Maybe sex realists really are winning the gender wars. But for every two steps we take forward we are relentlessly pushed at least one back. The most recent victory in the war against common sense has seen the University of Sussex dodge a £585,000 fine over their free speech policies. The fine was awarded after Professor Kathleen Stock was hounded out of her job five years ago following sustained protests over her views on transgender rights and gender identity.
She was hounded out of her academic job for not believing that men can be women. I will never get over how grotesque that is.
The Office for Students (OfS) spent three and a half years investigating the circumstances that led to Stock’s departure. Their final report is damning. It notes that the university’s ‘Trans and Non-Binary Equality Statement’ requires ‘any materials within relevant courses and modules [to] positively represent trans people and trans lives’ and makes vague statements such as ‘transphobic propaganda … will not be tolerated’. These requirements all effectively censored course materials and created a culture in which any expression of gender-critical thought was believed by many to be a disciplinary offence.
And what even is gender-critical thought? Just knowing that men are not and cannot be women. That’s it, that’s the thought. And it’s verboten.
In the OfS’s own words, ‘a chilling effect was created because the university indicated, through these restrictions, that the expression of certain lawful speech and views was not acceptable at the university’. The result of this policy was obvious to anyone who followed Kathleen Stock’s final years at Sussex. She was harassed by masked students protesting outside her lectures, ‘Stock out’ posters were plastered across the university, flares were set off, and many of her own colleagues signed an open letter condemning her ‘harmful rhetoric’. At one point, just to do her job, Stock had to appoint private security.
Her crime? Writing a book in which she claimed gender identity should not supplant biological sex. Sussex University did little to nothing to defend Stock from the abuse. The Vice-Chancellor at the time, Adam Tickell, seemed more interested in pursuing his new equality, diversity and inclusion strategy
But not real equality and certainly not real inclusion. Women who refuse to say that a man is a woman are very much not included.
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