Is Kathleen Stock’s ‘Stick’ Opinion Really About Disabled♀️or Trans♂️?

It’s both, and (as usual) she shouldn’t have written it

Morning commute, by Justin Kaneps, photographer for the inaugural All in Frame Collection

Kathleen Stock, whom I mostly know for her hardline anti-trans lifestance (it’s so very important to be skeptical of trans people, after all!), this week is encouraging her readers to be skeptical of disabled women.

As always, this rhetoric is dangerous, and I try to take these bad-faith professionals both literally and seriously.

The ableist part is literal and serious.

The transphobic part is allegorical and also serious.

Note the timing

In the UK, the updated EHRC Code of Practice took effect a couple days ago on 5 August. This government guidance, as the Good Law Project explains, tells “service providers they can no longer operate on a trans-inclusive basis.”

One would expect a professional transphobe like Kathleen Stock to schedule an anti-trans screed to be published that day.

Instead, she scheduled an ableist screed.

The Times

Hmm! Curiouser and curiouser!

What she wrote in her opinion for the Times

“In 21st-century Britain, canes are the unironic preserve of vulnerable looking girls,” Stock opens her opinion column. “Sometimes you see groups of them, each leaning on a walking stick...”

Yes, sometimes you see friend groups of disabled people! Leaving the house!

I haven’t set foot (neither of my arthritic and transgender feet has done so) in the UK for a couple decades so I can neither confirm nor challenge by personal experience what Stock claims to have recently seen there. What I might’ve seen is, however, quite irrelevant. If Stock cared about facts and numbers, she’d bring them. As a professor of philosophy, she can robustly imagine which sorts of facts and numbers might be warranted. She is pointedly not giving any facts or numbers about disabled people in her essay for the Times, which signals to me that she intends this entire essay as an allegory, or at least for it to have a double life as an allegory.

“The message sent to onlookers” by these young women with canes, she goes on, “is about a life spent in pain; though what kind of pain, exactly, remains unclear.”

Here, she assumes people use mobility aids (or do anything whatsoever) primarily to send a message to onlookers, and the reason she assumes this is that she herself is a propagandist. She can’t imagine planning her day except for the purpose of controlling a narrative. When other people don’t invest time in making their feelings and challenges legible to her, she concludes their pain isn’t real or meaningful. As those people haven’t worked hard enough to be legible to her, she assumes they’ve failed at their propaganda, and it is the success of propaganda that decides whose pain matters. They aren’t politicking hard enough, so they’re on a losing team, and therefore she doesn’t care about them. She wants to win. She cares about power and people with power. A person disingenuously using a cane to poke at scraps of power would be interesting to her; a person using a cane to walk is just “unclear.”

Because disabled women are speaking for themselves about how to be fashionable with a cane (“TikTok has hundreds of videos on the subject,” she notes), the cane itself is a “trend,” she concludes. Unfortunately, this is the simplest possible logical fallacy: though many TikTok videos be about trends, not every video on TikTok is about a trend.

Why, on TikTok, one wheelchair user even filmed herself rollerskating, which in Stock’s eyes proves that the woman doesn’t need a wheelchair! Layers of fallacies here.

I hate to break it to her credulous readership, but TikTok (and the internet generally) has multiple videos on every subject. You imagine it, and the internet will cough up a million or so examples. In 2026, of course, videos can be AI-generated, so there are functionally infinite TikTok videos on any subject for which you can type a prompt.

Though, again, she provides no relevant numbers (she said there are “hundreds of videos” on TikTok, yes, but she gives no numbers about people), she informs us that “a disproportionate number of young women” are using canes. Apparently because the number is “disproportionate,” these women’s bodies have become our business: “we need to find out what is going on” by “dig[ging] into their explanations.” It’s “Gen Z females,” she says, who purport to “have strangely unstable bodies that intermittently require support.”

She admits that gendered expectations unfairly limit people from asking for or receiving help. “Many middle-aged men,” following a “repressed British script,” fail to “notice injuries or signs of illness,” she acknowledges, understanding that this is bad. And, of course, “young women with chronic illnesses tend to be disbelieved by doctors,” which is also “a very bad thing.” In short, men won’t ask for help and won’t believe women either. That’s medical sexism in a nutshell, as she’s explained it. It is indeed too often the case.

