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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 Girls, and I’ve made a long list of reasons why. I’ve taken notes on each chapter. Here they are, in order.
Introduction
Stock’s complaint is that, since 2004, under the Gender Recognition Act in the UK, trans people have gotten “what the official legal wording called an ‘acquired gender’ in line with their preferences.”
The 2004 GRA said that, following a gender dysphoria diagnosis, once someone spent two years living in the gender for which they wanted legal recognition, they could get a Gender Recognition Certificate. Surgery or hormones weren’t necessary. With a legal document, Stock recognizes, they could “protect themselves from accusations of fraud” and from “embarrassing or humiliating” disclosures.
This 2004 law was of course of interest to trans people in the UK, who the government believed to number 2,000–5,000, most of them adult “male-to-female transsexual[s]” taking…
