Kathleen Stock. Now they are writing academic papers about how terfy she is

[Birdsweepsin]

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2022.2147915

In this article I write on the feminist rift within University culture and the wider impact it has had in the British media landscape. I will chronicle the case of Kathleen Stock and its reporting in the media principally through a focus on a selection of particularly relevant articles in the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph as a newspaper closely aligned with gender critical and UK Conservative government thinking.

OK, no worries. So a dispassionate look at both sides, considering media bias goes both ways, hey?

I want to consider Stock as a totemic figure for a trans-hostile media, and discuss the way her case has been used to spread misinformation around universities, and trans people. My focus here is on trans women as those on the receiving end of most gender critical hostility.

Oh. Sigh.

Or impartiality.

Please don’t provide a platform for idiots like this by reposting their links…

My focus here is on trans women as those on the receiving end of most gender critical hostility.

Yes, while downplaying the hostility that forced Professor Stock out of her actual job, which is glossed over as "protests by students at her institution [...] and her subsequent resignation".

I read a lot of journal papers and academic publications from many disciplines (an occupational hazard), but I can honestly say that none of them has ever been as ideologically motivated as this one.

Me too!

By virtue of their fondness for licking plastic & chewing cardboard, & indeed even the way they unashamedly rub their fuzzy wee faces all over my phone when I’m trying to read, I have genuinely removed things from my cats’ litter trays that contained more of academic worth than that article did.

Perhaps they’d let my cats’ write them a viewpoint piece. Combining voice-to-text with toebeans-to-touchscreen & of course I could provide some feline to English transcription.

Shaw quotes Kathleen Stock: "At the other end of this particular story arc (that of the immersive fantasy) are unhappily infertile young adults; women prisoners made to share facilities with male rapists; sportswomen crowded out of competition by men they can’t hope to beat; young lesbians guilted into dating males; wives being coerced into participation in the cross-dressing fantasies of their husbands."

She then totally sidesteps Professor Stock's examples, writing, "According to Stock, this ‘immersive fiction’ leads to all sorts of dangers in what could be described as a gender critical moral panic greatest hits, all of which code trans women as predatory, deceptive and delusional men".

Does Shaw think that the evidence for those "unhappily infertile young adults, women prisoners made to share facilities with male rapists; sportswomen crowded out of competition by men they can’t hope to beat; young lesbians guilted into dating males; wives being coerced into participation in the cross-dressing fantasies of their husbands" doesn't exist? Or is she happy to write those women off as collateral damage for the greater good of prioritising men's feelings? (Rhetorical questions; we know the answers.)

Anyone spending 30,000 before interest charges on a degree in South American movies, this is the standard of the education you will get.

What on earth is such an article doing in the Women's History Review, anyway? It's not a history subject.

I'm currently in email correspondence with the founder and director of the WHR, who has offered to publish an article on a famous woman in history whose life I am researching. I am astonished that she has accepted and published this what sounds like not only garbage but irrelevant garbage.

I've vaguely heard of it Bird - and yes it looks entirely legit. Scrolling down their website it seems to be entirely sensible research papers, but they also have a Viewpoint section. There's an article on abortion wars in it. I wonder if this is in that? Sounds like the editors and reviewers are all utterly captured, but it might explain the polemic style (and no, I'm not clicking on it, this thread is enough). Bet they wouldn't allow a response.

The article concludes with a hope - and more importantly, a belief - that all feminists, including GC ones, can unite around a series of feminist aims. It’s notable that the author (I don’t want to personalise this) accepts gender critical feminists as feminists, rather than labelling us as ‘gender criticals’ and arguing that our views are not part of feminism at all. The framing is that we must ‘not allow anti-feminist conservative and far right forces to exploit trans and non-binary people to divide our movement’.

