Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 448 | Gay, Feminist, and Against Trans Activism (Part 2) | Guest: Dr. Kathleen Stock

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Today we conclude our conversation with professor and writer Dr. Kathleen Stock, author of "Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism." We pick up where we left off: discussing the harmful effects trans ideology has on kids, even while its advocates claim wholeheartedly that they're helping our children by pushing unscientific ideas onto them. --- Today's Sponsors: Good Ranchers meat is 100% American! All of their product is individually wrapped, vacuum sealed, and ready to grill (which helps to eliminate waste!) & it's delivered right to your door. Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE to get $20 off & free express shipping! Gabi is the one true comparison platform for your insurance needs. Put your policy to the test & get a better insurance with Gabi. Go to Gabi.com/RELATABLE - it's totally free to check & there's no obligation. --- 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, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys. Welcome to Relatable. I hope everyone is having a wonderful day. You guys loved part one of my conversation with author Kathleen Stock. And so this is part two. I'm really excited for you guys to hear it without further ado. Here again is Kathleen Stock. 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 talk.

about looking for evidence in children and like maybe the boy picks up a hair clip or, you know, the girl moves towards the action man. And these are signs of something inside them. It's just, it's just incredible. It's strange. And I'm not totally sure to answer your question, why in this segment of science, it seems like many academics and doctors and scientists are so anti-scientific. But I don't know why we can't allow just kids to be kids. think about when I was, when I was in preschool, the only thing that I would allow my mom to put me in where jeans and a white t-shirt, I did not want to wear a dress. I didn't want to wear bows. That embarrassed me. And, you know, I bought, my parents were a little concerned there for a while

because I only wanted to read books about snakes and I really liked worms. I mean, it was just me being a kid. I had two older brothers. At the same time, I had a boyfriend from the time that I was in preschool. I was just being who I was. And there was never a thought in my parents' mind or in my mind that maybe she should be the other gender. And I just wonder if I had been the same way in this era, would there have been teachers and administrators and social workers and pediatricians in my life pushing me into starting a plan of hormone blockers and how drastically that would have changed my life for the worst? And you just have to think about how many victims of that. are there right now?

Yeah, I mean, I agree. And one of the kind of powerful aspects of the pushback in Britain has been lesbians in particular and gay men who as children strongly identified with the opposite sex, maybe called themselves boys' names, insisted. I mean, I know several of my friends as children insisted on being called boys' names. They didn't want to, like, pee sitting down, you know, they were like, they really, really. identified with boys and they played with boys. And that was all at the time considered so un-worrying.

So, you know, just fine. And it would just be very different for some families. Not every family, like we need an exaggerate. This is not like going on everywhere, but it is going on. And the worrying thing is that like I say, parents who feel a bit uncomfortable with that can have now have a narrative that they can just quickly turn to. They have internet chat groups that can help them, like, buy, you know, like packers for trans-identified girls. So, you know, there's just a whole bunch of paraphernalia now you can buy or books you can read to kind of support this fantasy that you're going to get a daughter at the end of it when you started with a son or vice versa.

Yeah. I mean, I just don't know what to say about it. I think parents are scared too because there's been cases in America and Canada and the UK of parents refusing to affirm the gender identity of their child and their child being taken away from them temporarily. Sometimes, you know, there are worse cases of that. And parents are scared because they love their child and they want to do what's best for their child. And some parents just don't know any better. And there's some, in some cases, scared of the state. And so it's an awful situation.

It is. I mean, really, we have to go to the powerful people in this. We have to go to the LGBT lobby groups which have lots of money. We have to go to educators. We have to go to academics who are thus waving this through. And we have to go to the psychiatric and psychological professional associations who have all signed, well, in Britain they've signed a memorandum of understanding that they will only affirm gender identity. And there's a similar kind of understanding, I think, in place in.

