Kathleen Mary Linn Stock OBE (born November 1972) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex.^[1] She has published on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, sex, gender, and sexual orientation.^[2] She has gained public attention for her views on gender identification.^[3][4][5]

Academic work

Until 2020, she was the vice-president of the British Society of Aesthetics.^[6] In her monograph Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (2017), she examines the nature of fictional content.^[7]

Stock has written one monograph as well as a number of articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, and has contributed several chapters to edited volumes.^[2] She edited Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (first edition 2007), and together with Katherine Thomson-Jones, she edited New Waves in Aesthetics (2008).

Stock has given lectures at the University of York,^[8] the Aristotelian Society,^[9] the London Aesthetics Forum,^[10] the University of Wolverhampton,^[11] the American Society for Aesthetics, and other places.

Views on gender identification

Stock has called for trans women who have male genitalia to be excluded from women's changing rooms, characterising them as "still males" who may be sexually attracted to women. She has denied opposing trans rights, saying, "I gladly and vocally assert the rights of trans people to live their lives free from fear, violence, harassment or any discrimination" and "I think that discussing female rights is compatible with defending these trans rights".^[12]

She has expressed gender critical views on proposed reforms to the UK Gender Recognition Act and trans self-identification.^[13][14][15] Her 2021 book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, discusses modern gender theory;^{[16][17][18][19][20]} her thesis, according to a reviewer, is that there is "a new orthodoxy, one in which sex gives way to feeling, and feeling trumps facts".^[17]

In June 2021, Stock was appointed as a trustee of the LGB Alliance.^[21]

Campaign by students at Sussex University

In October 2021, a group of LGBT+ University of Sussex students began a campaign for Stock to be fired stating she was “espousing a bastardised version of ‘radical feminism’ that excludes and endangers trans people”.^[22][23] Supporters, including Julie Bindel and Allison Bailey, spoke in Stock's defence, while the vice-chancellor Adam Tickell condemned the campaign as a threat to academic freedom, and said an investigation was underway.^[22][23]

Honours

Stock was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to higher education.^[24][25] In response over 600 philosophers signed a letter criticising the decision stating she has a “tendency to mistake transphobic fear mongering for valuable scholarship, and attacks on already marginalised people for courageous exercises of free speech”.^[22][23]

Selected works

• ed. Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• New Waves in Aesthetics, edited with Katherine Thomson-Jones (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008).
• Fantasy, imagination, and film. British Journal of Aesthetics, 2009. 49 (4): 357–369.
• Fictive Utterance and Imagining. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume. 2011, 85 (1): 145–161.
• Some Reflections on Seeing-as, Metaphor-Grasping and Imagining. Aisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell'Estetico. 2013, 6 (1): 201–213.
• Imagining and Fiction: Some Issues. Philosophy Compass. 2013, 8 (10): 887–896.
• Sexual Objectification. Analysis, 2015, 75 (2): 191–195.
• Learning from fiction and theories of fictional content. Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy, 2016, (3): 69–83.
• Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (Fleet, 2021).^[17]

References

External links

• Official website
• University of Sussex bio