Professor Kathleen Stock is a very misunderstood figure in the current UK gender wars between ‘TERFs’ and trans activists.
Commentary surrounding Stock’s new book “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism” tries to pigeonhole her as a classic UK “gender critical” activist: deliberately misgendering trans people, mocking them and rallying against anti-discrimination protections.
However, Stock is a very methodical thinker who takes something of a centrist position in the tiresome gender wars. In summary, Stock:
Doesn’t oppose transition surgery or hormones and specifically states that it’s “a reasonable thing for adults to do” in some circumstances.
Is supportive (and celebratory) of gender non-conformity.
Is empathetic to the suffering of trans people and supportive of trans women calling themselves women, and trans men calling themselves men.
Doesn’t believe that trans people are “deceivers, delusional or duped”.
Opposes radical feminist attempts to depict trans women as autogynephyllic predators.
Being an analytic philosopher, Stock’s main interest in trans politics is what she sees as conceptual sloppiness and the consequences of theories which don’t correspond to material reality.
In Material Girls, Stock makes her case to ground what we call ‘gender identity’ in the reality of biological sex difference.
Questionable Theory
For Stock there are three questionable positions underpinning contemporary trans activism:
A belief that biological sex isn’t a binary (or at the very least that the lines are sufficiently blurred that we can disregard this notion);
A belief that everyone has a psychological ‘gender identity’; and
A belief that a fair society should preference gender identity over sex in determining who is a “man’” and who is a “woman”.
Stock takes aim at the ideas of prominent queer theorists including Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling as well as historian Thomas Laqueur, over their theories of biological sex.
This is by far the weakest part of the book, because it becomes pretty evident that Stock’s training as an analytic philosopher means she is not well-versed in continental philosophy.
Stock makes rookie mistakes such a conflating Butler’s notion of gender performativity with theatrical “performance”; taking Fauto-Sterling’s infamous five sex model as a real hypothesis and not a demonstration on how choosing the criteria for sex difference can result in a re-categorisation of the sexes; and mischaracterising Laqueur’s work documenting the one-sex model of ancient pathologists as literally saying that biological sex difference was invented in the 18th century.
Her basic point - that there are pre-discursive sexed bodies which actually exist in the world, isn’t denied by any of these theorists. Their work is more concerned with understanding how the meanings we attach to sexed bodies have changed over time.
Stock is much stronger when she switches gears to focus on how the meaning-making around sex difference (gender) is necessarily constrained by biology.
We as humans have a natural history as well as a cultural one.
Our bodies became sexually dimorphic, with one half of the species carrying small gametes and the other half carrying large gametes, due to the evolutionary advantage of this reproductive strategy.
The extent to which this reproductive strategy selected for psychological differences is still contested, that only males and females exist isn’t (and shouldn’t be).
Stock in particular is rallying against views that biological sex is so overwhelmed by culture that we can never truly discover it. She is opposed to the idea of cyborg theorists such as Donna Haraway that:
humans are like chihuahuas or seedless grapes or genetically engineered wheat ears: so saturated with intentional manipulation at every stage of development that it is impossible to differentiate discrete ‘natural’ parts from discrete ‘artificial’ parts of the organism.
Indeed, Stock quite methodically documents the many ways in which biological sex difference rears its ugly head: from differences to disease susceptibility, progression and outcomes to pain sensitivity, drug effects and athletic ability.
Unlike more contested ideas, such as violence and aggression, these differences don’t have anything to do with gender identity or social role - they are a pure reflection of our anatomical sex difference.
This was a good start to the book overall, however most trans activism doesn’t deny biological sex difference per se - it merely makes such ugly bodily constraints secondary to ‘gender identity’.
What The Hell Is ‘Gender Identity’ Really?
I’ve written before about the rather questionable history of ‘gender identity’ - Stock takes a similar approach, finding the concept untenable as a fit for purpose explanation of social phenomena.
In particular, Stock explains that it’s simply not true that everyone has a gender identity and that the only distinction between trans and cis people is whether there is incongruence between gender identity and sex.
Stock is particularly annoyed at the use of feminist theory to justify the notion of gender identity:
When some twentieth-century feminists talked in de Beuvoir-esque vein about ‘becoming a women’, they meant having a set of social norms or expectations about femininity imposed upon you, not having an ‘inner’ identity of a certain kind.
Many, many people do not feel that their innate sense of who they are corresponds to the cultural response to their sexed bodies. This isn’t reflective of a false ‘psychological identity’ it’s because cultural mandates aren’t totalising. We cannot internalise all historical/cultural expectations completely.
