Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 434 | The Women Against Trans Activism | Guest: Kathleen Stock [Part 1]

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Today we're talking to Dr. Kathleen Stock, who is gay, a feminist, and, in many ways, a progressive, but still disagrees with radical transgender ideology. Although Dr. Stock is coming from the Left with her opposition to encouraging young kids to transition, there is a surprising amount of middle ground for conservatives and liberals who want to defend women. --- Today's Sponsors: Allie's Kit Clubs give you a monthly craft retreat, hassle free and saves you from searching for supplies or hunting for new projects. Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE & save 50% on your first kit! Bambee helps small business owners with their most complex HR issues and employment nuances across all 50 states! Go to Bambee.com/ALLIE right now to schedule your free HR audit! Good Ranchers delivers 100% American steak or chicken directly to your door! It's individually wrapped, vacuum sealed and ready to grill. Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & save $20 off, plus get free express shipping! --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Today I am talking to Dr. Kathleen Stock. She is a professor from the UK. She is a feminist. She is a progressive in many senses of the word. And she has been pushing back against this so-called gender identity movement. She's got a very interesting perspective on this. Obviously, she and I are coming from two different places in our opposition to kind of what we see is the eraser of women and biological categories. I've got the Christian conservative worldview and she has a different perspective and a different angle, which I think is so, so valuable and adds a lot to our understanding of the subject to be able to understand it from every different perspective. So I'm really, really excited for you to hear this conversation

without further ado. Here is Dr. Kathleen Stock. Dr. Stock, thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? My name's Kathleen Stock. I'm a professor of philosophy at a British university called the University of Sussex. And I've recently, in the last two years, I've started writing about sex and gender, sex in the sense of biology and gender and this thing called gender identity, which is an increasingly common, popular concept. So I've got a book coming out called Material Girls, Why Reality Matters for Feminism, where I take on this idea of gender identity and say that there's both some philosophical problems with it and some practical problems with it that mainly impact on women and children. Let's start with the philosophical problems with it.

I think you and I are probably coming from what I can tell, two kind of different perspectives. We both see some similar problems with the gender identity movement. I'm a conservative Christian, so I kind of have that perspective. You're coming at it from a different angle. So in your opinion, what are the philosophical problems with the gender identity movement? Okay, yes. So I'm coming at it from, I'm gay myself, and I think I'm broadly speaking on the left, although there's very many different versions of the left,

and I'm certainly not on board with all of them. So philosophically speaking, so gender identity is, we are told some, a kind of psychological fact about you, that's invisible, that potentially anyway may not be perceived by anyone else. It's detached from the way you dress, what you wear, how you modify your body. It's a feeling in your head. And that in itself is problematic when gender identity is the thing that we're being told is supposed to get us access into certain spaces or access to certain resources. There's also additional problems around, well, there's a huge number of problems, as you

can imagine, where gender identity is being prioritised over material facts about biological sex, because as a society, we organise a lot of things around biological sex quite reasonably. and the modern trans activist movement says that we should deprioritize sex and we should prioritize this invisible feeling as the criteria politically and socially. So I can go into the many different areas where that causes problems if you'd like. Yeah, we can definitely do that. First, I'm curious to hear in your opinion how you think we got here. It seems like we kind of accelerated this conversation about women.

rights and recognizing the equal dignity of women into where we are now, which is basically that we can't define a woman without being called a bigot. And we can no longer have sex protected spaces. How did this happen? It seems like just in the last few years, or was I just not paying attention before? Well, it may be that you weren't paying attention, but I think a lot of it has gone under the radar. So I think the ground was softened up in the 20th century. Partly through certain academic movements, which I think are really regrettable. So for instance, within feminism, there was a move to say that womanhood was some kind of social status and not a biological fact. So womanhood was not adult human femalehood, but something social, some kind of social presentation.

