Yahoo Sports The most controversial debate of the year: Inside Kathleen Stock at the Oxford Union
Outside the rainbow flag-waving protesters were chanting “trans rights are human rights” and “resisting by existing”, ramping up the music and screaming in unison.
Inside the Oxford Union debating hall, the audience strained to listen over the fracas when suddenly chaos broke out.
Two trans protesters stood up at different ends of the room, shouting, and handing out leaflets while a third, wearing a No More Dead Trans Kids t-shirt silently took up the lotus position and glued her hands to the floor.
Welcome to the woke world of trans rights and indeed wrongs of modern Britain.
And in the eye of the storm, impassive and watchful sat the rather unassuming academic who has sparked a culture war like no other.
She is Kathleen Stock, an erstwhile philosophy professor at Sussex University who was vilified, threatened and hounded out of her job in 2021 by students like these, for her “hateful” views.
Her crime? Stock has the temerity to say that trans women are not the same as biological women. Imagine that.
There’s more. She has also stated that transgender women and transgender men deserve to live in dignity and should have the full protection of the law - but with the proviso that “identifying as a woman” isn’t the same as being a woman.
What was once common sense and commonplace now qualifies as heresy in the new pick’n’mix gender orthodoxy that is gripping university campuses s d social media alike. Crazy, but there you go.
Back in the room a very different sort of madness reigned. Security guards strode up and attempted to negotiate with the activist, but to no avail.
An audience member with cerebral palsy, a third-year history student, received a round of loud applause when he insisted he was there to listen and demanded the event continue. But the organisers declined.
Two police officers swept into the room, spoke to the protester and swept out again while another audience member announced “take this time to google the Tavistock Clinic scandal”.
I don’t think I’m overstepping the mark when I say the proverbial man on the Clapham Omnibus would be utterly bewildered by all of this.
Not so the furious trans lobby hollering away in the street outside the Oxford Union who remain adamant that trans women are women. Trans men, incidentally tend to make far less fuss so they seldom even get a name check.
To these militants, Stock is a hateful bigot who questions their very right to life because she refuses to call them women. As the feminist Julie Bindel so succinctly put it “that word’s taken, choose another”. But put simply, they don’t want to.
Meanwhile inside, the impromptu theatre continues; five more police officers strode in, one carrying a camera to film the removal of the protestor until finally after the half hour interruption, the activist was led away to loud cheers and the Q&A recommenced.
Truthfully by then I was too discombobulated to pay more than fleeting attention to the way in which a poised, articulate Stock gave her earnest student interlocutor short shrift, in the nicest possible way. I think it was her playful mention of Cartesian dualism that finally did for him.
I’m not in the least surprised. I interviewed Stock just days previously and as we talked at length in her sun-dappled sitting room, I warmed to the razor-sharp funny woman who has become a lightning conductor for so much anger and anxiety, since she first raised her head above the parapet in 2018 and suggested that issues surrounding transgender rights ought to be discussed.
“It’s hard to believe now, but when all this started, I genuinely thought people didn’t understand and if I just explained them, they would concede that transgender women are not women and that facts have to triumph over feelings,” she told me then, with a rueful laugh.
Fortunately in the splendour of the Oxford Union debating chamber, after the brouhaha died down, facts effortlessly trounced feelings.
“What I think is silly is to make laws and policy based on something intangible nobody else can see,” she said to loud roars of approval. “Are we supposed to accept what someone says about their gender identity on their word alone? That is way too open to malfeasance.”
To put this evening into context, in the course of its 200-year history the Oxford Union has played host to the great, the good and, let us not mince words, the morally repugnant.
Provisional IRA leader Martin McGuinness, OJ Simpson in the wake of his controversial acquittal for the murder of his wife. Colonel Gaddafi made his views known via video link. Holocaust denier and historian David Irving was allowed to say his piece.
Yet the invitation extended to Stock, a “gender critical” lesbian with entirely mainstream beliefs has caused unprecedented uproar and outrage among the Dreaming Spires.
Barely a day has passed without various colleges calling for her to be no-platformed and other students rounding on them for seeking to silence her.
Amid allegations of death threats and harassment against the committee members, the LGBTQ+ society urged hundreds of students to join the protest “to show support for the trans community”.
Last week 40 Oxford academics warned students that free speech was in peril in a letter to The Daily Telegraph. It was signed by dons including Prof Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, and Prof Nigel Biggar, the theologian, and stated that universities exist to “promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument”.
The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak belatedly bandwagoned them and followed suit this week. Not that anyone paid much heed in this bonfire of the binaries.
On the face of it, a Oxford Union brouhaha might well look like just another generation of navel-gazing youngsters getting aerated over as they have done for millennia.
In the 4th century BC Plato complained: “They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions.”
I’ve been a shouty student protester myself. But the key difference was that in the 1980s we took aim at the big stuff. We wanted to free Nelson Mandela and dismantle Apartheid; not redefine womanhood and give bearded blokes carte blanche to muscle their way into female sporting competitions and the ladies’ changing room in Marks & Spencer.
What happens in institutions like Oxford has far-reaching reverberations for all of us; increasingly women are being asked to make room for people who were born male.
Is it really hateful and trans-exclusionary to want our daughters to compete against other girls in team sports? Or to ask that a woman rather than a trans woman attends to our mother’s personal care in a nursing home?
I make no apologies for partisanship. Like Stock, like most people in the country and indeed on the planet, I believe in the scientific truth that sex is determined at conception, not “assigned at birth” and is written into our DNA.
This is unfortunate for those who feel they were born into the wrong body and do not identify with their sex. But in the words of Stock: “We can’t make everyone happy. That’s not the job of public policy.”
In the current climate of narcissistic me-tooism that’s arguably the most controversial thing she’s said yet.
