Kathleen Stock wins free speech debate at Cambridge

The philosophy professor faced down the protests — and won.

The Cambridge Union’s Debating Chamber was filled to capacity last night with students eager to hear philosopher and UnHerd columnist Kathleen Stock argue in favour of the motion “This house believes in the right to offend”.

Stock, the author of Material Girls: Why Material Reality Matters for Feminism, was forced to resign from a tenured position at the University of Sussex in 2021, after three years of targeted campaigning by students. They were offended by her view that sex is an immutable biological fact distinct from gender, and that this distinction is frequently important in law and policy.

Before and throughout the debate, trans rights advocates, unhappy with the Union’s decision to platform Stock, loudly protested. Banging on drums and an assortment of makeshift instruments, they chanted, “No TERFs on our turf”. One sign read: “We’re offended. Now what?”, an unfortunately rhetorical question.

The proposition also included Arif Ahmed, a philosophy fellow at Cambridge and a champion of free speech. Last month, his invitation of gender-critical feminist Helen Joyce to speak at the college was met with a notable backlash among parts of the student body who consider her ‘transphobic’. On top of this, college leadership proudly threw their weight behind this backlash, a decision which supporters of Joyce emphatically denounced.

In contrast, the motion’s opposition consisted entirely of undergraduate students. A speaker from the floor lamented this discrepancy: “Inviting a huge and polarising figure to debate no invited opposition, only students, is just not good enough,” he said. In response the Union’s president, Lara Brown, clarified that although many speakers were invited to argue in opposition, all declined.

The proposition’s core belief was that while offending people may not be good, the right to do so is. For the opposition, offensive speech was linked inextricably to actual harm. On several occasions, the opposing speakers decried racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, transphobia and homophobia, but never mentioned misogyny as an attitude equally worthy of offence.

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