Tragically, she throws all that awareness out the window, concluding: “We owe it to potentially able-bodied young people to challenge their tendencies to neuroticism and fear; to get them out into the world as functioning adults, wherever that is possible.” Functioning, here, to her, means no cane. She’s asking everyone to exhort strangers to “ditch the props, and — quite literally — to stand on their own two feet.” In other words, whenever she sees a young woman with a cane and it’s not obvious to her why the woman is using it, she takes it as her duty to “challenge” the woman and suggest that she try walking without it. It would be “cruel not to” try to change the woman’s mind, she says.

Kathleen Stock, by the way, is in her 50s and has certain forms of privilege: she is white, has a PhD and (as I glean from her attitude here) is nondisabled. The “Gen Z” people she finds ripe for skeptical questioning about their bodies and abilities are ages 14–29 and visibly disabled. Her stance generally has to do with the active preservation of hierarchy.

After all, she says, their disability may have been “socially constructed” rather than “biologically fixed.” It may be a product of “social contagion.” And “stories can be changed for the better.” She wants to tell people which stories to tell about themselves.

Why did she write this? Why now?

I have a theory.

In the new Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance on single-sex spaces, as The Land Of Green Ginger explains today, “What’s getting tested is whether the people round me are comfortable looking at me.” It’s not what your documents say about your gender, since “the Code accepts you can’t demand paperwork off everybody…documents are out, by their own admission.” It’s not what your body or identity actually is, either. It’s what someone with everyday oversight authority thinks or feels you are, based on how they see you or how they predict others will see you.

If you’re entering a public bathroom and someone feels uncomfortable with how trans they think you look, they are emboldened and empowered to take action against you.

Mind you, this may not have been Stock’s conscious reason for writing this essay. She may have written this “story,” to borrow and repurpose her words, following a “trend” that she has “unconsciously learnt.”

I wonder which trend! I wonder where she learned it from!

To make this a bit clearer: Stock is saying that many young people, especially women, are experiencing “anxiety, the defining emotion of teenage years.” If you embrace such discomfort and seek attention for it, you may come to be seen as “different, special, excused from the pressures of life, pleasingly fussed over by strangers.” That’s why so many young women [sic] have chosen to carry an unnecessary stick [cough]. They should “ditch the props,” or else their “cycle of confused self-interpretation will continue.”

Literally, she is telling everyone — you too, dear reader — to question young women with canes. This is how most readers will understand her message, and most of the harm, inconvenience, irritation, and rage it will cause is to disabled people.

Allegorically, she is saying that everyone, upon seeing a Gen Z trans man, should question whether he really needs his penis. After all, quite possibly he has “unconsciously” fallen victim to a “trend” or “social contagion,” and as long as there seems to be any chance he’s “potentially” not really trans, it would be “cruel” of everyone else not to take a minute out of their day to remind him to look more ladylike. She is telling people how to enforce her understanding of the 5 August 2026 EHRC Guidance.

If you’re well-versed in transphobia, this isn’t especially subtle.

Transphobia and ableism are linked. This is an example of it.

She could have interviewed a disabled person

Stock could have interviewed a disabled person — if she were not being ableist, that is, and if she really cared to illuminate disabled people’s concerns.

Her opinion is 900 words, an average length for an op-ed. She had a good chunk of space to work with in the Times.

Yet the only person or work she cites is a nine-year-old book about emotions by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist in her 60s, who is not, as far as I can quickly divine, disabled.

If Stock truly wished to write about young disabled women, given that she had 900 words to work with, you’d think she might have taken the opportunity to interview or cite a young disabled woman.

After all, if there are so many around, if they are so “disproportionate” in their numbers, they shouldn’t be hard to find.

Keep up with disability stories

Speaking of finding disabled people’s voices, I just learned that the Rooted in Rights blog will soon stop publishing. Helpfully, they suggest how “to keep up with disability stories”. These have a U.S. focus. I’m reproducing their list of links here. On their recommendation, please follow:

• Julia Métraux at Mother Jones
• Disabled Journalists
• Disability Culture Currents
• The Sick Times
• New Disabled South
• Lurie Institute for Disability Policy
• Global Alliance for Disability in Media
• The Disability Justice Project
• Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF)
• …or your favorite contributor from the Rooted in Rights blog whenever they go on to publish elsewhere.

Thanks to Rooted in Rights for that list!

I’m sure we can all find similar resources covering whichever regions we care about.

The end. P.S.…

For your further reading, here’s another Times column by Stock. I wrote about it a few months ago.

[embed]‘Other People Didn’t Have to Like It.’ Nope! But Raise a Glass to Respect! Kathleen Stock on her limited understanding of whether gay rights are about being ‘liked’tuckerlieberman.medium.com