As I’ve written about before, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan saw this as the “noble bastardry” of humanity - no matter how constructed by the social-symbolic we are, there’s always a little bit left over which culture can’t get its hands on.
This incongruence between sense of self and the social-symbolic attached to sex difference isn’t just the experience of trans people, but many people throughout history from homosexuals to feminists to cross-dressers and beyond.
It’s very much a disservice to the history of all kinds of non-conformity to trace the origin of this resistance to some kind of innate psychological disposition.
If we do away with gender identity then, how do we explain the trans experience?
For Stock, there is no difference between the gender non-conforming lesbian and the trans man in terms of psychological identity or feeling a disconnect between sense of self and the socio-symbolic attached to being female.
However, the trans man has a further desire that the non-conforming lesbian doesn’t - a desire to be immersed in the fiction that one can change sex.
Here I think Stock is hitting on something interesting, although her choice of words leaves a lot to be desired. The word “fiction” gives rise to connotations of “playing dress up” or “lying to oneself” - which is very explicitly not what she’s saying:
Generally speaking, being immersed in a fiction is a familiar, benign and rational human behaviour. The fiction in question can of your own or another’s making. It can take years to construct -as in a great novel, film or play"
What Stock is describing is a “fantasy” - which is all humans do in order to experience lives worth living. If one takes a psychoanalytic model: we can see that the entire idea of being a rational subject with a coherent identity in the world is utter fantasy, but that doesn’t make it “make-believe”.
This articulation of the trans experience aligns with some trans scholars such as a Jack Halberstam. In ‘Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability’ Halberstam describes the trans experience as:
[A] desire for forms of embodiment that are necessarily impossible and yet deeply desired, all at once.
A likely critical response to this idea might be: “well I don’t want to live in fantasy, I want to live in the real world!” - and my response would be: no you really don’t.
Try having sex without any layer of fantasy covering what’s actually going on, focusing only on your rhythmic movements, the smells, the bizarre moans - you’ll be retreating back into a fantasy world in no time!
A screen of fantasy protects us from the ugliness of reality, such fantasies should be grounded in actual sensuous experience (i.e not utterly delusional) but are an integral part of retaining our sanity as humans.
This is by far the best part of Material Girls, because Stock puts forward an empathetic understanding of the trans experience which is also a universal human one. It has the added benefit of giving ‘gender critical’ perspectives some support should the demands of transgender fantasy become obsessive or unreasonable.
However, Stock chooses to take this idea to an extreme position: essentially arguing that in nearly all aspects of public life, we should be recognising the reality of biological sex over the fantasy of transition.
What Counts As ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’?
Stock cites Stonewall UK’s definition of ‘transphobia’ to point out the ludicrousness of an unquestioning assent to ‘gender identity’:
The fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans, including denying their gender identity or refusing to accept it. Transphobia may be targeted at people who are, or who are perceived to be, trans.
This sets a rather low bar for committing transphobia and doesn’t appear to acknowledge that buying into the fantasy of transition isn’t just a matter of someone’s inner psychological identity. To ‘be’ a man or a woman generally requires someone to perceive you as such.
This is how we get rather odd modern diversity rituals such as pronoun rounds, because all social interactions run the risk of ‘hateful and discriminatory conduct’ caused by misperception.
It’s also how we get virulent attacks on (mostly women) who refuse to play along: the firing of Maya Forstater, the defamation of women in the Wi Spa incident and the cultural maligning of female athletes raising concerns about trans competitors.
The ultimate edge case for how robust one’s assent to psychological gender identity is, is Alex Drummond - a character straight out of Sheila Jefferys’ nightmares.
Drummond is a trans woman who has shunned all hormones or surgery and has decided to retain her bushy beard.
She’s a bit of a favourite ‘bogeyman’ for UK trans-exclusionary radical feminists, both because she’s on the advisory committee for Stonewall UK and identifies as a lesbian.
When presented with a character like Drummond, the polite thing to do is to assent to her inner gender identity as a woman. However, Stock does have a point that the spectre of biological sex haunts my reading of Drummond and -politeness asides- my perception of Drummond is still that of a man.
How do we deal with this conceptual confusion? Well for Stock the answer is simple: stick with biological sex.
For Stock, we need to stop being bogged down by political correctness and start recognising that sex differences matters more than fantasies of transition. From sexual orientation to the pay gap to eating disorders to athletic ability to crime - sex difference determines social significance.