And they did that because they thought it would help avoid. this political problem of what's called biological determinism, the idea that what your sex determines where you should be in life and that women should be in the home looking after children and not be in the universities, being educated or whatever. So the cunning move, the cunning plan on the part of some 20th century feminist was to say, ah, well, biological determinism can't be true because we're not biological beings. We're actually social beings and womenhood just is a social role. And that was a very regrettable move

because it separated out, at least in some circles, womanhood from biology. Then there's another strand within philosophy called post-structuralism, which thinks of pretty much everything is socially constructed, linguistically constructed. So there's no prior fact about it

except what we say about it collectively. And that's very popular in some, areas of the humanities. And it's become exceptionally popular in areas like gender studies and trans studies. So the academic stuff was softened, the ground was softened up there. And yet another strain was, again, from the 20th century, some psychologists working with people who are sometimes called intersex, but I would say they have differences of sexual development, say that's a better way of putting it, because they're not actually intersex. But so psychologists, working in the in the 50s and 60s with children who had DSDs, differences of sexual development,

hypothesized this thing called a gender identity that they had that was a kind of sex psychological role that was maybe at odds with the more ambiguous facts about their bodies. From there it got extrapolated out to, we all have a gender identity. And moreover, a gender, the new twist is that a gender identity is what makes you a woman or a man. which is never what, you know, people were saying in the 1950s or even in the 1970s. So that is the new bit. There was a doctor in the United States, Dr. John Money, who also kind of developed that theory based on sexual experiments that he performed on twin boys. I'm sure that you're familiar with all of this. And obviously, that experiment did not end well. It did not prove his hypothesis. And yet, even though that hypothesis of, gender identity being this thing that, like you described so well, is separate from our biology

has lasted. Somehow it has endured and it has been latched onto. And now it's not just defining our political conversation, but it's affecting very tangibly women's protection and girls' sports and women's rights. So why do you think it is that even though it's really kind of been this whole idea of gender identity being this intangible thing that people can just identify as and think of. How do you think that it has endured for so long, even though we kind of debunked it a long time ago? Well, it fits with a very powerful narrative, which we hear a lot in other circumstances, which is like, you must realize who you really are. You must become the person you were born to be. And that kind of, I would say, liberal kind of narrative fits very individualistic,

very concerned with freedom, freedom to be yourself and that, you know, whatever that means. That kind of rhetoric, which we hear a lot, and particularly from the states, if you don't mind me saying, fits very well with expansive claims about gender identity. So, I mean, when I was researching this book, I bought a lot of books for kids or teens, which had names. like gender identity, discover who you really are or find yourself. And of course, it fits very well with capitalism because if there are more than two gender identities, of course, once you've moved away from sex, you can have more than two, you can have non-binary identities, you can have complicated sexual identities, then you can market all those identities, so you can

make money out of them. So I think that's also part of the story here, which we shouldn't neglect. Certainly people are able to capitalize on what is now in industry, especially for impressionable young people. When I think about getting rid of these biological categories, which we have recognized, I believe, for all of human history, I also, I mean, I do think about the communist revolutions of the 20th century and what we read about in some of the dystopian novels like Brave New World in 1984. It's not exactly. exactly that, but it does kind of speak to this idea of kind of getting rid of any distinguishing factor about a person, making sure that everyone just becomes this comrade, and that we no longer

have kind of inherent value according to our bodies or according to who we are, according to our families, according to our value systems. We all just become this amorphous block. that is controlled by the state. Now, that's coming from my conservative perspective. And so I do see the problem with this becoming an industry that capitalism loves. And certainly we see the big corporations like Amazon latching on to it. But I also see this as reminiscent of things that we saw in the 20th century with, you know, communist and socialist and even fascist totalitarian movements to take away what makes any individual special and just kind of see them as agents of the state. Do you agree with that at all? Well, I mean, from what I've read of the Chinese Revolution and the Russian Revolution,

they certainly knew who the women were because they had to keep having the babies. And they didn't have as much power as the men. So some things never change, as far as I'm concerned, whether it's good or bad, there is a sex reality to our lives. And we're a sexually dimorphic species, we reproduce by sexual reproduction, not asexually. We can't technologically change those facts, although I think some people might be trying. But in the meantime, there is a sex reality that has social effects. And what I think is true about the comparison you've made is that in both cases, there's an attempt to control language, a very strong attempt to control language. So, you know, Modern trans activism cannot change the fact that there are males and females, and they're,

I think, very likely always, well, there will, there will always be males and females. They can't change that, but they can stop us talking about it. They can take any reference to womanhood, for instance, out of the language as we're seeing in Britain, there's a move in public policy to stop talking about women and to start talking about pregnant people or menstruators or cervix havers. of course all those terms are incredibly biological as well. So it's not, but none of this is logical. Well, that's right. That's one of the many contradictions that I was hoping to talk to about is that if I push back and say, for example, that, you know, only a woman can give birth. What I hear

from a trans activist is that, oh, well, you are reducing women down to her, their capacity to give birth. What about women who can't give birth? Are you saying that she's not a woman? Well, of course, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying. I'm not saying that. that only people who give birth are women. I'm saying the only people who, or the only women, you know what I'm saying. I'm only saying that only women can give birth. But then they use terms like you just said, like cervix have or gestator, which is actually a lot more bio-essential is what they would say than me saying that only women can give birth.

