I could easily aged 15 have decided I was non-binary or even a boy I’ve struggled with my body in terms of femininity. So she is supportive of the government’s controversial plans for a free speech bill, which critics including English PEN, Article 19 and Index on Censorship have argued will have the opposite effect. Campuses are a minefield for those wanting to discuss these issues, she says, and she has faced calls for her university to sack her. That last statement is loaded, too, because the gender identity row is closely linked, especially on university campuses, with freedom of speech. “It’s fair enough if people want to disagree with me, but this is what I think.” “There’s a taboo against saying this, but it’s what I believe,” she says. And she believes that increasingly in universities and the wider world, that is a view that cannot be challenged. What she says she opposes, though, is the institutionalisation of the idea that gender identity is all that matters – that how you identify automatically confers all the entitlements of that sex.
Stock is at pains to say she is not a transphobe, and also that she is sympathetic to the idea that many people feel they are not in the “right” body. “It’s so hard psychologically to say, in reply: ‘I’m afraid not.’” “Very few people who are sceptical talk about it directly, because they’re frightened,” she says. But the problem for her is, at least partly, that many people do anything they can to avoid answering it.
Whatever else about her views is controversial, she is surely on firm ground when she writes that this question has become surrounded by toxicity.
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