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.

Ah yes, encouraging a hateful pile on, unlike someone writing an "academic" article trashing one specific woman bullied out of her job for daring to voice her opinion and her desire to keep her hard won rights.

Academics, as a group (Not All Academics, etc) are prone to such churlish, bullying behaviour, it really is disgusting. I've worked in HE for nearly 10 years, and I've lost so much respect for it. I do, however, respect those who find the strength to go against the tide, such as Dr Stock.

how do you peer review an opinion?

were they just checking your SPAG?

@devorah - this is not my area of research so hopefully you will bear with me in my questions.

I assume the reviewers were blind to you? If not, what was there area of expertise?

Can you give us an idea of the types of comments the reviewers made? What did they indicate as the strengths/weaknesses of your paper?

I'm trying to get a sense of what is involved in reviewing a viewpoint article. What are they looking for? Obviously academic rigour in the normal sense that would be applied to a research paper would not be a requirement but what is required?

This is a hateful pile on? When compared to what happened to Professor Stock, the subject of the journal article discussed in this thread?

I see that the thread has been archived now, just in case.

So you write an article about one person and that's not a pile on [on that person]

But people who might respond to you on twitter is a pile on [on you]

The irony that you say in your introduction that her case has been used to 'spread misinformation about universities and trans people' when it was universities and trans people that forced her to leave her position in a university is quite frankly brazen. That isn't misinformation that is information.

People like you are just two faced bullies.

Ah, we’ve been having ideas above our station lads: fancy our thinking we’d the right to not just read an open-access paper but discuss it! The. Very. Idea.

I blame all the academics we have kicking about the place, giving the rest of us Notions. Disgraceful.

Devorah I’m glad you’re here as I would really like to ask a question, the issue I raised earlier, in good faith. Can you not see how there is a large overlap between “toxic masculinity” and “trans women”? How do you explain that many males who identify as trans women (a I am not sure they are all genuine but it is of course hard to say if we go by self-ID as a definition) a threaten women with rape and violence online and in person (at protests for example), and a good number are themselves rapists or guilty of other sex crimes - in fact there’s a high rate of identifying as a TW immediately after being arrested for a sex crime, and sex-related convictions are over=represented among trans women in prison? That is one reason feminists find it so alarming that laws are being based on trans ideology saying that a) anyone who self ids as the opposite sex IS the opposite sex, and b) must be allowed into all that sex’s spaces and provisions? Can you not see who that could be and is being exploited by some of the most toxic males?

I am not trying to attack you, it’s just that this seems so obvious to me and I don’t understand how you don’t see it, or can leave it out of your analysis.

Just a comment about your discussion of a quote by KS, @devorah.
The quote immediately follows exploration of The Transsexual Empire (though you don't quote Raymond or Greer but only Hines' views).

KS's quote focuses on women. It says very little about transwomen, it doesn't say they are predatory or delusional, but says that women are transitioning for reasons which resemble other forms of female self harm in a sexist society, and also that women are finding themselves in places labelled single sex for women where there are now men. This is an objective fact from the gender critical perspective, and this is the crevasse between us, not political views or the insults of the Daily Telegraph. Why make people transition is not the focus of the quote. It is about women. That's feminism.

Male people not make people!

Transodium sounds like a province of the Roman empire.

Another point about 'broken health system'. The NHS is certainly under extreme strain at the moment.

But look again. I'm a speech therapist and some years ago I provided transgender voice therapy for a short period. This therapy is part of NHS provision. Waiting lists for it are incredibly long. But how do you look at this? If I met with a male person who'd transitioned, inevitably they had a completely normal voice for a male person and it would be part of what would lead to them being heard as a male. However, if you considered them a woman, they might have an unusual voice, different in multiple ways from most female voices (it's not just about pitch). Still not a disordered voice though. Nothing like the other voices I worked with which had organic issues such as severe muscle tension, cranial nerve palsy, laryngeal cancer treatment, progressive disease like Parkinsons.

