The feminist revolution is eating its children

Stock’s rejection of transgender orthodoxy that people can change their sex at will and are entitled to impose their ‘preferred pronouns’ on the populace has attracted and exposed the worst of pro-transgender ‘activism’.

Professor Kathleen Stock is a respected academic heralding from Sussex University, where she devotes her livelihood to philosophy and the discussion of matters relating to feminism. Within the forest of contemporary political jargon, she is described as a second-wave feminist by the liberal lexicon and a dangerous TERF (meaning ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’) by the politically radicalised and increasingly unhinged.

To really fill in the bingo board, she is a gender-critical feminist – one who believes that biological sex exists and is responsible for physical and psychological differences between the sexes which play out in the real world. She recognises that there are societal ailments where it is primarily the fairer sex which bares the full burden, and notes that it is important to ensure the safety and security of women through female-only spaces, such as changing rooms and refuge shelters for domestic abuse victims.

But in today’s colourful utopia, Stock’s rejection of transgender orthodoxy that people can change their sex at will and are entitled to impose their ‘preferred pronouns’ on the populace has attracted and exposed the worst of pro-transgender ‘activism’ (if it can be called that). Professor Stock has faced a wave of harassment, bullying, threats and a co-ordinated attempt to coerce the university into unceremoniously removing her from her post.

Posters equipped with ‘fire Kathleen Stock’ printed in bold black letters have been covering the campus, along with one that reads ‘Kathleen Stock makes trans students unsafe.’ I guarantee the latter one was not forged by a transgender student. The strategy for advancing its ideological crusade is emotional blackmail followed by brutal intimidation towards those who dare raise a finger.

Any utterance of dissent is tarnished as genocidal rhetoric – that transgender individuals must not ‘debate their right to exist’ – granting its zealous activists the messiah complex they so desperately crave. In their view, they are literally protecting the lives of the oppressed from certain death, against the evil bigots that wish to exterminate them Einsatzgruppen style.

Professor Stock is not the first feminist to face this fiery wrath of fanatical fury. Author J.K. Rowling has faced death threats over her concerns of women being erased from the English language in favour of manipulative gender-neutral language to appease the fringe beliefs of a minority. Labour MP Rosie Duffield contemplated whether to attend her own party conference due to fears over her safety – and it wasn’t the far-right who were making her feel uneasy.

Professor Stock has stood her ground, and the Vice Chancellor has not capitulated as many weaker characters would do in front of the mob’s baying breath. Stock is lucky. On the other hand, there is a fifth column inside the workplace, as the Student Union’s has implicitly supported her removal with calls to investigate and remove ‘institutionalised transphobia’, while one of her colleagues has reportedly backed a student petition demanding her to be sacked.

The ferocity of these conflicts are a microcosm of how polarised and toxic modern political discourse has become. But they are not polarised ideologically; Stock’s crowd are a feminist sect born in the 1960s, sitting between the suffragettes and the twenty-first century, whereas the trans movement can be described as the most recent reincarnation of feminism, the twist being that it rejects gender entirely to dismantle the patriarchy and usher in utopia.

This is an ugly civil war, however radicalised the trans-lobby may be, and it is this intensifying purity purge that is causing the movement to eat its own. ‘The personal is political’ was a phrase deployed by the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s to inculcate self-perception into feminist politics – in other words, indirectly planting the idea of addressing and dismantling so-called social constructs and that villain known as ‘objective truth.’ Whilst this may not have been the intention, it certainly became the result.

In turn, as with countless other grievance movements, the feminist camp is dizzy with success. Within a hundred years it has made great strides, outlived its critics and pushed through legislation that was long overdue, but now it is running out of enemies, legitimacy, and purpose. As can be seen elsewhere, the demand for discrimination is far outstripping the supply.

We shouldn’t sit back and watch the fireworks or, to take a word from their neck of the woods, victim blame. We must support academic freedom whenever it is under siege, as well as acknowledge how we came to this predicament. When foe can’t be found abroad, it is magically found at home.