Three interviews and a literary event
What recent interviews of Kathleen Stock, Alice Sullivan and Simon Blake, and my upcoming appearance at Oxford Literary Festival, say about where we are now.
This article started as a thread on X, and as I wrote it I realised I had more to say about it than fitted in a sensible number of posts. It’s a reflection on three interviews that came out in the past few days, the differences between them and what that says about where we are.
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Two came out on Sunday, one with Kathleen Stock in the Sunday Times (permalink and share token, which will last for seven days) and one with Alice Sullivan in the Sunday Telegraph (sorry, I don’t have a subscription to offer a gift link). Both were pegged to significant news developments.
In Kathleen’s case the news was the record fine levied by the Office for Students on Sussex University, where she used to work, for various breaches of the conditions whereby it is licensed as a university, which include upholding free speech. The university is being fined nearly £0.5m – far more than the OfS has ever fined a university before – for a set of policies that policed how academics taught and spoke about identity-related issues, specifically trans identities, and its failure to protect Kathleen’s own freedom of speech and academic freedom as her colleagues and students sought, successfully, to ostracise and harass her until she resigned.
It’s a really well-written interview, giving an accurate overview of the legal situation and skilfully using quotes and vignettes to bring Kathleen to life. It gets across her acerbic wit, and includes some vignettes that aren’t already common knowledge – I want to meet that military historian and shake his hand.
In Alice’s case the news is the recent publication of her landmark review of official statistics on sex and gender identity. Again, the interview is a pleasure to read, mixing insights into Alice’s life and psyche (I love the quote about how much she cares about questionnaires) with her findings and why they matter.
I know and like both women, and was of course delighted to see them get the chance to talk about their work in such high-profile publications. But I know from the responses of various people I shared them with who know neither of them that they were classic Sunday interviews: interesting insights into noteworthy people that conveyed significant amounts of information in a lean-back read. In both interviews the journalist gets across the subjects’ independent-mindedness – Kathleen’s refusal to demonise Jordan Peterson and Alice’s rejection of tribal opposition to Trump’s executive orders.
The third recent interview – with Simon Blake, the newish CEO of Stonewall, in the Guardian – was quite different. The news peg was weak: the publication of some research Stonewall itself commissioned. Worse, the research wasn’t actually published – all that has come out so far is this piece and an item on Stonewall’s website written like a particularly uninformative press release. (The pollster Stonewall used, Opinium, is a member of the British Polling Council, and one of the conditions of membership is that any research that is not kept completely private must be made public, either by being placed in full online or by being sent to anyone who asks. It’s therefore quite surprising to me that neither Opinium nor Stonewall has published the research – I, and no doubt many others, have already written to Opinium asking to be sent the full thing.)
Even setting aside questions about publication by Opinium/ Stonewall, it’s quite unusual for any serious media outlet to publish findings from research that involved any type of polling without giving any methodological details. At a minimum, when I was commissioning and editing articles at The Economist, I would have demanded the correspondent include in their coverage how many people were polled and when, how respondents had been selected and what efforts had been made to ensure that they were an unbiased sample of whatever group they were being taken to represent. I would also have wanted to know the precise wording of the relevant questions.
None of that is in the Guardian article, even though the findings include some really startling claims. According to Blake, 10% of “LGBTQ+” people have been subjected to exorcism in an attempt to change their “sexual orientation or gender identity”. I simply cannot imagine letting a claim like this fly by, either as an interviewer or an editor.
First, who are “LGBTQ+” people? What’s the “+”, and what could it mean to attempt to change their sexual orientation or gender identity? Which people within that group have experienced this? Is it mostly gay people, or mostly trans people?
And then, what sort of exorcism? Private or group prayers? Laying on of hands? Exhortation? Speaking in tongues? Beating? If, say, 3% of the population of the UK are “LGBTQ+”, that’s about 2m people, which would mean about 200,000 exorcisms. Where is the coverage of this enormous, ubiquitous scandal? Why has nobody ever heard a thing about it?
Without seeing any details of the research I can’t say with certainty what has gone wrong here, but I would guess that exorcism is being defined extremely loosely, or the questions were very vague or the sample was wildly unrepresentative. Quite possibly all three – but the journalist doesn’t ask anything about it, simply repeats the claims with apparently complete credulity.
She might also have followed up on Blake’s claim that making progress on Stonewall’s agenda requires “endless conversations with people who may share none or some of the same views” as him. It’s a decade now since Stonewall added the T to its former remit of LGB – and ever since then successive CEOs, Ruth Hunt, Nancy Kelley and Blake himself, have without exception refused to speak to anyone who disagrees with them. At least Hunt and Kelley were honest about their policy of “no debate” (though they both now deny that was their policy) but Blake is following the approach of Iain Anderson, former chair of trustees of Stonewall, in saying publicly that he is open to talking to a wide range of people and then refusing to do so.
In late 2022, as he was preparing to take over as Stonewall’s chair, Anderson said this:
“Anybody that knows me knows I believe in a big tent… What I want to do is talk to women’s groups, I want to talk generally, I want to get this conversation off Twitter, I want to stop debating people’s lives and get everybody to come together again… Less shouting, more conversations and more policy action.”
But when Sex Matters wrote to him saying we would like to meet, he didn’t even bother to reply. Others also wrote, including LGB Alliance, but apparently the big tent wasn’t big enough. So a journalist who had done her homework before talking to Blake might have asked about this. Whom was he saying he would talk to, and had he yet reached out?
I wouldn’t normally share private discussions in public, but this one makes me cross. As I write I’m preparing for the Oxford Literary Festival, where I’m being interviewed by Julie Bindel. When the event was first mooted the organisers had hoped to do it as a moderated two-way or panel of people with differing views. I said I was willing to talk to anyone serious, by which I meant people who have actually played some part in the embedding of gender-identity ideology in public life, whether in business, politics, journalism, publishing, regulation, charities or anything else. In other words, I wasn’t willing to give oxygen for the sake of it to people I regard as bad-faith publicity hounds – I named a couple, and their identities won’t come as a surprise to anyone. (Oh, I also said I wouldn’t talk to anyone I regard as having defamed me.)
That left a very wide field. And the organisers tried; they really did. They said they would offer any day and any time slot to accommodate the various people they asked – I agreed to hold the entire period of the festival open in the meantime.
But it seemed that every Establishment transactivist in the UK was washing their hair, away or otherwise occupied for the whole week. And yes, Blake was one of them. He at least had the courtesy to reply – he said he would be away. Which is fair enough – but there was a whole week of dates and times available and this is a sell-out event in the largest venue at one of the country’s biggest book festivals.
It was an amazing opportunity for someone who says he wants to have “endless conversations” with people who may share “none” of his views– especially since he didn’t even have to write a bloody book! So, forgive me for not believing Blake actually means he wants dialogue. If I’m wrong and he really is away for the entire week at something that couldn’t have been moved, even though he had a few months’ notice, I take it back – and am happy to meet at his convenience for a conversation, either private or public. I am easy to get hold of.
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PS: a friend sent me the picture at the top of this article. It’s of an installation by students at Central St Martins that is on display in public space owned by King’s Cross Station. I don’t know which I find more disturbing: the poor quality of the “artwork” or the poor thinking it reveals.