America. So it's very hard to find a therapist who could talk you through this stuff, say, hang on a minute, maybe you just, maybe there's another narrative here. You know, maybe we should wait and see what happens because there is evidence that if you wait, most kids will desist from thinking that they're the opposite sex, but you have to give it time. You can't leap into anything. Now, of course, for some very small number of people, being trans might be the right thing to do. But I think it's got to be an adult decision after quite a lot of talking and thinking rather than something that we would let a nine-year-old or a 10-year-old do. Yeah. But you can kind of see the logic behind some trans activists. If you truly believe

that gender identity is just as real or if not more real than biological sex, if you believe that it's the same as sexual orientation and that sexual orientation is something that you're born with, then you could see the logic of someone saying, well, why shouldn't we allow 11-year-old or 12-year-old to be who they really are? And I know that you would disagree with that conflation, but you could see how someone who conflates those, you know, gender identity and sexual orientation, they, if they think that, okay, any kind of therapy is, quote, conversion therapy. And if they oppose conversion therapy for gay kids, then that means that they oppose any

kind of, quote, conversion therapy for trans kids. And so that conflation, I think, also is part of the issue is that they lump it all together and they say, well, no, we just have to affirm. And that's the most healthy path that we can take. Yeah. I mean, that conflation that happens in the Equality Act, your Equality Act, it happens in the Yoga Kiyata principles, which were in 2003 and which have influenced all sorts of international bodies legislation, they put,

sexual orientation and gender identity together in the same sentence and the same breath. And they say both are fundamental aspects of your, of you. And no one should be forced to suppress them or pressure to change them. But they're very different things. I mean, gender, in my view, gender identity is not what makes you trans or not. What makes you trans is a behavior or a choice to modify your body or to take hormones or to dress a certain way or to start even just announcing to the world or a certain way. It's not a thing inside you that's like always been there bursting to come out.

Just in the same way, actually, sexual orientation is expressed through behavior, like who you're attracted to and who you date and who you marry and who you sleep with and so on. So it's not that I don't think, I do think trans people should be protected in law. They certainly shouldn't be fired for being trans. They certainly should face any kind of discrimination or harassment for being trans. But that's not to say that gender identity is what makes them trans or what makes it worth protecting them. So I would like to separate out these two issues and say let's think about what protections, legal protections and social protections we need for trans people. Let's get gender identity as this concept, which is just a very bad concept out of the discussion and do it some other way.

Hey, this is Steve Deist. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country, aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed. You can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get

podcasts. I hope you'll join us. You mentioned about separating out and then you talked about discrimination and trans people shouldn't be discriminated against. I also think it's important to kind of delineate certain kinds of discrimination because I think we would probably both agree that biological males, I don't like that phrase, but it seems like we have to for the sake of clarity should be discriminated against when it comes to who we put in women's prisons and who we let into women's shelters and who we let into women's bathrooms and who we let into women's locker room. So that's where it kind of, the language kind of gets tricky because the fact of the matter is is that some of us are advocating for, quote, discrimination. We're not advocating for, you know,

mistreatment or to not have, you know, basic human rights. But we are talking about, okay, the rights of a woman to be able to have a sex-protected space should trump any sort of so-called right of a biological man to enter those spaces. And so it is a kind of discrimination that we're actually advocating for. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I use the word discrimination in a different sense there. And I agree that we need better, more flexible, more fine-grained concept because there's different kinds of discrimination and some are permissible in some context. So in the British legal system, And we have a law which says that discrimination of the kind you mention is permissible where it is a proportionate means to a legitimate aim. And it used to seem obvious to everyone that it was a legitimate aim to protect women from potential sexual predators when they got undressed in changing rooms or when they were sleeping in dormitories or halls of residence or where they were seeking refuge from violent males in dementia.

violence shelters. So that used to be like absolutely uncontroversial that that was a good place to do sex discrimination. And sports teams is another one. Like that's built into our equality act too. Unfortunately, like in America too, trans activism in the UK has been very successful in convincing people that really the important grounds for these discriminations is gender identity. So now it should be that anyone with a female gender identity gets in to the changing room or the prison or the, I mean, in the right circumstances or the sports team. Now, that's something that anyone could say they had. As I keep stressing, it doesn't have to be, you don't have to have had any surgery on your

genitalia or anywhere else. You don't have to take in any hormones. So it's written into policies across the UK that the legitimate permissible criteria of entry into the shower or the changing room or the facility is. gender identity, not sex. Now that arguably is illegal, but it has yet to be tested. And we have a strong lobbying group saying, no, no, it's fine, it's fine. That's what it always was. Right. There was a story out of California here about a group of girls at a public sports facility who walked into a locker room where there were kind of these open showers and there was a man

