Workable solutions for a toxic debate

27 November 2021

Kathleen Stock’s ‘Material Girls’ fits into that category of ground-breaking academic writing that could just change the course of history, writes Jan Rivers.

For me, the book has the same quality that former New Zealand PM Helen Clark used to deploy very effectively: Clark would present complex, and even counter-intuitive ideas so clearly that they were brought into sharp and easily understood focus. There is pleasure for listeners in understanding a well-structured case. To follow arguments is to feel satisfyingly well-informed; clever even.

Heresy! they cry

Stock’s fast moving, efficient and accessible prose does this for the topic of gender identity theory. Her technique could be called a reverse-Butler as clarity stands in place of the tortuously expressed and impenetrable prose of Professor Judith Butler who has been one of the main promulgators of the queer theory behind the ideology. Stock takes the philosophy behind gender ideology and, element by element, dissassembles it and shows the shocking incoherence at its centre. Early in the book she describes gender identity theory as ‘intellectually confused and concretely harmful’.

Picking gender ideology apart, however, comes with difficulties. Some, like her former colleagues and some of the students at Sussex University regard her work as so heretical and hateful that she deserved to lose her professorship. In contrast, gender critical feminists are delighted to have such a compelling exploration of the issues. Meanwhile, the majority of the population would be surprised to learn that the basic truths she explains have ever been in question.

“Lived experience” trumps reality

Early on in the book, Stock has to discount the idea that she (and by extension people in general) should be intimidated and silenced by gender ideology’s standpoint claims. This perspective maintains that because transgender people’s ‘lived experience’ gives them the most insight into their own condition, others have no business speaking about the issues raised by gender identity ideology. The claim there should be ‘no debate’ because this would call ‘trans people’s right to exist’ into question has always been a hyperbolic and innacurate claim. Stock shows that being transgender does not depend on a gender identity and to be sceptical about its existence is not transphobic.

Who is a lesbian?

Indeed, as lesbians we have particular skin in this game. We love and care about women. We are by definition ‘gender non-conforming’. Our claims to be lesbian are genuinely wiped out by gender ideology because at its centre is the idea that it involves ‘same gender’ and not ‘same sex’ attraction. It also, as Stock explains, leaves nonsense in its wake. Gender ideology ‘queers’ the categories that makes all language related to sex difference meaningless: The female partner of a man who transitions becomes a lesbian if she remains in the relationship as does the trans-identified man. A young lesbian becomes heterosexual if her lesbian girlfriend transitions to become a transman. If she, too, transitions they become a gay male couple.

In contrast, scepticism about gender theory and gender identities neither makes sex-based language meaningless nor does it cause others to have their reality reframed. In fact, failing to believe in gender identity has only one practical impact: Transgender people should not be able to demand that others consider them as sexual partners. It is an oppressive idea and gender ideology discusses this mostly in relation to lesbians. The narrative is promoted that such women are ‘genitally obsessed’, bigotted and should try a relationship with a transwoman to ‘get over their hangups’. Is this any different from the older style of homophobic bullying and sexual pressure from men that lesbians have always faced?

Since Stock’s book was published a poignant story about the male “lesbians” who harass and sexually assault them has been published by the BBC. At least one interviewee has subsequently put herself in the public eye to show the real lesbian behind the anonymised story. She reported that the trans-identified male who raped her did the same to two other young lesbians. She wrote that he did not pursue the bi-sexual women who were part of their shared queer network. If that is not bad enough emails have been leaked showing that “Rainbow” organisation Stonewall applied pressure to have the news suppressed, and at least one well-known academic feminist has been vocal in saying that the queer community’s dirty underbelly should not be shown to the public.

Incidental humour

Stock’s writing is carried along by skillfull use of irony and analogy. She demolishes the Butlerian view that the world – and with it our biological sex – is created only through words and not by its own materiality. She shows that if this were true we could also legitimately equate evolution and creationism, or replace the idea that things burn by consuming oxygen with the medieval idea of phlogiston. But much of the humour is incidental because of the nature of gender ideology itself. Stock lists biology and gender studies professor Anne Fausto-Sterling’s five sexes, Stonewall’s 17 genders, Facebook’s 71, and quotes materials created by queer staff and students at Roehampton College, a part of London University, which states that their own list of genders will already be out of date by the time it is published.

Sex is real

Stock also structures her own arguments using typologies that do what PM Clark used to do so well. She identifies four meanings of ‘gender’ including gender theory’s deployment as a synonym for ‘gender identity’. She assembles three compelling models that show that sex is a coherent and useful concept. She summarises the history of gender ideology in eight easy steps showing how the misquoting of Simone de Beauvoir, has, via Butler and others, led to the current explosion of gender identities. She also describes four key reasons why continuing to see sex as a primary descriptor is important. The first three are medicine – including language about bodies, sport, and as indicated above, sexual orientation. The fourth is ‘the difference sex makes to the social effects of heterosexuality’. She includes the loss of female-based statistics, including about assaults, and the impacts of sex differences in the workplace.

Female-only spaces

Surprisingly though, unless I missed it, she doesn’t write much about the beneficial effects of women being able to meet and organise as women, and as lesbians in female places and female institutions although she does write about their loss. Having just seen the movie Mothers of the Revolution about the Greenham Common protests, I was reminded how much this ability to meet without male company has influenced my own life and how, were such a campaign to start now, it would be next to impossible to sustain. In New Zealand, our loss of spaces and institutions has included the National Council of Women, Women’s Studies Association and the Wellington Access Radio lesbian programme to gender ideology. Conscienceness raising groups and lesbian summer camps have faced determined takeovers, if not by transpeople themselves then by their transactivist ‘allies’.

Promoting tolerance

True to form Stock, the gentlest and fairest of academics, provides solutions to the impasse. They centre on the idea of a legal fiction and politeness to account for being transgender that is used in all cases except where women’s rights need to be maintained. Her solution guarantees dignity for transgender people and for women. Some people live ‘as the other sex’ for their mental health and that should be possible. We should not deny other people’s belief in a ‘gender identity’ or that they were ‘born in the wrong body’ even if we believe such ideas to be nonsense. However, Stock also recognises that women should not have to give up sex as a category and for this to happen she provides the nut and bolts of possible solutions. This won’t satisfy all gender critical feminists but it is workable in a toxic and fractious environment. More importantly, it also sets a high bar for the trans idealogues to respond to. Stock’s book promotes research, tolerance, analysis, and balance. That’s probably why those who argue for ‘no debate’, and who have been so fully exposed by her careful analysis seem to hate her so much.■

Further reading:

BBC journalist Caroline Lowbridge wrote an article titled “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women”. It was the first mainstream UK article to investigate the ‘cotton ceiling’ – where lesbians are manipulated, coerced and, in some cases, forced into sexual relationships with transwomen.

Kat Howard reflects on the interview: “As one of the lesbians quoted in this article, this backlash has hurt. Deeply.” Read it here.