many reasons. And, after all, she says that people can disagree, gay rights aren't about being liked, and so on.
