When her OBE was announced in December 2020, Kathleen Stock – then a philosophy professor at the University of Sussex – said she was “delighted to get this award in recognition of my attempts to open up academic discussion on important issues around sex and gender identity”.
Stock had been a specialist in aesthetics, with relatively little public profile, until 2018. A blog post opposing Theresa May’s promised reforms to gender recognition legislation changed that, gaining her attention within wider academic circles. She has since become a fixture of media discussions about free speech in academia, arguing that so-called ‘gender critical’ voices are being suppressed.
But Stock’s commitment to free speech – and that of her allies – has been questioned by students at Sussex and beyond, who have found themselves subject to online abuse, facing legal threats, and risking their careers in academia after criticising ‘gender critical’ views as transphobic.
Sussex English undergraduate Katie Tobin was among the first to experience such a backlash when she wrote an article in late 2018 for the Sussex branch of The Tab, a student newspaper conglomerate with a presence on dozens of UK campuses.
Tobin’s piece concerned an email Stock had sent the entire Sussex philosophy cohort defending her views on trans rights. In her article, Tobin said Stock’s email had “created a hostile and unwelcoming atmosphere” for trans students, and that her comments about trans issues had been “extremely detrimental” to their welfare.
When the article was published, Stock responded on Twitter: “This is not OK @TheTab. I will be seeking legal advice.” In a tweet that Stock ‘liked’, a supporter of hers wrote: “Tobin is clearly a homophobe and misogynist”, and called the article “slander”.
At that point, Tobin said, she started getting a “flood” of “horrible messages”, including death threats. She filed a complaint with the university about Stock instigating a pile-on against her.
Sussex concluded that Stock was not responsible for the abuse Tobin had received, and that she had not been unprofessional or engaged in bullying. Tobin was, however, given £250 as compensation by the university.
Meanwhile, at the request of Stock’s lawyers, The Tab removed the article, published a retraction and paid her a small amount of compensation, which was donated to charity.
Stock told openDemocracy any abuse Tobin had received was not her responsibility as she had not tweeted her complaint about The Tab at Tobin directly, nor mentioned her online by name.
“After a thorough examination of all evidence provided by Tobin, I was completely exonerated and she was somewhat admonished,” she said. She added that Tobin “has not respected the [university’s] request for confidentiality, though up til now I have” despite having tweeted about the dispute in 2021.
The university’s response to Tobin appeared to set a precedent, In October 2021, when students put up posters reading “IT’S NOT A DEBATE. IT’S NOT FEMINISM. IT’S NOT PHILOSOPHY. IT’S JUST TRANSPHOBIA AND IT’S NOT ON. FIRE KATHLEEN STOCK”, an art history lecturer at Sussex tweeted that “security rushed to remove them at 8am”.
Stock resigned a few weeks later. Then-vice-chancellor Adam Tickell expressed sorrow over the “bullying and harassment” Stock had received, and said: “I would like to make it very clear that it is unlawful to discriminate against someone on the grounds of sex and of philosophical belief. Her departure is a loss to us all.”
But Tobin couldn’t help but compare her treatment by the university to Stock’s. “I struggled a lot seeing the university being so willing to support her when she’d received [online] threats of violence and death threats, knowing that was the fate she’d willingly subjected me to,” she said. Sussex University did not respond to requests for comment.
Stock told openDemocracy: “The claim that I ‘willingly subjected’ Tobin to abuse, when I did not mention her at all in any public intervention, seems to be a fantasy which she has been trying to get people to listen to for five years now.” She added, “As far as I know no evidence was offered by Katie at the time of death threats.”
Tobin, however, says she told the university that the online abuse was making her life “a living hell” and said Stock “couldn’t seem to care less”.
It’s pretty difficult to publish work that engages the gender critical movement on any level. They have almost a monopoly within academic philosophyGrace Lavery, professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley
A month before the Tab article was published, a tweet from Stock kickstarted a chain of events that would end the academic career of a young philosopher.
The tweet read: “Oh do fuck off, you complete and utter dickhead.” It was a reply to Nathan Oseroff-Spicer, then studying for a PhD at King’s College London, who had accused Stock of “publicly advocating bigotry and intolerance”. Stock later called his statement defamatory – and allegedly emailed his boss at the American Philosophical Association (APA) to complain.
Oseroff-Spicer had been an editor for the APA blog as a side-job during his studies. “I was then told [by my boss] I couldn’t speak out in support of trans people or criticise her publicly,” he said, adding his boss also instructed him to apologise publicly to Stock. The APA did not respond to requests for comment.
