Kathleen Stock

Kathleen Stock is a former professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. She has published academic work on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, and sexual orientation. Her views on gender self-identification have become a contentious issue. In December 2020, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), in recognition of services to higher education, a decision which was subsequently criticised by a group of 600 academic philosophers who argued that Stock's "harmful rhetoric" contributed to the marginalisation of transgender people. In October 2021, a student campaign called for her dismissal, leading to a group of over 200 academic philosophers from the UK signing an open letter in support of Stock's academic freedom. On 28 October 2021 Stock resigned from the University of Sussex.