So it's a little confusing to me. It's, well, it's bad philosophy for a start. The whole premise on which it's based, the idea that in saying only women can give birth, you're somehow reducing women to their biology or to their birthing function is absolutely crazy. That is not how definitions work. I mean, you can also say, and I make this point in the book, only bankers, or at least if you are a banker, you work in a bank. You know, only bankers work in banks. But you're not saying that the most important thing about a banker is that they work in a bank. You're not saying anything about what's important. You're basically classifying some group of people for some explanatory purposes. And being a woman enters into all these different causal relationships in the world, same as being a man does. And we need names to track those. And then, yes, of course, then replacing that language with things like menstruator and cervix have. Firstly, it's demeaning and dehumanizing. And secondly, it's very confusing to people who are not university educated,

who don't necessarily know the name for a cervix. So it's incredibly middle class. This whole movement is basically educated people playing around with language to make themselves feel good, whilst not thinking about the consequences of what they're doing for people who are less privileged than they are, I think. Right. And I would say that's true of things like critical race theory and critical theory as well.

These are all kind of academic theories that come from a few people at the top, and then they try to apply what are just academic theories into politics and into the real world. And I guess time tells whether or not the beach ball that is human nature can sufficiently be pushed down forever or whether like any beach ball it's going to pop back up. I think when it comes to gender, progressives or the people who are pushing this have just pushed too far. I just don't think because of the reality that you articulated, there will always be male and female.

And biology is just not going to change in that way. There's going to be a pushback to this. Whether or not you're on the right and the left, it's just an irrefutable truth in reality that people aren't going to be able to escape. Do you have optimism in that direction that eventually this whole kind of movement is going to fall apart?

because it's just not in alignment with what's real? I don't know. I mean, it depends on the day, to be honest. And I think certain areas are more open to movement than others. So, for instance, what's happening to children and to teens, I think, cannot stand. We just need more information and more light being shed on actually what's happening, which is children who are exploring their own identity. It's fair enough.

We will have aspects of our identity. They're exploring their identity. Sometimes, you know, they will turn out to be lesbians or gay children. That is being interpreted by the wider culture around them as them being in the wrong body. Or them really, you know, a girl who is attracted to other girls is interpreting herself as a boy who's attracted to girls. for instance. And then therapists around them have all signed up to something which says that they can't argue with that.

They have to affirm this thing called their inner gender identity, which is described as if it's innate and it's just sort of bursting out of them as if that could possibly be true. So, you know, when all that comes to light and the medical consequences of that for children and that properly gets looked at responsibly, then I think hopefully there'll be some push

on that. But what I feel more depressed about is the effect on women and the encroachments on adult lesbians, the encroachments on their rights, their spaces, their resources, things that feminism over decades has fought hard for.

Grassroots feminism, not academic feminism. Grassroots feminism has fought hard for shelters, domestic violence refuges, rape crisis centres, changing rooms, bathrooms, you know, you name it. We've had to fight for it or others before me have fought for it. And it's being dismantled now by this prioritization of gender identity. So that's just not right. But on the other hand,

do people care enough? I have a few questions within that. My first question to back up just a little bit is about children. Now, one thing that I've seen that is troubling to me that I don't think is quite mainstream. It was a viral tweet. And then it was also also associated with the self-proclaimed communist who lives here in the United States, who wrote a book called Full Surrogacy Now. She is an anti-family. Yes, you might know exactly who I'm talking about. Of course, she believes in, quote, taking away the innocence of children.

