Kathleen Stock: ‘Lesbians are in crisis – younger women don’t like the word’

When Kathleen Stock looks back at her youth and recalls watching tennis legend Martina Navratilova play against long-time rival Chris Evert in the 1978 Wimbledon final, it is now, she acknowledges, with an air of bemusement.

It is remarkable, she explains, that Navratilova, and Stock, a 50-year-old British professor of philosophy, have become close comrades caught up in a global existential crisis.

“I could never have imagined,” says Stock, who today is launching – along with Navratilova (who she has never met in person) and writer Julie Bindel – the Lesbian Project, a group that intends to champion UK women who are same-sex attracted.

Stock stresses the project, which is planning a series of fundraising events, doesn’t wish to create controversy. “We’re not going to be tweeting furiously or anything. We’re interested in evidence-based research into lesbian life and increasing public understanding.”

Nonetheless, its existence will infuriate those who see her and Bindel, along with their ally – and heterosexual – JK Rowling, as a trio of arch-Terfs (trans exclusionary revolutionary feminists), largely because of the animosity between some trans activists who object to lesbians refusing to have sex with transgender women who have male genitalia.

“There will be a fuss from some quarters but my head hasn’t ever been down from the parapet, so I’m not particularly worried,” shrugs Stock. “There’ll be some nasty tweets but I get them all the time. I don’t pay much notice now, I think it’s ridiculous. In any case, [the flak] will never be as bad as the first time. You become more resilient; you realise you can take it and the fundamental things in your life persist.”

That resilience was hard won by anyone’s standards.

Nearly two years ago, her world imploded. Stock had to resign from her beloved job as professor of philosophy, having been already signed off sick with stress from the Sussex University campus where she’d worked from 18 years, a campus that had become plastered in posters saying “Stock is a transphobe” and where masked protestors were letting off flares beside signs reading “Stock Out.”

Stock’s crime had been wading into the increasingly toxic gender debate – arguing first in blogs, then in a book, Material Girls, that although she detests transphobia and believes a person should be allowed to identify as any gender they like, nonetheless biological sex is fixed.

She pointed out the ramifications of claiming sex is mutable: female prisoners having self-identified “women” in their midst; unisex loos that schoolgirls are too scared to use; sportswomen being defeated by trans competitors who’d recently declared themselves female. In return, when she received an OBE for services to education in 2020, 600 colleagues signed an open letter saying she was a “danger” to transgender students. Police warned her to stay off campus for her safety and she had extra security installed at home.

The majority of colleagues who supported her stayed silent. “There was a lack of ability to stand up to a small number of students encouraged by small numbers of academics. That was quite difficult,” she says, with understatement.

“Some signed a petition defending my right to free speech but I found it irritating the way they prefaced it with, ‘Well, we don't necessarily agree with what she’s saying but…’ I was hardly saying terrible things. In fact, as time has gone on, most people see what I said was perfectly right and sensible. Look at what’s happening in Scotland now,” she says, referring to the uproar that greeted both the Scottish National Party’s proposed Gender Recognition Reform Act and the Scottish Prison Service decision to place a convicted rapist remanded in a woman’s prison because he identified as female, a significant factor in Nicola Sturgeon’s downfal.

More than 6ft tall, in a lumberjack shirt and jeans, I meet Stock in her basement kitchen in Lewes, East Sussex, surrounded by baby paraphernalia, the mantelpiece packed with first birthday cards for her daughter with her partner Laura (previously she was married to a man with whom she shares two teenagers). Parenting such a diverse age range is, she says with characteristic dryness, “interesting.”

Soft-spoken, she seems an unlikely controversialist. Yet there’s also a steeliness to her demeanour that’s led her to establish jointly The Lesbian Project.

The idea that lesbians still need some kind of protective body may seem almost laughably anachronistic, not least since the 2013 same-sex-couples marriage act. But the project isn’t so much battling homophobia as preventing lesbians from being overlooked in favour of newer, more “fashionable” sexualities.

“We’ve got a report coming out that will show millions of pounds are going into LGBT but increasingly that funding is going to trans projects, while for lesbian-only projects it’s vanishingly rare,” Stock says.

Increasingly, the notion that sexuality isn’t fixed means millennials and Gen-Z under-45s are eschewing “old-school” “straight” and “gay” for ambivalent labels such as “pansexual” and “bisexual.”

“Lesbians will always exist but we’re in a crisis in which young lesbians don't want to be associated with the word. Some of them want to describe themselves as queer and some of them prefer not to see themselves as women but as non-binary.” In fact, Stock adds wryly, the only place where lesbians retain a high profile is in “porn, where it continues to be one the most popular search terms.”