Stock isn’t absolutist in this position. She doesn’t mean all spaces should be separated by sex (rather than gender) or that trans people should be misgendered constantly, only that we should recognise that this is what counts to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ in public life.
Here’s where my perspectives on sex difference drastically divides with that of Stock. I’m not convinced that biological sex matters socially quite as much as she does. Instead, what matters is socio-symbolic sex.
You Are What You’re Perceived To Be
Stock’s retreat back to biological sex as the significant determination of what constitutes a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ causes more problems than it solves.
Let’s say you work at the airport and you’re checking the passport of a touring right-wing internet shock jock named Blaire White. On that passport the sex-marker says “male”. This is Blaire White:
If this happened the assumption would be that the passport had an error – or worse – was a forgery. In this context, a sex-marker is used to aid in identification, and it is more useful for Blaire White to be “female” in this context than “male”.
Similarly, on an informal social level, if I were to refer to Blaire White in a conversation I would find it very difficult to consistently refer to her as a ‘man’. If I was to be particularly pedantic I may want to use ‘he’ and ‘him’ pronouns for Blaire, but that would require going against what my brain wants to register as correct.
This is the opposite of the Drummond scenario, and it comes from trying to ascend to biological sex as the determinate of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ - not merely above Blaire’s individual psychological gender identity, but the overwhelming amount of visual (or ‘socio-symbolic’) information telling me she’s a woman.
Stock does address this disconnect in Material Girls, albeit very poorly.
She analogises this “confusion” as an example of the Stroop-effect a quirk of human visual processing. In a Stroop experiment, participants are asked to name the colour of the font of a word flashing on screen. This is relatively simple when the words look like this:
But there is a significant delay and a high chance of error when the following is displayed:
The findings of the Stroop experiments are that we shorthand a lot in our categorisation of objects, and are easily tricked or stumped when there is incongruence between our perception and our understanding of a word.
Similarly, Stock sees this as the cause of our “confusion” about passing trans women and trans men.
[E]ven with simultaneous access to confounding information about a passing trans woman’s actual sex, via some other information route, there’s a sense in which a viewer will still automatically see the trans woman ‘as’ a woman
This is seen as a problem by Stock, as it misleads us regarding reality of biological sex.
However, from my perspective, it demonstrates that both appeals to biological sex and appeals to gender identity misunderstand why we categorise the world in male/female and man/woman in the first place.
In the vast majority of legal contexts, sex-markers are used as shorthand for identification purposes or to generalise about certain social demographics. They reference the socio-symbolic recognition of “man” and “woman” not biological difference or psychological gender identity.
Both the feminist movement and the queer movement have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to prove that the current cultural-historical categorisation of the sexes isn’t all there is. In the words of French feminist Monique Wittig:
“[B]y admitting that there is a ‘natural’ division between women and men, we… naturalise the social phenomena which expresses our oppression, making change impossible”
However this ideological commitment has blinded most theorists from the reality of socio-symbolic sexual difference: you’re a real woman and you’re real man, but only if you pull it off!
It isn’t just trans people who are immersed in fantasy, we all are. However, this fantasy isn’t our own - it’s an objective facet of being in the world.
In this social-symbolic world there are only two modes: man and woman. Biological sex gets you a head start, but many still fail to pull off these socio-symbolic ideals.
Whilst biological sex has relevance to some aspects of public life: medicine, and some aspects of research such as crime statistics perhaps - it’s a fairly limited aspect of sex difference.
Socio-symbolic sex difference isn’t kind, acknowledging the reality of the difference can lead to some harsh truths about the trans experience - but nothing that trans people aren’t themselves willing to admit after a few drinks.
In short, here’s what socio-symbolic sex difference means for trans people: Trans women are women (if they pass), trans men are men (if they pass) and non-binary or “agender” or any newer psychological gender identities are incapable of recognition in the social-symbolic.
If you fail to live up to the socio-symbolic ideal, don’t fret - very few of us do. But that doesn’t mean that this socio-symbolic sex difference isn’t very real, being the primary decider on who counts as “man” and “woman” in the world.
This is ultimately why Stock’s hypothesis fails. She’s wanting to find the truth of sex difference in something physical, but the sex difference that matters is mystically incorporeal - a symbolic interplay that exists across cultures and across history.
Neither biology, nor psychology, can truly grasp the mysteries of sex.
There are no ‘material girls’.