Trans activists are hounding women out of public life

The New Year Honours list included an OBE for Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. Recognised for her services to universities and the higher education sector, Stock’s achievement was something that should have been celebrated by fellow academics. Instead, hundreds of her peers wrote an open letter denouncing her and many activists began to harass her. Why? Because Stock believes that people cannot change their sex.

This might sound like just another row between academics that has no relevance to the outside world. But it is emblematic of a much wider – and more sinister – phenomenon: the hounding of women who dare speak out on trans rights. Across our public institutions women are being harassed and, in some instances, fired for not adhering to the new gender identity orthodoxy.

It is possible that you may have heard Stock’s name mentioned alongside other female professors like Selina Todd and Alice Sullivan for the simple reason that they have appeared in the press following spats about being ‘cancelled’ or ‘de-platformed’. Their opponents often cynically point to the media’s interest in these cases – even to articles such as this one – as evidence that feminist academics aren’t really being cancelled. After all, how can you cancel someone when they are being openly defended in a national newspaper? But this is a deliberate distortion tactic, used to downplay the seriousness of what is going on.

The treatment of these women is merely a high-profile symptom of a larger social affliction. Women like Stock, Todd and Sullivan have, in the past, been forced to have security guards accompany them when speaking in public – and they’re the lucky ones. For there are countless young, often working-class women and women of colour, that do not have a public profile, who have lost jobs, been bullied and labelled bigots and transphobes.

This debate has become so toxic that across the board people are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs, whether they are nurses, midwives, teachers, public sector workers or civil servants. The situation has become so extreme, in fact, that even staff in the Gender Identity Development Service may have felt unable to speak out for fear of being disciplined, as David Bell told Channel 4 last week

Before the ideology of trans activists took hold in elite universities, many turned a blind eye because they tended not to care about grassroots feminists being targeted. Some initially went along with the notion that those accused were anti-trans but defended our right to speak. Others, particularly in Gender Studies departments, took a different approach, labelling feminist activists and campaigners ‘transphobic’. But look where this has got us – women are now afraid to speak for fear of being attacked, harassed, hounded, and fired.

We need to think about the world that this approach has led to. Isn’t now the time to speak out?