and they're taking a shower and they were obviously traumatized. There were 17-year-old girls. They told their parents, the parents complained, well, the local officials said that they couldn't do anything because this grown man, just like we were saying earlier, just a man, no kind of changes whatsoever, said that he identifies as a woman. And so you can already kind of see the tangible consequences of this kind of thing. What we would have considered even five years ago, sexual harassment or sexual assault of young girls is now being normalized. is something that we just all need to accept. And my bit of optimism is that ultimately people won't stand for that kind of thing, that they will risk being called a, quote, transphobe or a turf or a bigot for the sake

of their daughters and for the sake of protection of their wives and friends and sisters. That's my hope. Maybe I'm too hopeful in these crazy times, but I do think that this issue is tipping people over the edge. Well, I mean, there's been quite a few cases in the UK. There's been a notorious case of a convicted rapist and paedophile being put in a female prison and then sexually assaulting female prisoners. Now, female prisoners are some of the most vulnerable population. Most of them are in there for petty crime. A large proportion of been in the social care system. We're homeless at the time they went in. And the thought that we are putting sexual offenders

in female prisons because they say they are female. Just again, it's one of those ones where you just kind of spin out. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe that sort of case will push people over the edge. But one, for that to happen, there's two things. One, for that to happen, it has to be talked about in bigger circles than the conservative ones in which it's being talked about. Right.

Because we all need to hear about this. We all have an interest in it. But the other thing I'm really worried about is some kind of backlash because I don't think, I think trans people should be protected in law, as in they shouldn't be fired for being trans. I think that gay people should also be protected in law in various ways. And I'm worried that this overreach on behalf of LGBT organizations, this crazy overreach is going to result in some kind of backlash against gay people too and trans people who are just wanting to get on with. their lives, you know, transsexuals who've been living as the other sex for years without any problem and without making any huge demands on people around them, you know, those are the people that are going to suffer as well. Well, I think that the fact that you and I, and I've talked

to many other people who identify as gay or identify as feminist or identify on the left, I've had a lot of people who identify as those categories on my podcast. I am a conservative, traditional Christian. The fact that we find these kind of strange bedfellows, we find ourselves linking arms with people who on other subjects we might not link arms with and we might not agree with. I think that that actually bodes very well. That's not to say there isn't a concern of some kind of backlash, of course, but I do see, you know, not just when it comes to this, but when it comes to a lot of the, what people feel like is a totalitarian movement coming from the left. And I know that's not exclusive to leftism, but a lot of people feel that way. I see atheists and

Christians and agnostics and gay people and straight people and conservatives and some liberals coming together and kind of pushing back against what we see is insanity. And so I think that the fact that there is kind of this, there's an alliance of a variety of backgrounds and political stripes, I think actually could hopefully push back against any sort of, you know, unintended consequence to say no to the, you know, insane parts of the trans-activist movement. Well, I hope you're right. I mean, I certainly see that that is bound to happen. It's not, it's completely predictable that a vast range of people from a vast range of backgrounds and interests and religious commitments or atheist commitments or whatever will have an interest in maintaining

that there are males and females in the world. You know, I mean, who wouldn't? It's crazy that this ever happens. So, yeah, there's going to be very unusual alliances. I mean, personally speaking, I am tired of the purity spirals that happen on the left, and I'm tired of identity politics, so I can identify myself as economically left, but not necessarily culturally left.

I think there's another interesting feature. this is like a range. I think the left and the right are becoming, not everyone fits so cleanly between those two things now because there's, I mean, this is different conversation, but obviously there's sort of cultural left and then there's economic left and you don't have to be on the same side in both those cases. And I think conservatives in the United States, there was this kind of scatter plot of 2016 voters that said, we're the vast majority of people who identify as conservatives are, is they're conservative economically and their conservative socially. But there are far more people who are conservative socially and culturally and are okay with

some economic leftism and economic populism than there are people who are socially liberal and economically conservative. And we are not really well represented by the people who are in charge in the elites because that kind of social liberal, Well, I'm just not really going to speak up about this whole gender thing or any of these cultural movements. But capitalism, libertarianism, that's actually not in line with the majority of conservative Americans. And so I think what you're speaking of is absolutely true as far as the population goes. I just don't think that's represented, at least here in the United States, by the people who are making decisions.