Where is the 'broken' service here? Whos being intersectional? Who is imposing gender stereotypes? Male people living as women who wanted a voice that sounded 'more like a woman' despite their unchangeable male laryngeal anatomy? Or the service that said this was always going to be a lower clinical priority than people living with post surgical damage or chronic disease?

When a transwoman lawyer posts in this forum to explain that they haven't worked to change their very masculine deep powerful voice because it's useful for work, who is benefiting from sexism? Who gets to choose how they are perceived and treated at work?

I dealt with this by saying to myself that a male person who tries to make his voice more 'feminine' without support may end up straining their voice, and that therefore I was trying to prevent voice injury. In fact, there are more resources online these days and many people get on with sorting out their own vocal gender presentation without damage and in many cases with very good results. Of course many allegedly left wing trans people who go to private speech therapists and voice coaches for this will just say that the system is broken to justify their choices.

The big mystery to me and to (I imagine) most MNers, as exemplified by your article's "plea" to unite against the patriarchy @devorah, is why any "feminist" thinks that trans-identifying men are directly subject to patriarchal sexism, as opposed to (at best) indirectly subject to it, by virtue of being effeminate males, and/or (at worst) actually an agent of it - however well-intentioned.

How can anyone critically attack the idea that the mechanism by which the patriarchy keeps women oppressed is the enforcement of gender roles and stereotypes on to women through structural biases and cultural reproduction &c., whilst also then praising those who claim that embodying those gender roles and stereotypes is what MAKES them female?

You see this argument of "womanhood as defined by subjection to patriarchal oppression" most fervently and most clearly (though still extremely muddy in the classic gender studies Butlerian style) argued in Talia Mae Bettcher's work and yet it STILL makes no sense as a working definition of womanhood.

To me the trans rights agenda is Patriarchy 2.0.

As trans author Julia Serano (2017) notes: ‘While some cisgender people refuse to take our experiences seriously, the fact of the matter is that transgender people can be found in virtually every culture and throughout history […]. In other words, we simply exist’.29

Interesting thread on Ovarit about Julia Serano, who does seem to wield a lot of influence over the narrative. I'm not sure what is particularly compelling about JS's arguments.

https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/35262/opinion-julia-serano-is-the-cult-leader

1. LOL. Compared to what you are doing to Kathleen Stock who, one would think, has suffered enough?

1. Also in your article you say,

"It appears that there were a few misogynist drawings, and an offensive banner addressed to trans exclusionary feminists. I was there on Saturday morning and did not see them, and a colleague of mine was there all day and also did not see them. That is not to say that they were not there, but they did not capture my experience; I saw people writing “trans rights are human rights”, and banners expressing support for trans rights. Nonetheless, the few offensive images are what gender critical feminists seized on"

I take this to mean that you didn't see anything offensive.

Yet on Twitter here twitter.com/MisAlchemy/status/1450743767661780995?s=20&t=cO-hx-1pCS4Y9zPzveVO9A, as @Ereshkigalangcleg linked, you're recorded as saying, 'Can we keep an eye on any crude drawings /dick pics as they are seizing on them...'

Damn well you knew they were there.

With those two things chalked up, your credibility has taken rather a hit, wouldn't you say?

So you say in one article that you did not see the drawings, devorah, and yet on that Twitter thread you say the ones you saw were pretty offensive. Which is it? Or - which line are we at from the following poem?

That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.

@devorah To quote your friends, the trans activists: free speech has consequences.

In the case of Professor Kathleen Stock, MBE, the consequences of politely stating a belief in biological reality have included abuse, death threats, rape threats and graffiti at her place of employment calling for her to be sacked.

Now you have written a spiteful piece attacking Professor Stock, you have the nerve to complain about posters encouraging a "hateful pile on".

Wait. What's that I can hear? Oh yes, it's the world's smallest violin for a cowardly bully who thinks she can publicly vilify a kind, decent, intellectually brilliant woman and then expect to experience no consequences at all.

