On Kathleen Stock’s ‘Material Girls’
My reality matters too
A few years ago, a cluster of anti-trans books came out, and I’m still trying to catch up with them. It feels important to know what they say.
(Sometimes people ask me how I know that a book is anti-trans, and it helps if I’ve read it. Though, of course, reading it isn’t always necessary.)
I’ve finally gotten to Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (London: Fleet, 2021).
She was faculty in the philosophy department at the University of Sussex in the UK. She admits that her “professional turn towards sex and gender” had been within the previous couple of years, and that she doesn’t work in a gender, queer, or trans studies department, so “academics already working in these fields often consider me unqualified” on the topic.
Several months after the publication of her book, she resigned from the university.
Stock, unlike Sheila Jeffreys, supports dressing however you like; unlike Helen Joyce, she’s willing to call trans people by the pronouns we request.
But still, she’s not a moderate toward trans people. She’s on the anti-trans side.
Just as I did not like Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, I do not like Kathleen Stock’s Material…