And that, you know, that does kind of concern me, obviously. Yeah. I mean, I think we've talked a lot about the influence of the left, but we can, and I don't know where you would put libertarians, actually, but I would, you know, I think of libertarians as more on the right than on the left. And there's a strong kind of libertarian influence in trans activism. There is a kind of, you know, let everybody radically be who they want to be, no matter as long as, and then they say as long as they're not harming anyone else, obviously, then you can downplay all sorts of different kinds of harms, particularly when it comes to women. So I think I'd like to see a rejection. of that. I think that the free market, like I explained, I think has a big role to play in this too. It's like monetizing dysphoria. It's monetizing people's uncomfortableness with themselves and particularly teenagers. And so that's something I think should be reigned in by the right. So there's a lot, there's something for everyone to work on. Well, yes. And I think a lot of people on the right and the left could possibly agree with the growth of corporate power.

which has been exacerbated in the United States by mostly Republicans giving disproportionate tax breaks and deregulation to these corporations, making them grow and grow and grow to where we have almost this corporate oligarchy who is pushing things like gender identity down our throats. And hopefully the right and the left could kind of agree that, okay, we've given these big corporations too much power. There's no need for us to continue giving tax cuts to corporations at the east. expense of the working in the middle class. And so you do kind of hope that that sort of, I don't know if it's, I don't know if I should say populism, but a little bit of economic populism could bring people together in that way and at least say, okay, we've given these entities too much power. And I think the right is only now waking up to the dangers of corporate power. Yeah. I mean, it's an elite. And I think there are several elites involved in this

particular nightmare, you know, there is a kind of LGBT elite that have gained enormous status through hard-fought, laudable battles on behalf of gay people, but are now, you know, looking for new projects. And then there is the sort of, I would say, a kind of male-led indifference to the effect on women's rights, because they just don't care as much about it. And then there is the money men and then there's the left which is a very masculine uh chauvinist place as well so yeah there's all sorts of elites going on here and i think um ordinary people um oh yeah and the academic elites of course the and i speak as an academic you know a fully paired member of the academic elites but i completely recognize their role in this and how ordinary

people are the people that are going to suffer yeah um it's not you say it's not the you know the middle class academic who writes books about how we should have full surrogacy now, who is going to pay the cost of their homeless hostel being suddenly, suddenly having to be pushed into the presence of a male in a homeless hostel or, you know, they don't have as much reliance on public services. It's there that it's going to affect people most. Yeah. So that's interesting. And I do only have one quick question to ask you. But when you say middle class, see, I typically think of this as most elite movements like critical theory, like critical race theory, like gender identity, being coming from the upper class and being a war on the middle class. I think that's just a British, a British, my problem translation. So middle class, I mean upper middle class as opposed to working class. Okay, see, we kind of use working, right.

Yes, we kind of use working class and middle class interchangeably here. Obviously, there's like a wide range. And so I just wanted to clarify that for people, for people listening. And it's also interesting how we kind of view economic classes in the United States. Like, we might see, you know, a New York Times reporter who only makes $60,000 a year as part of the elites. But she's not necessarily, she's not making a sense. much money is the person who lives in, you know, middle town Kansas, who's making $100,000 a year, but is a plumber. Like our view of what is elite and what is not is, and what is working classes

and what is not, is not necessarily tied to income in the United States. So it does just seem like it's these elites, whether they're rich or not, pushing it down on, I don't know if the right word is just regular people, just kind of working people. But I think essentially we agree. Sorry, yes, I should have clarified that. No, no, no. We agree, though, on the premise. Speaking of people in charge in elites, you have been, you've received some pushback or a lot of pushback. And I don't know what any of this means.

So you might have to clarify for us. You were made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 New Year honors list for services to higher education. So I don't know what that means. But apparently a lot of people were not that you. earned this accolade. Yeah, I didn't know what it meant either when I got it. So yeah, that's going to, I very unexpectedly, so I've been talking about this for a while and I've been also talking about the impact on academic freedom and freedom of speech. And I've been trying to draw attention to the fact that academics who feel like me are not free to discuss this in the

same way as other academics. We have faced all these extra obstacles. We can't publish our work. We can't give talks without them being protested or no platformed. There's many open letters and petitions against me and all sorts of things have happened to me. So I've been trying to draw attention to that. Then very unexpectedly, I got an honour in our honours list. I don't know if you have a kind of presidential honour type thing, but ours is from the Queen, although she obviously has nothing to do with it really. But there's a kind of committee that looks at nominations.

And I got this honour called an OBE. very unexpectedly. And yes, that really enraged people who hate me even further. So at that point, 600 philosophers, many of whom were in the US, actually, wrote an open letter about me. You know, what they accuse me of is every time is transphobia. They assume that I must hate trans people, that I must, what do they accuse me of propping up the patriarchy?

