The writer and philosopher says that she admires the Church for its robust resistance to such fashionable liberal trends as the recognition of same-sex relationships.

Assisted dying – or “assisted death”, as she always refers to it in her new book – may at first glance seem like an unlikely subject for Kathleen Stock to embrace following the headline-making storm that engulfed her in 2021 and caused her to leave her post as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She had dared publicly to question whether transgender women should automatically qualify for all the entitlements of biological women. “Some people,” she reflects five years on from that trial by ordeal, “still think I am the devil incarnate.”

You might therefore think she would pick a less contentious subject as her follow-up to Material Girls – the book that caused the furore – something more in the style of her first book, Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (2017), which was aimed firmly at the academic market. But, she protests when I mention it, that book only sold 900 copies. And, as very quickly becomes apparent sitting opposite 54-year-old Stock in her sitting room, the two of us separated by her exercise bike, she is not one to be silenced or intimidated.

Get Instant Access

Continue Reading

Register for free to read this article in full

REGISTER

Subscribe for unlimited access

SUBSCRIBE NOW

From just £37.50 quarterly

  Print copy of The Tablet delivered directly to your door.
  Complete access to all Tablet website content including all premium content.
  Access to the weekly digital copy of The Tablet.
  Full access to The Tablet’s archive – over 180 years of back issues.

Already a subscriber? Login