The philosophy professor at the centre of a row over her views on gender identification and transgender rights has said she quit her post at Sussex University because of what she called “a medieval experience” of campus ostracism and protests.
In a lengthy interview with BBC Woman’s Hour, Kathleen Stock claimed the student protests grew out of hostility from other academics. She said a lack of support from her colleagues and the unions led her to resign.
“There’s a small group of people who are absolutely opposed to the sorts of things I say and instead of getting involved in arguing with me, using reason, evidence, the traditional university methods, they tell their students in lectures that I pose a harm to trans students, or they go on to Twitter and say that I’m a bigot.
“So thus creating an atmosphere in which the students then become much more extreme and much more empowered to do what they did,” Stock said.
Stock said her “personal tipping point” came after Sussex’s branch of the University and College Union responded to a protest against Stock on campus in early October by calling for a university-wide investigation into transphobia.
“It was when I saw my own union branch’s statement, which basically backed the protesters and implicitly made it obvious that they thought I was transphobic and accused Sussex University of institutional transphobia,” Stock said.
“When union committee members basically back intimidation against you as an employee, then that’s a bit of a blow.”
The philosophy professor was awarded an OBE in the 2021 New Year honours list for services to higher education.
But more than 600 academics criticised the decision, signing an open letter that criticised Stock’s comments on trans and gender non-conforming people. The letter said her “harmful rhetoric” reinforced “the patriarchal status quo”.
The academics said they were concerned there was a “tendency to mistake transphobic fearmongering for valuable scholarship, and attacks on already marginalised people for courageous exercises of free speech”.
Stock told the BBC her recent time on campus was “like some sort of surreal, terrible anxiety dream, to see your name plastered over every wall … Lots and lots of young people and all eyes are on you and all fingers seem to be pointing at you. It’s like some sort of medieval experience.”
On her most recent attempt to visit the university, Stock described being confronted by posters calling her a transphobe and demanding that she be fired. “I just turned around, ran back up to the train station, hyperventilating and got the first train I could home,” she said.
While Stock exempted members of her former department from joining the ostracism, she said the university could have done more to curb the behaviour of other staff members and to support her from external abuse.
Asked to respond to trans students who accused Stock of making them feel unsafe while at Sussex, Stock said it was hyperbole.
“Whether you feel unsafe and whether you are unsafe are two different things. As philosophers we constantly distinguish between appearances and reality, and my book is not actually making them physically unsafe,” Stock said.
Stock has been criticised for being a trustee of the LGB Alliance, which describes itself as promoting “the rights of lesbians, bisexuals & gay men, as recognised by biological sex”. Trans rights activists have accused the group of being transphobic, which it denies.