I am sure, by now, that everyone reading will have heard of the contentious matter of Kathleen Stock’s talk at The Oxford Union. Scrap that – I’d go as far as saying that you’d be hard pressed to find a person at the University of Oxford who hadn’t. Debate over Stock’s attendance has been colossal, and the national media have had an absolute field day with it. It made headlines in nearly every British paper, and to be honest, I can see why it did.
The presence of Kathleen Stock at the Union, the place that Harold Macmillan labelled (rather dramatically) “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”, has turned into something far deeper than just a one hour talk. The streets of Oxford this term have transformed into the site of national debate – we have witnessed a culture war.
When this event first entered my horizons – essentially from the moment it was announced, being Senior News Editor at The Blue – I’ll tell the truth; I hadn’t heard of her. I had no idea who she was or what she believed. What I knew of her was solely how people responded to her.
I knew that there was controversy surrounding her, I knew that people were reacting, I knew that people were hurting. As term progressed we saw a flurry of petitions, plans for protests, The Telegraph weighing in on it, the Oxford Mail, The Guardian, The Daily Mail. The reaction was immense.
We also saw a lot of attention paid by the press to the Student Union’s disaffiliation with The Oxford Union. This is where my point begins to unfold. The Daily Mail reported that “Oxford students’ unions ‘bans the historic Oxford Union from freshers’ fair’ amid gender-critical professor Kathleen Stock was invited to give speech’. This headline, to put it frankly, is nonsensical – and by that I don’t just mean the fact that it is grammatically incorrect on every level and riddled with errors.
Nowhere in the proposal for the disaffiliation between The Oxford Union and the Oxford Student Union is Kathleen Stock even briefly mentioned. Sure, some will argue that the timing of such a proposal was suspicious, and there was clearly mass objection from student JCR’s issuing condemnations of Stock’s speech. But this issue between the Union and the SU simply is not, at least solely, because of Stock. The depiction of it being such is not only misrepresentative, but a perfect example of polarisation and agenda-pushing that has occurred.
The notion of misrepresentation is something that runs at the core of this debate. Kathleen Stock’s attendance at The Oxford Union has been turned into something it is not. I was invited by one of my friends to The Union to watch one of the Thursday debates. It was within this capacity that I witnessed a speakers (not said friend I hasten to add) launch into a tirade against the mass JCR condemnation of Stock, stating that as a former member of one of these colleges they were “ashamed”. This to me seemed barely linked to the debate at hand, if at all. But this clearly shows that it had rubbed against some deeply-held principle, enraged them, and it’s evident that many felt similarly.This passion that so many seem to feel regarding this student event is because it has been catapulted into being a synecdoche for the ‘free speech versus cancel culture’ debate. I reported on the protests for The Blue, and it was an eye-widening experience. People came to such a protest with an agenda, on both sides – and that is not necessarily a bad thing, and I suppose to an extent unavoidable.
In fact, many protesters were open in the fact that they were there simply to show support of the trans community, as opposed to directly engaging with Stock’s argumentation. One protester stated that no, they did not know the ins-and-outs of Stock’s beliefs, but they wanted to exercise their voice too. After all, we have a right to free speech, but we also have a right to protest. Why should either stifle the other?
What was clear, however, is that the nuance of this debate in terms of what Stock was stating was simply not there. It was an us versus them affair, however peaceful. And to me, that’s what I think is quite sad about this whole scenario. There was an opportunity for an incredibly important conversation to be had here, to educate, in a place that is fundamentally devoted to education. We are quite literally ranked #1 in the entire world for exactly that.
The Oxford Union, in its perfect state, should be about encouraging healthy discussion, having these discussions in a productive way. Instead it was transformed into something that it did not need to be. I witnessed an argument between the two sides, with some legitimate points being raised – only to bury their own arguments upon labelling each other “left-wing fascists” and “right-wing fascists”. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again – you lose any credibility you have when you haphazardly sling around the label of “fascist”.
