Stock throws book at fellow academics over trans debate

ACADEMICS are acting in “naked selfinterest” on the transgender debate rather than pursuing the truth, a feminist professor who quit in a row with activists has said.

Prof Kathleen Stock, an expert in analytic philosophy, faced death threats and accusations of transphobia in a campaign to have her sacked from Sussex University.

After posters demanding “Stock out” were plastered around campus, she quit British academia in November and became a founding fellow at the University of Austin in Texas, a new “anti-cancel culture” institution that welcomes academics treated like “thought criminals”.

Prof Stock took aim at academics rather than students, saying they are “taking a cue from their role models, the adults around them” who are “all in their own little bubbles” but have not “actually read what I think”.

“There’s a lot of not just enabling but inciting individuals in this story. As soon as I arrived I was obviously, I deduce, a massive threat to them,” she said in an interview with the website UnHerd.

Gender identity theory is an “egregiously false, terrible philosophy” that undermines the concept of biological sex, she said, such as through the belief that trans women are the same as those born as women. In turn, she argued this can undermine the sex-based rights of women, girls and lesbians.

Prof Stock asked: “How could it be true that psychological identity claims mean that we should just ignore material categories and pretend they don’t exist, when they clearly have all these impacts in medicine, sport, science, education, and everywhere you want to look? If I’m right, then they [fellow academics] have built their careers on sand … So I can see why they had a vested interest in shutting me down.

“They will just chuck everything. And some of these are paid academics – so we’ve moved very far away from the stereotype of the responsible truthseeker, it’s just naked self-interest now.”