Also significant is that the author’s list of aims on which she thinks “all feminists can” agree includes ending violence against LGBT people. Leaving aside the question of whether feminism should prioritise ending violence against men, it’s interesting that the author implicitly recognises, correctly, that gender critical feminists oppose and believe in working against violence against all LGBT people, whether or not we see that as a task for our movement. It makes a change from ‘literal violence’.

As this all comes at the end, the earlier part of the article about Kathleen Stock and transodium reads like a recitation of the catechism before sneaking in some heretical opinions. I suspect WHR see this as an olive branch to us, albeit mostly wrapped in nettles. The author’s argument that feminists, regardless of their views on gender, should unite against ‘anti-feminist conservative and far right forces’ will bewilder true believers who fantasise that all ‘gender-criticals’ are fascists funded by the religious right. I wonder how it will go down with the Twitterati? It might depend on how many of them read to the end. Once they do, the author will presumably be ‘educated’ and called to repent in short order.

Congratulations, you have just won the Internet!

What's salt got to do with the price of of eggs?

@ThreeLocusts ah no, you must! Show em how it's really done!

The actual, sensible editor you’ve been communicating with is probably nothing to do with the viewpoints section. That one is probably presided over by someone more junior (and more focused on getting polemic on topics that are big on SM rather than high quality academic work).

As I said, the way the instructions god authors is written makes it clear that research articles are rigorously peer reviewed (as they should be). But viewpoints are not research articles. It’ll all be much lighter touch over in viewpoints.

Still worth raising the issues of accuracy and quality of argument with the proper editor though. Polemical should not mean spreading misinformation and demonising a group with a protected characteristic under the EA (gender critical beliefs). Good polemic can help to generate debate. But bad polemic may as well be someone’s tumblr.

Trans women = biological men. It’s male rights brigade isn’t it - and unfortunately these kind of men want rights to destruction.

Transodium! Is that pepper that identifies as salt??

Thank you! I had nothing profound to add, but couldn't help plopping that in.

“principally through a focus on a selection of particularly relevant articles in the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph as a newspaper closely aligned with gender critical and UK Conservative government thinking.“

lol, they have no idea who we are.

She doesn't seem to realise that many gender critical women look to the Telegraph in spite of not being its natural audience because the stories aren't covered by left wing media.

If the writer was really dedicated to trans rights, they'd be centering a trans person in their publications instead of Kathleen Stock. Tut.

This!!!

Slightly tangential, but here is an article in today’s Washington Post about University of Austin, the new University that Stock is due to join. WP seem to agree that Universities need to be braver in allow dissenting opinions.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/16/university-of-austin-intellectual-diversity/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjM3MTk5NjA2IiwicmVhc29uIjoiZ2lmdCIsIm5iZiI6MTY3MTMxOTA0MSwiaXNzIjoic3Vic2NyaXB0aW9ucyIsImV4cCI6MTY3MjUyODY0MSwiaWF0IjoxNjcxMzE5MDQxLCJqdGkiOiI0NjIyYWY1Yy05OTAzLTRlMDEtYmUzYS02YjhhOWM1NDdiYzkiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy53YXNoaW5ndG9ucG9zdC5jb20vb3BpbmlvbnMvMjAyMi8xMi8xNi91bml2ZXJzaXR5LW9mLWF1c3Rpbi1pbnRlbGxlY3R1YWwtZGl2ZXJzaXR5LyJ9.ZwLmKEo-yTUwfwOfOij_d4RzKfBzqcijbhomE6Y_gD8&itid=gfta

US academics that I follow - including the ones strongly in favo(u)r of free speech on campus - are very sceptical about the University of Austin. More universities simply need to adopt the Chicago principles.

sorry to disappoint you, but the article was researched and did undergo peer review by two expert reviewers. Really glad folk are reading it, but sad Mumsnet folk target trans women. Did you like the final pledges? I was trying to bring us together and asking us to focus on what really places women in danger. The same forces of toxic masculinity target women, and LGBT people and many anti trans folk really don't support women's rights,

Are you the writer?