Stock said: “To my recollection, I have never written to Nathan Oseroff-Spicer’s employer,” but added she was “happy to endorse the sentiment of the original tweet he complains of”.
Oseroff-Spicer’s tweets also attracted the attention of influential philosopher Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. On his philosophy blog Leiter Reports, he repeatedly pushed for Oseroff-Spicer to be sacked from the APA blog, which he eventually was.
Leiter defended his actions, telling openDemocracy that Oseroff-Spicer “repeatedly abused his position at the APA blog”.
The events led both Oseroff-Spicer and his partner, a trans man, to conclude “philosophy just was not the right place for either of us”.
Pressure
Christa Peterson, currently a final-year philosophy PhD student at the University of Southern California, has become an expert on the impact of ‘gender critical’ thought in academia, having clashed with ‘gender critical’ philosophers since the movement came to prominence. In 2021, she was invited by a group of postgraduate students at the University of Sussex to present her research on anti-trans thought in philosophy, scheduled at the same time as Stock was meant to give a talk.
She agreed, but then received concerned emails from the organisers. “My sense is that the students were getting pressure from the administration to cancel it,” she said. “They were sent the university's conduct guidelines and were told they were responsible for everything I said, and that it could not be an ‘anti-Kathleen’ talk.”
Peterson broadened the scope of her talk to cover anti-trans thought in academia more generally. “I changed the subject of the talk in response to these concerns – which is a clear-cut academic freedom problem,” she said. “I was very worried about getting them in trouble.”
Stock told openDemocracy that Peterson’s talk was “certainly not a standard academic event in any sense” and added: “I am told it took place without any interference from management, so I am not sure I understand what she is now complaining of.”
The revised talk, given in the summer of 2021, went ahead without issue, but weeks after resigning from Sussex, Stock told The Times that she “went off sick with a breakdown” because of it. She told openDemocracy: “The timing by the organisers was intentionally hostile to me, as was the nature of the invitation as a whole.”
In November 2022, an academic article in the journal Impact referred to Peterson’s invitation to present her research at Sussex as part of a campaign of “bullying” directed at Stock. The authors, Alice Sullivan and Judith Suissa, both influential ‘gender critical’ thinkers, omitted Peterson’s name and credentials, calling her simply “a Twitter-troll primarily known for her obsessive interest in Stock”. Sullivan had previously called her a “loony grad student” on Twitter.
Peterson says she complained to Impact about this portrayal of her in January of this year and was told she would receive a quick response, but has still not heard back. Impact has yet to respond to requests for comment from openDemocracy.
The dismissal of her work by senior academics has left Peterson concerned about her career opportunities. “I’m going on the job market this year and these people keep saying my academic work is bullying and harassment,” she said. “I will not apply to jobs in the UK. I think most departments would have at least one person who would have a real problem with me being hired, because they think I've been bullying Kathleen Stock for years.”
Peterson is not the only researcher into ‘gender critical’ academics who has felt pressured by a British university to soften their academic work on the subject.
Grace Lavery, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk in 2022 at University College London (UCL) about what she called “the mortal threat to academic freedom in the United Kingdom that has been mounted in recent years… by an alliance composed of the gender critical movement and the managerial class of administrators that govern the UK [higher education] sector.”
The threat, she argues, is so great, partly because “the GC movement sees students as obstacles to be silenced, either directly or by the abuse of legal instruments”.
When the editors of Think Pieces, an in-house journal at UCL, asked Lavery to produce a written version of her talk, she was happy to oblige – but started to become concerned when, months after she submitted an article, it had not appeared. Lavery understood editors feared they could face legal action for running the piece as was, something UCL appeared to confirm when we asked about the article, telling openDemocracy that it “must carefully take other factors into account when publishing articles including the risk of legal action against the institution”.
Lavery instead published the article on her blog in June. “It was the first time I’d ever heard of university administration actually intervening in the normal course of publication of work,” she said.
UCL added it was “firmly committed to ensuring that free and open discussion can take place in an atmosphere of tolerance for different viewpoints”.
Another academic who says her career has been affected by her support for trans rights is Newcastle University sociology professor Alison Phipps, who was head of gender studies at Sussex University when Stock was teaching there. Phipps has been a vocal trans ally for the past decade, which she says has meant “some academics working on violence against women give me a wide berth, as do some third sector organisations”.
According to Phipps, ‘gender critical’ women in her field “tend to set the mainstream agenda, with very few people willing to risk their own careers by challenging them openly”.
For Lavery, the issue is fundamentally one of academic freedom. “It’s pretty difficult to actually publish work that engages the gender critical movement on any level whatsoever,” she said. “They have almost a monopoly within academic philosophy.”
