We must stand up to trans bullies if we value freedom
IN the twisted mindset of self-righteous political fanatics, the quest to impose dogma can justify even the cruellest forms of oppression. It was Maximilien Robespierre, the sinister leader of the bloodsoaked French Revolution, who proclaimed that “terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible”. In our own country over recent decades, that same warped mentality has led radicals to support violent Irish Republicanism or tyrannical Soviet communism or militant Islamic fundamentalism.
Today, a similar form of bullying extremism is found among the hardliners of the transgender movement, who seek to create a culture of fear where critics of their ideology are bullied into silence. In classic revolutionary style, anyone who dares to challenge their creed is portrayed as an enemy of the people. Wallowing in invented victimhood, these zealots present themselves as a humanitarian engine for social progress, rooting out bigotry.
On the contrary, they represent a deeply reactionary force which shows no respect for essential liberties, especially those of women. In their addiction to witch-hunts, they echo the McCarthyism of the 1950s. In their rampant misogyny, they have become a kind of TransTaliban. In their denial of biological science, they resemble a bunch of flat-earthers.
ALTHOUGH they are wholly unrepresentative of the British population, these despotic gender warriors have had a disturbing influence on our public life. Civic institutions cower before them. The concept of childhood innocence is disappearing as bewildered youngsters are interrogated about their identities. Official language is being rewritten, with references to womanhood increasingly airbrushed from the public discourse, so we end up with verbal monstrosities like “birthing people” in place of “mothers”. Indeed, the assault on women’s rights is relentless, as single-sex spaces are abolished, while socalled “gender critical” feminists are hounded out of their jobs and denied freedom of speech. Only this month, the Labour MP Rosie Duffield avoided her own party’s conference because of death threats from trans activists.
But this week has brought perhaps the most alarming case into the spotlight. Kathleen Stock is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Sussex University, the author of several acclaimed books and the recipient of the OBE for her services to academia.
But, in a frightening development she has become the target of savage harassment by trans protesters. Figures in balaclavas have been seen on the university grounds carrying placards with the slogan “Stock Out”. The online abuse has been just as bad, with one social media user putting up an image of a man with a gun, accompanied by the chilling injunction: “Kathleen Stock – rest your weary head.” The local police are sufficiently concerned about her safety to have advised her to stay off campus, install CCTV at her home and make use of a direct hotline.
And what has been Professor Stock’s crime that has triggered this deluge of intimidation? Merely to argue the case, in reasoned terms, for women-only spaces and to question whether people can really change their biological sex. An energetic campaigner for lesbian and gay rights, Professor Stock is no hate-monger and is not antitrans. But in the Orwellian environment that now prevails in much of our public sector, she is deemed to have offended against the ruling creed and therefore, like a heretic, must be punished. As she herself says, the situation is “surreal”. Universities – and particularly philosophy departments – are meant to be arenas for open discussion, not citadels of narrow groupthink controlled by the thought police.
SHE had received some backing from Sussex’s Vice-Chancellor Adam Tickell, who has rejected demands for her dismissal. “We cannot and will not tolerate threats to cherished academic freedoms,” he said. Yet her own trade union, the UCU, not only refused to support her it told management to “take a clear and strong stance against transphobia at Sussex”.
The UCU’s shameful refusal to assist one its own embattled members is another indicator of how moral values have been comprehensively inverted by trans radicalism. Misogynistic intolerance has prevailed in the name of gender tolerance.
Understandably dismayed, Professor Stock said that the union’s decision has “effectively ended” her career. That cannot be allowed to happen. The bullies must not win. Her fate is a test of whether we really still value freedom in this country.
‘We will not tolerate threats to cherished academic freedoms’