At the same time, TikTok and Instagram are packed with videos suggesting girls attracted to girls are not gay but in “the wrong body”, encouraging them to transition – despite often irreversible consequences. “A high proportion of the [controversial gender-identity clinic] Tavistock girl patients are same-sex attracted, and that’s a tragedy when you consider they were being funnelled into altering their bodies irrevocably and some may well come to regret it,” says Stock.

“The solution,” she says, “is to try to make lesbians more visible, to have all these lesbians confidently explaining it’s OK to be a lesbian. There are high-profile lesbians but they don’t often talk about their relationships.”

One of the highest-profile women is Navratilova, who came out in 1981 (although she at first would only admit to bisexuality), who for the past few years have campaigned to stop transgender women compete against cisgender [born female] women, on the basis “It’s insane and it’s cheating.”

Says Stock, “Martina’s very vocal in support of Democrat causes in the US, so she's the antithesis of the idea people like us must be somehow anti-progressive, when that’s not the case.”

Stock grew up in Montrose, near Aberdeen, where her English parents were academics at the university. At school she was bullied for having an English accent. At 25, she married a childhood friend. “I didn’t think about my sexuality because I was actively committed to the marriage.” But when that marriage ended at 39 and she began online dating, she realised she was attracted to women.

“People could see how much happier I was. It suited me down to the ground. I felt like my whole world transformed for the better. It’s cheesy but it was like there was a puzzle that had been all mixed up and I’d known it was all mixed up, and suddenly it was resolved and made into a picture and the picture was good.”

Yet, Stock notes, colleagues’ “welcoming” attitude to her sexuality cooled when she began saying things they disliked. “As soon as you go against the grain your membership of a minority becomes irrelevant to the narrative.” I compare it to vilified black Tories. “Exactly, they’re often told they’re only superficially black.”

It’s those peers Stock can’t forgive. “I can understand students: when you’re forming your ideas it’s very, very important to not stand out. It’s much, more worse when it is 40-year-old and 50-year-old academics and activists. Philosophy’s a quite tight-knit profession; some people would be all friendly and smiling to my face then saying shocking things about me on social media. Reading a nasty tweet really hurts when it comes from a person you consider in your group. At times I struggled to get out of bed. You feel very exposed, but then you realise it’s point-scoring, it’s not for my benefit – it’s for onlookers: what message do they want to convey to their peers about how virtuous and brave they are.”

Leaving Sussex was “a wrench, but it’s not a case of poor me. They freed me to be more explicit, not less. There’s no one to report me to now or looking over my shoulder.” Now she has a column on the news and opinion website UnHerd and a fellowship at the newly established, anti-woke University of Austin, Texas. “It focuses on academic freedom and enquiry that isn’t hampered by ideology as it is these days in more mainstream universities.”

Public opinion appears heavily on her side; Stock recently saw a letter from Keir Starmer’s office responding to concerns about Labour’s refusal to define “woman.”

“It was very different in tone and okay to previous communications,” she says.

Last week, doctors and nurses submitted a 1,400-strong petition to the NHS demanding the end of gender-inclusive language, which – for example – replaces the words “breastfeeding” with “chest feeding” and “breastmilk” with “human milk.”

Stock sighs. “I mean, it’s mainly an attempt to accommodate trans or non-binary men, basically girls and women who think they aren’t girls and women, when I don’t think there are any decent statistics about how many trans men actually even get pregnant. I imagine it’s a very, very small number. So why make these sweeping changes when you don’t even know the number of people you’re trying to reach? Communication about health is meant to be clear, so this attempt to be inclusive comes at a cost. Vast numbers of the population don’t have any idea about the trans force and will just not understand this because it’s too convoluted. But words help us communicate with each other about things that really matter: if we rule out certain words as inadmissible and replace them with words that are inexplicable or hard to understand there are costs: 10 years hence the trajectory of research projects could be changed, so could the money flow, so could be public understanding.”

Some used Stock’s quitting Sussex as an example of cancel culture. “I wasn’t cancelled, I’m still here. But what cancel culture does is make examples of high-profile people in order to frighten less high-profile people into submission. There are lots of ordinary cases, which won't hit the headlines, of people biting their tongues or losing their jobs, their boss having a word with them, being disciplined or being ostracised in some way for their beliefs.” But Stock and her ilk will be looking out for them.

CORRECTION: This article has been amended to reflect that the decision to place a convicted rapist in a women's prison was made by the Scottish Prison Service and was unrelated to the Gender Recognition Reform Act.

Click here for more on The Lesbian Project