After a severe panic attack, the philosopher Kathleen Stock, 48, gave up her chair in philosophy at the UK University of Sussex at the end of October.

"I can no longer work in such a poisoned climate," she said on record.

The case has attracted worldwide attention: Kathleen Stock sees herself as a left-wing, gender-critical feminist.

She has two sons, is a lesbian, and her partner is pregnant.

By the powerful transgender movement, the philosopher was insulted as "transphobic", vilified and bullied.

Rainer Hank

Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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The argument may sound strangely alien to people outside of the university environment.

But it determines the increasingly aggressive debates in the academic community, not only in the Anglo-Saxon world.

While the transgender movement advocates constructivism, according to which everyone can define themselves as man, woman or queer regardless of their biological nature, the gender-critical feminism sees this as an overarching feasibility mania and holds on to the inevitability of biological nature.

Free speech at stake

The definition of personal affiliation is not above all else, say the feminists. Biological nature cannot be defined away. That, in turn, is what transgender people call a violation of their right to self-determination. You, the weaker ones, claim greater property rights. Feminists, on the other hand, fear that men as transgender people will break into women's toilets.

Now one could leave this dispute to the academic debates, which have nothing to do with an economic column, or at best marginally. But that's not the end of the story. Because it's about free speech and the right to say anything in a liberal society - at least up to the limits of criminal law. Free speech (“parrhesia”), in which one can express what one thinks is true without false consideration, has been a humane achievement of civilization since ancient times. It is she who is at stake today.

The opponents of freedom of research and teaching in the Stock case are not only to be found, but above all, among the student body of the University of Sussex, while many professors and the university management - at least for a while - supported their colleagues. The students refer to their emotional shelter, which Kathleen Stock had violated. And this is where the market economy comes into play: “We don't pay 9,250 pounds a year to be insulted by a transphobic professor”, so it was read on the posters of a demonstration. After Kathleen Stock's resignation, her opponents triumphed and sang “Ding, dong, the witch is dead” from the film “The Wizard of Oz”.

The students in their witch hunt instrumentalize the market economy to suppress the freedom of expression of others.

This could be called the neoliberal variant of opinion terror, which, thanks to its economic legitimation, is no better than the sixty-eighties, who saw themselves not as agents of the market but as prophets of the world revolution.

Terror remains terror.

“They don't want to argue, they want to destroy my reputation,” says Kathleen Harris.