Reported what?

This thread? Because you don’t like to see women disagree with you?

You say you ‘didn’t want’ to dehumanise Dr Stock… yet you did.

Own the direct attack. It is yours.

And if women think your work is not balanced, we will say so. Thanks. If more than x people don’t like your work and say so, how many constitutes ‘a pile on’. I have seen 1 tweet called a pile on.

Plus there are academics on this forum. However, just how many do you think will refute your work knowing what has happened to Dr Stock?

What a perfect set up. Being able to say ‘no one refuted my work’ while never once acknowledging that academics fear for their livelihoods if they did.

It must be quite uncomfortable never really knowing who supports you, who is pretending and who doesn’t but will not say so. It must takes some ego to ignore that.

@devorah upthread I mentioned you should do a follow-up but use The Guardian, a left-leaning paper this time. There’s a lot of info on The Guardian’s bullying and silencing of feminists Suzanne and Hadley. And when university lecturers were striking (quite rightly about pay conditions), the UCU were instead tweeting about fundraising for trans awareness.

I have written an abstract for you to consider.

^In this article I write on the rift between trans inclusive lobbyists and gender critical feminists in the UK. I consider this division within university culture and politically-left media through a focus on UCU and The Guardian. From a feminist viewpoint, I discuss the way trans lobbying has been used to spread fear around universities and newspapers, and the abandonment of lecturers and journalists who are gender critical. I examine the key ideas of gender critical feminists and people who think men should be included as women in feminist issues, and present an analysis of concepts of free speech and debate that have challenged the lives of feminists such as Professor Kathleen Stock, Suzanne Moore and Hadley Freeman. I end with a call for a way forward to strengthen feminism.^

Sentences get a bit clunky when discussing gender but I have kept the term gender critical as per your other abstract for continuity.

Deb "the one I saw was pretty offensive" Shaw has gone very quiet.

I've been saying for about ten years that academic standards are not what they were. When I was at university, back in the Dark Ages, it was made very clear to us that the truth mattered, that we had to get quotes correct, that we had to source our findings properly.

Honestly, I think some of my lecturers would have an aneurysm at what now passes for serious research, and would be horrified by the behaviour that some academics now consider acceptable.

We rely on academics to push forward the frontiers of knowledge. If they don't operate in good faith, we're fucked.

People pointing out the obvious consequences of gender identity ideology for women and girls would hardly be "hateful" however uncomfortable people find it.

Tbf, they wanted to flood your Twitter feed with evidence that self ID/gender ideology has its issues, not, say, with porn (as happened to JK Rowling).

This is a very pertinent point.

At the event the organisers had chalk for people to use (a mistake in hindsight?) and it appears that there were a few misogynist drawings, and an offensive banner addressed to trans exclusionary feminists. I was there on Saturday morning and did not see them, and a colleague of mine was there all day and also did not see them.

That's funny - I was there for the whole weekend (FILIA at Portsmouth, 2021) and didn't see any delegats walking around blind-folded.

Because that's the only way anyone could have missed the misogynist TRA graffiti.

I doubt @devorah will still be reading. They will have considered the answers ‘a pile on’ I am sure.

What strikes me is the dismissal of signs / graffiti telling women to suck those males trans dick as merely “few misogynist drawings”.

I am sure that anyone reading Devorah’s words would recognise the emotionally manipulative style and the cogninitve distortion. The polarisation.

The ‘pile on’- really? How many and is it a ‘pile on’ if it is women posting evidence to disprove a published academic report ?

Versus

A few misogynist drawings telling women, some of them rape and sexual abuse survivors, to suck the person who wrote the sign’s dick. Dismissing any harm these ‘few drawings’ might cause. Chalk that the organisers provided the chalk to create… oh a mistake in hindsight.

You know… just high jinks from some immature males.

Hardly a balanced approach. But obviously par for the course.