She believes that we all belong to each other, which, again, is very brave new world-esque and that that will usher in this time of total egalitarian communism and beauty and all of that. great stuff. And there was another tweet, not by her, but someone who kind of promotes her saying that children should be given puberty blockers without parental consent and paid for by the state. So something that worries me, I trust parents to say, yes, look, I love my child. I believe in the best interest of my child. I want to do what's best for my child. And being a 10-year-old that goes on puberty blockers is not best for my child. But if that kind of authority, is removed or is questioned by the state or is replaced by the state, then I really do worry about

protections for kids who can't even, you know, make their own peanut butter and jelly sandwich yet. That is, and I want to talk about, you know, women's rights and feminism too, but that really worries me about the disintegration of parental rights and parental influence over a child's life in place of these activists and the state who, quite frankly, do you. not have the best interest of children at heart. Is that something, is that something that concerns you as well? Well, I'm very concerned about the unregulated market for puberty blockers. I'm very concerned with surgeons advertising mastectomies, double mastectomies to teenagers on TikTok. I'm very concerned about all of that. But I don't think I'm as relaxed as you about parents. And this isn't because I

blame parents or, you know, have some kind of animus to, I am a parent. I know that there are parents who are uncomfortable with gender nonconformity, or I would say sex nonconformity in their children. I know that there are parents who are uncomfortable with the emerging homosexuality of their children for whom, and these might be more conservative parents, for whom it is preferable on some level that they maybe haven't properly thought through, but it's preferable to have a daughter than a gay son or, and, you know, that seems to be happening now. They're not getting there on their own because there are educators, there are academics, there's a whole infrastructure of LGBT lobbying groups perversely, because you'd think LGBT

lobbying groups would be protecting gay children, but there's a whole mechanism now in place to explain to parents that they might have a child in the wrong body or whatever. that doesn't involve any kind of wild radical communism that's happening now in relatively mainstream places yeah so I'm saying I'm not saying you're wrong to worry about unregulated you know children acting off their own bat and it's true that in Britain you can get puberty blockers from Spain you can bypass NHS regulation right now but I'm also worried about the state doing it and I'm worried about parents doing it because we've developed cultural narrative that this doesn't seem to be much pushback against.

Yeah. And I agree with you on that. And I think that actually transitions well into what I wanted to ask you about next. You're talking about how this movement kind of threatens the rights of the protections of women and in particular lesbians. And of course, that's yet another contradiction that we see in all of this. I've seen trans activists say that, you know, preferring someone's body or having a particular sexual orientation, not being attracted to gender identity, but actually someone's sex, homosexual, heterosexual, whatever, is transphobic. And so to me, this kind of leads to the

eraser of the LGBT. And I'm wondering if you think that as well as someone who is gay and who has worked in this realm for a while. Well, yes. I mean, this is not a wild fringe aspect of the LGBT movement. This is on the Glad website. This is on the Stonewall website, which is the UK equivalent of, you know, Glad or HRC. They say they have redefined sexual orientation to be an attraction to gender identity, as if you can be attracted to an invisible thing that you can't even see for a start. But so now a lesbian is defined by these LGBT organizations. I'm not kidding. It's hard to believe, but if you go, I could show you the pages. They define a lesbian as a person with a female gender identity attracted to other people with female gender identities.

Now, that means that a male who I would say was heterosexual, who had no interest in his sex, could, on the basis of having a female gender identity, describe themselves and being attracted to women, like females, heterosexuality, describe themselves as a lesbian. And they are, some of them. No, not everyone. I want to make clear all the way through that I'm not talking about all trans people, because actually a lot of trans people are very worried about this too. It's about powerful trans-activist organizations appropriating this discourse and coming up with these ideas and these language changes.

So trans activists are trying to redefine what lesbianism is and what homosexuality is. and what heterosexuality is too, but that's obviously impacting less on heterosexuals than it is on lesbians. Yeah. Do you see a lot of gay people speaking up about this? Because it seems like there's also a split in the LGB community as well as in the feminist community. They're obviously feminists who say,

yes, we have to be on board of trans rights, and it doesn't threaten women. And then, of course, they're feminists who say the opposite and the same thing within, within the gay community saying, oh, no, we have to include the T. This is so important for us. And then there are people like you who say, well, hang on just a second. Let's think about the consequences and the implications and the redefining of these things.

Why isn't that more people see this the way that you do? Partly is because they don't really know yet. I mean, there is a big problem with getting this message out, especially through the newspapers and media organizations. organizations that most, you know, left-leaning progressives would read. So I'm sure this is, if anyone's watching this, it's news to them. But also because there is kind of a loose solidarity between lesbians and gays and trans people. And there always has been in the sense that quite a lot of trans women started off as gay men.

