Premium: Silencing, Shaming and Scapegoating with Kathleen Stock
Gender: A Wider Lens
Sasha Ayad and Stella O'Malley
4.6 • 961 Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2024
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the release of her book "Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism" in 2021, while she was a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University, Dr. Kathleen Stock found herself being targeted by a group of activists. She faced harassment and protests including placing provocative stickers and posters throughout the campus with transphobic allegations against Stock, despite her book's thoughtful exploration of trans identification. The hostility towards Stock, which gained public attention, escalated, isolating her from her colleagues and ultimately resulted with her losing her job. Stock's experiences shed light on the broader issues surrounding academic freedom, social isolation, and the challenges of navigating contentious topics in educational institutions.
In this bonus episode for premium subscribers, Dr. Kathleen Stock reflects on her experiences, highlighting the lack of support from colleagues and the university. The conversation delves into the aftermath of her departure from Sussex, exploring its impact and how Stock coped with challenges, including the role of public support, family, and her transition to a new career in writing.
Watch our full length episode with Dr. Kathleen Stock: https://www.widerlenspod.com/p/episode-152
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Gender A Wider Lens exclusive content. If you're a free listener, what you're about to hear is a preview of a bonus episode for our paid sub-stack subscribers. |
| 0:11.0 | If you'd like to hear the rest, go to widerlands pod.com and sign up for any of our paid membership |
| 0:16.8 | options. |
| 0:17.8 | And to all of our premium and founding member subscribers, thank you for the support. And here's the bonus conversation. |
| 0:24.0 | So we're here with Kathleen Stock |
| 0:28.0 | and in our full episode we covered so many |
| 0:32.0 | amazing topics and ideas but we wanted to talk a little bit more |
| 0:37.3 | about what happened with you at Sussex University because you had a very intense and I imagine difficult life-changing experience |
| 0:49.2 | when the campus kind of turned against you. So can you tell us a little bit about that experience? |
| 0:57.8 | Sure so the events that were most in the public eye happened in 2021 after I published my book |
| 1:08.0 | And that was a group a small group of activists whatever you want to call them, students possibly, think some of them were students, harassers you might want to call them because I think they did harass me, basically made a decision to organize and protests and kind of actions on campus every day until I left. |
| 1:29.0 | So the first wind I had of this was going into campus about to teach a lecture. |
| 1:38.6 | I went to the bathroom and there was stickers all over the bathroom with my name on them, |
| 1:42.0 | saying something about |
| 1:43.6 | transphobic shit that comes out of Kathleen Stocks mouth or something like that. |
| 1:47.2 | So I went and did my lecture, went home and then the next day I came in and I walked |
| 1:52.4 | through the underpass leading to the university and there was posters on every side with my name on them saying fire Kathleen stock, you know, so Kathleen stock is a transphoble. So it was basically extremely |
| 2:06.3 | intense, a big, you know, a reasonably sized university with everyone walking past this. In fact fact people walking past it as I saw |
| 2:13.7 | the posters in real time you know we all just got off the train together I was walking along |
| 2:18.7 | no one was speaking to me and people were just watching me look side to side and see my name on all these things and I basically got to the end of the tunnel and turned round and ran back up the tunnel and sat crying on the train platform. |
| 2:34.0 | But the isolation, the feeling of isolation, |
| 2:37.0 | when no one speaks to you, you know, they just look at you. |
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