Right. Various other ridiculous things. Oh, yeah, stopping, stopping trans people from having life-saving surgeries, me personally, and so on. You know, very hyperbolic, rhetorical. It turns out they didn't even know what I actually thought because they accused me of something in the letter that turns out I didn't think. And I have actually publicly said I don't think. So, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah.

You're always told, not you personally, but maybe you personally. If you have any objection to this on a philosophical or political level, you're told, obviously, that you hate trans people personally, which is not true for you or for me, that you don't think that they should have rights. And I think the most egregious thing that I hear so often from them is that you have blood on your hands. Like the suicides of trans people is on your hands if you don't agree with trans activism. And that scares a lot of people from speaking out. They see pushback that you got. and you're in the academic field, you have all of these credentials, and obviously you're very thoughtful about how you approach it,

and you're progressive in a lot of ways too, and you're even getting that pushback. That makes a lot of people intimidated. Can you give some people some hope and encouragement? They want to speak up, but they don't know what to do, and maybe they're scared? Yes. I mean, I just want to say about the suicide rhetoric. It's completely irresponsible,

and it's also propaganda, because there isn't particularly good evidence. I mean, there isn't any evidence that the, I don't know what the claim would be. The thing is that trans activists use the threat of suicide to say that parents should accept their children's transitions or in Britain a trans activist organization called Mermaids, which lobbies on behalf of children, used again this rhetoric about the potential for suicides to say that children should be given puberty block as quicker. You know, it's just used all the time as a tool to get certain political demands met.

And it's not evidence-based. And also the other thing is it's suicide is very contagious. Suicide talk tends to produce more suicide. So it's completely irresponsible to talk as if it was a simple causal. story and when suicide does occur tragically there's numerous factors usually it's it's it's connected to all sorts of complicated background stories it couldn't just be one thing right anyway could I give people hope um well I've got a lot of solidarity and friendship out of um this because I've met many amazing people who are um worried about this too so that's I think you know that was a definite bonus for me

I also feel incredibly relieved. I can say what I think. And people should not underestimate that, particularly academics if anyone's watching. I mean, your job is to do this stuff. And if you can't do it, who can? So you will feel an enormous sense of relief to be able to say what you think.

And now I've written a book, which hopefully explains in more detail why we don't have to accept the choice that we've been given between you must be transphobic or you must accept trans activism. Those are the two choices made that we're told are available to us, but that's not true. We could think of creative ways to protect trans people through law and maybe even to develop new spaces where they feel safe if needs be. there's all sorts of creative stories we can

have conversations we can have that don't involve these black and white aggressively asserted binaries that we're being forced to accept. Yes, and I really encourage people to get your book. I think that you know, knowledge is power and people

educating themselves and realizing that there is someone like you who is speaking out against this stuff, even amidst a lot of pushback and a lot of hate. I think that courage begets courage in itself. And people need to realize that about themselves as well, that their own courage and their own willingness to speak up despite pushback gives courage to other people.

And that kind of contagion is something that we desperately need. People can get your book. I'm guessing on Amazon, but we try not to direct people towards Amazon quite as much. Is there anywhere else they can get your book? Well, the situation in America is a bit complicated because I couldn't get an American deal, funnily enough because no American published wants to touch it so I've got a British publisher little brown and they are making

the e-book available on the launch date which is May the 6th and then they hope that hardback will be available later at some point later so you can get it and as an e-book I'm afraid you might have to get that through Amazon I don't know to be honest there's another one

but um or you can order it from the UK um through any one of multiple outlets. So you just go to Little Brown and look for me and they've got links to all the places you can order it. Okay, great. Well, we'll put that link in the description to this podcast episode so people can order it. It's called Material Girls, correct? Material Girls, Why Reality Matters for feminism. But it's not just for feminists. It's basically

for humans. Right, right. And it comes out May 5th. Awesome. I know people are going to gain a lot, a lot of insight and a lot of encouragement from that. So thank you so much. And thank you for joining us. I'm sure everyone can follow you on social media. Do you have a website? I do, Kathleenstock.com, and I am Doc Stock with an extra K on the end on Twitter, where you can find me arguing with people. As we all do, as we all do on Twitter. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Ellie. Thanks for having me. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God,

humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.