The whole debate spiralled into a school-like (albeit verbal) fight, filmed by the circle of onlookers. They may as well have been chanting ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’. We could’ve been hearing a genuinely engaging, persuasive, constructive debate between the two: instead we witnessed them quite literally polarising themselves against each other.
Something I also noticed whilst covering these events was how quickly those with an agenda leapt on the opportunity to sensationalise. God was sensationalising rampant that day. Just behind the counter-opposition, there was a sole protester, explicitly specified by the counter-protesters as separate. The man spoke of the “evil desires” of homosexuality and pornography, stating that he himself wrestles with said urges but shakes them off “for Christ”.
Again – this had precisely nothing to do with what Stock was going to be speaking about. Stock herself is a lesbian, she co-launched ‘The Lesbian Project’; they really didn’t read the room. As we waited for the protest to begin, we saw a protester walking towards St. Peter’s College where Oxford University LGBTQ + Society had based themselves. They were not even protesting at that point, and we witnessed a woman in the queue yell “fuck you, stupid bitch” at them, before declaring that “trans people get into women’s beds and rape them”. A man wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed him a “revolutionary communist” walked the length of the queue of those attending and laid out an agenda for the abolition of “woke lunacy”. Too often genuine points of argumentation are stifled and overshadowed by extremity.
It is this that I think perfectly summarises the death of nuance that we’ve seen, both in media but also society. With the rise of click-bait, sensationalist headlines sell. We are no longer interested in the moderate rationalisations, the political discussions and debates, the healthy conversation. We want engagement, hard and fast views. Our media scene has become like a circus – come gawp at this incredibly far-right perspective, come gawp at this incredibly far-left perspective. God, aren’t they ridiculous? What woke snowflakes, what bigoted headbangers.
That is not how everybody thinks, but that is what we see, that’s what surrounds us. It’s this that has led to the highly-studied polarised culture in the United States, but it’s not just an American thing. Cancel culture, or rather what it’s begun to represent, is certainly no help, though the term is flung around slightly too much than I think is appropriate. After all, at the core of it, cancel culture is holding people responsible for their actions and their speech. Accountability is not wrong, and in fact it’s something that’s been lost to us for a long time. Accountability is a good thing, it is needed, and without it people suffer. Cancel culture though is not accountability, but some twisted contortion of such, forming a hybrid-ideology. It is the extension of accountability into determining the ‘right’ narrative, the one that is allowed to be voiced. Anyone who wishes to challenge that singular societally accepted opinion and perspective – nope. Gotta go.
Within this debate, I have attempted to set my political opinions aside. So I’ve decided to do what national papers have – to use Stock’s speech as an opportunity to leap on a wider debate, though (I hope) my aim has far less of an agenda behind it. I did not know anything about Kathleen Stock before this situation, and nor did quite a lot of people. What the majority know about her now is predominantly the reaction she has caused. It is not Stock’s words that are central to this debate anymore, but rather this bizarre caricature as the martyr of free speech, that she’s been turned into – she shouldn’t have been. That was never what it was about. Rather people leapt at the opportunity to divide. My issue lies not with the very legitimate issues being discussed – and I do think some genuinely productive conversations took place – but rather with those who jumped on it as an opportunity to push their own agenda. Those who completely ignored what was actually being discussed and leapt on the opportunity to hate, whichever ‘side’ they may have been on. It is the issue of ‘sides’ exactly that I have an issue with. In there being sides there is a lack of nuance, a lack of debate and willingness to navigate varying opinions. To be flexible on a topic as integral to your self-hood as your identity is deeply uncomfortable, and I’m not saying it’s always possible. Debate has its limits, and it cannot go against hatred. But there must be an attempt of productive debate, else it is simply an opportunity for the incitement of such hatred. Let us, for once, listen to both sides, the voices that are actually saying something related to the discussion at hand, rather than those who have appropriated the circumstances to fit their agenda.
Can we say that the Kathleen Stock talk was a “victory for free speech” if we only think of her as exactly that, a poster-woman for free speech, a symbol, rather than what she actually argues for? I don’t think so.