A form of religion

Nov 19th, 2021 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

One or two items from Janice Turner’s conversation with Kathleen Stock:

Although Sussex had a radical history, the philosophy department was an outlier: relatively conservative, less prone to fashionable thinking. Her argumentative father had inadvertently prepared her for “lots of rude, bolshie men who just would sneer at you if you said something stupid”, but who, she adds, “are still the cleverest people I’ve ever met”. The English and gender studies departments thought the philosophers very dull. “We were laughed at because we believed in things like truth and objectivity. Philosophy at Sussex has never been trendy. Thank God – that’s the way I like it.”

Especially that kind of trendy. “Hahaha you believe in truth” – from people who can’t argue their way out of a paper bag.

Meanwhile Stock’s marriage was falling apart. Aged 39, she found herself single for the first time in her adult life. She signed up to dating sites. “And I started half-heartedly seeing men,” says. “But my heart wasn’t in it. I kept dating, on paper, eligible guys and not wanting to do anything. I just thought, ‘Well, I could just change the box.’ So I ticked ‘F’ rather than ‘M’. I thought: why not, might as well see. And that was it! I went on some dates with women and thought, ‘Oh my God!’ I didn’t even particularly like these women! But suddenly everything made sense. It was an epiphany.”

It was, she says, like taking off a mask. “It changed my whole life. The way I walked even. I’d had long hair, wore make-up every day and was really awkward and self-conscious, touching my face and my hair all the time.” Overnight, Stock threw away all her skirts and dresses, sold her size 8 stilettos on eBay and cropped her hair. Kathleen Stock, the androgynous, lesbian academic, happy at last in her own skin, emerged.

“So, yes, I do understand gender identity,” she says. “From the inside. I know what it is to identify as masculine, or with males, more than women.” Referring to the spike in teenage girls identifying as trans she says, “If you could take me back in time, I think I would be very susceptible to a narrative that I was more male than female.”

It’s funny about clothes – how coded they are, and how odd it can feel to wear clothes that don’t feel like the right code. It’s feeling “misgendered” I suppose – but also I think like a fraud or a joke or both.

Over three years, campus life grew ever more toxic. Many times Stock resolved to step back and say nothing. “But I would go to bed and just fume until 4am then get up and write a blog defending myself. I’d press send and feel an enormous catharsis. I had to keep meeting every blow.” Moreover, her Catholic upbringing made her feel this “no debate” trans activism was a form of religion. “It involves special holy days, ceremonies, rituals, mantras and performing acts of ritual self-abnegation. I can see it completely.” Which frames Stock as a heretic.

It also involves firm and indeed coercive belief for no good reason. It’s all about faith in assertion. I don’t like faith in assertion.

As lockdown began, Stock started to write Material Girls, which seeks to analyse gender theory using philosophical tools. It is so unflinching you can see why some are incensed. Stock compares trans identity to an “immersive fiction”. She insists she is not saying a male living as a woman is “deluded or lying or there’s anything wrong with this. You’re participating in an activity that can be really life-enhancing. However, it also has limits. And there is a difference between fiction and truth.”

Enjoy your immersive fiction by all means, but keep the door always in sight.

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