And also every, all of us in some sense is kind of non-conforming about gender. that we don't necessarily feel like we fit in the standard issue, heterosexual, feminine, or masculine molds. But, and that's, you know, solidarity is great. But unfortunately, the modern LGBT movement has kind of just smushed everyone together and said there's just one kind of thing here. And obviously there isn't one kind of thing here. There's a lot of heterosexuality now in the LGBT movement where there wasn't before. Right. for instance.

And then there's all the extra thing, the add-ons that are now being added, like, nothing to do with sexuality, to do with, like, being a-romantic, but something to do with sexuality, but not the same as a sexual orientation, and being a-romantic or whatever the next new thing is. So, yeah, I don't know. Did that answer your question? Yeah. What do you think the tangible consequences of that is?

I'm sure that reading a definition like that on, the Glad website, which is something that you probably don't relate to, this idea of having a gender identity that's attracted to another gender identity. I'm sure that's not how you identify or feel as a lesbian. When I hear words like gestator or pregnant person or chest feeding as someone who is pregnant with my second child, I'm offended by that. And I worry about that too. I worry about the eraser and the redefining, but sometimes I can't always put my finger on, like, what the tangible consequences of that kind of redefining an erasure will be for these different categories. What do you think? Well, they're very tangible for lesbians, and they have been for a while.

So if you go onto a lesbian dating site, you will see males. And I don't mean males you can't tell of females. I mean, males you can absolutely blindingly obviously see our males that have put a bit of lipstick on, if that. And so there's, in other words, there are now people in the dating pool calling themselves lesbians and potentially saying you are transphobic if you will not consider me. And now that people have to think this through. Lesbians are same sex attracted. They are not attracted to males. There are now males calling themselves lesbians trying to pressure them into having sex with them. Now, again, I'm not saying this is every case,

but it is a documented phenomenon. So where that particularly bites, I think, is for younger lesbians who are getting to grips with their own sexuality. They're possibly in queer communities where they find solidarity and friendship. You know, there's all sorts of dynamics that can go on there that can be unhealthy, I think.

So that's one clear area where, this narrative that someone with a beard can be a, like a male with a beard can be a lesbian, really is just not helping. And the other area, I think, is one I've already mentioned, which is children and their emerging understanding of the world, which must be incredibly confused. I mean, I think we're doing a kind of social experiment here in how we tell children what the categories are. Because it used to be, we could point to certain kinds of bodies and say most of the time, that's a woman and most of the time that's a man and now we're just mixing it all up in the name of progression. So I really would like to know what that's doing. And of course there's evidence that within trans-identified children, there's statistically more likely to be, for instance, autistic

and there's also evidence that autistic people have harder time categorizing. So there's all sorts of extra issues there, especially if you're gay and autistic. So we really need to shine a light on all of this and look at it properly. And another contradiction, we've talked about these throughout this episode, but it's the reaffirmation that some of transactivism does of these gender stereotypes. And you kind of already touched on this, this idea if a little boy plays with dolls or maybe he wants to dance or do something that's out of the typical. you know, social norm of what it means to be male, rather than just saying, okay, that's a little boy

who likes to play with dolls and that's fine or that's a little boy who likes pink and doesn't like to get dirty. That's fine. That's the kind of little boy he is. Now parents and children even, probably, you know, in some curriculum are being taught. Well, no, that actually means that you're a girl. So it's reaffirming these very, very strict boundaries of what it means to be a boy and a girl in a time when it seems like self-love and self-acceptance is all the rage, we're actually continually telling people, if you go outside of these lines at all, you're in the wrong body. That seems so detrimental to me.

It's astonishing. And, I mean, again, this is not a fringe phenomenon. This is like in the definition of gender dysphoria in the DSM, which is the American kind of manual for psychiatric diagnosis. And, you know, they talk about what are the symptoms of a gender identity disorder. One of them might be playing with, you know, the other sexes toys or an attraction to certain kinds of clothing. When you're a kid, it's fine to do all this. It's fine anyway, let me just say.

It's absolutely fine for men to wear dresses and makeup and self-adorn. And it's fine for women not to. But, you know, when it comes to children, I just cannot believe that the psychological and psychiatric profession have, I don't know what has happened to them. I really don't know what has happened to them because these are not stupid people and they're not, you would think, particularly conservative. But when it come to this issue, I've got books which say, you know,

a child's gender identity emerges around the age of three. And I've seen videos of gender identity therapists talking about looking for evidence in children and like maybe the boy picks up a hair clip or the girl moves towards the action man and these are signs of something inside them. It's just, it's just incredible.