Academics’ anti-transgender submission to Parliament plagiarised?
Potential plagiarism may bring into question the supposed expertise of Gender Critical academics, the seriousness with which they approach important issues that have life-changing impacts, and the validity and quality of their submissions to policymakers.
Last year, during the UK Parliament’s inquiry around potential reform of the Gender Recognition Act, three Gender Critical academics presented oral evidence to the Women and Equalities Select Committee: Rosa Freedman (Professor of Law, Conflict and Global Development at University of Reading), Kathleen Stock (Professor of Philosophy at University of Sussex), and Alice Sullivan (Professor of Sociology at University College, London). During their presentation on 9th December 2020, the academics were pushed on evidence for a claim they were making.
Nicola Richards (Conservative MP for West Bromwich East): I just wanted to go back to something you said, Rosa, about predatory males and how the same statistics of abuse on women carry over from males to trans women. Do you have any statistics that you can give us to prove that?
Professor Freedman: There are statistics from a Swedish study that I can send to you after the session if that is helpful. They were written up in academic journals and things like that, so they are robust data as Alice would say.
Nicola Richards: You have mentioned this a couple of times and that there are hard facts that prove that this is the case. So far, throughout the session, you have not given us any stats to prove that.
Professor Freedman: That is because I am citing a Swedish study, but I try to avoid being too academic when I am in these kinds of sessions. I am very happy to provide you with the citations afterwards. It is a well-known Swedish study on offending rates and male-born people, whether they are men or trans women. I am happy to send that over to you. If there is a Zoom chat in here, I can happily ping it into the chat if that is helpful.
[…]
Nicola Richards: Would you accept, however, that to make the assumption that these are predatory males and predatory trans women has quite a damaging effect without robust data, as you have pointed to without the stats?
Professor Freedman: You have misunderstood. I said most trans individuals are not predatory, but there will be predatory males. We have the data. We have the rapes in prisons, not just in this country but in Ireland, Denmark and elsewhere. We know that there are predatory males. You are pushing me on this and I have told you that there is data under Swedish studies, so now it feels like you are accusing me of lying.
Nicola Richards: No, it is just this is a Select Committee. It would be helpful to have had those statistics, but we will look out for them.
Professor Freedman: I can send them.
Because they had not brought statistics to support their claims, the academics were invited to send in their evidence following the meeting and, on 12th January 2021, they submitted written evidence to the Committee. Whilst reading the submission, Christa Peterson, a Philosophy PhD student from the University of Southern California (USC), noticed potential plagiarism – the document appeared to have strong similarities with a document submitted by Dr Kath Murray, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Lisa Mackenzie to the Scottish Government’s consultation on Gender Recognition reform (which closed for submissions on 17th March 2020).
Following her own assessment, Peterson ran the two documents through a plagiarism detector, Copyleaks, which returned a 34.6% – over a third – match between the two, with 32.7% identical wording.
Commenting on the results, one of Peterson’s fellow PhD students, Jennifer Foster, who works at USC’s Writing Center said, “As a PhD student, and professor-in-training, this is actually, like, excruciatingly painful. This level of copy-and-pasting can get you failed out of undergrad courses, no ifs, ands or buts.” Peterson said, “If a student submitted this we would have to report it”.
According to Professor Stock’s university, plagiarism is academic misconduct involving ‘the use, without acknowledgement, of the intellectual work of other people, and the act of representing the ideas or discoveries of another as one’s own in written work submitted for assessment. To copy sentences, phrases or even striking expressions without acknowledgement of the source (either by inadequate citation or failure to indicate verbatim quotations), is plagiarism; to paraphrase without acknowledgement is likewise plagiarism. Where such copying or paraphrasing has occurred, the mere mention of the source in the bibliography shall not be deemed sufficient acknowledgement; each such instance must be referred specifically to its source. Verbatim quotations must be either in inverted commas, or indented, and directly acknowledged’. The University of Sussex’s penalties for those caught plagiarising include the work being disqualified, if it is the first instance of plagiarism, and not receiving a mark, and, if it is not the first case, ‘being disqualified from the University for at least three years’. Foster commented, “If I were the parent of a student [at the University of Sussex] who had received harsh penalties for plagiarism, and then saw online that a Professor did (what appeared to be) the exact same thing (or worse!) as my kid had, and then the uni did nothing, I would be fuming”. UCL and the University of Reading have similar standards.
Select Committee submission requirements also preclude the use of already published work. In a bullet-pointed section headed ‘Dos and dont's for writing your evidence’, the guidance says not to ‘send us material that has already been published’. Under the section heading ‘Ten top tips: how to write really useful evidence’ it adds, ‘We can't accept evidence that has already been published, or that is intended to be published elsewhere, but you can quote from or refer to published material’. Additional information is provided in the Guide for witnesses giving written or oral evidence to a House of Commons select committee: ‘Material already published elsewhere should not form the basis of a submission, but may be referred to within or attached to a submission, in which case it should be clearly referenced’.
For those concerned about this potential plagiarism, the issue goes further than academic misconduct. The gravity is increased because of who the evidence was submitted to and for what purpose. Freedman, Stock and Sullivan are vocal opponents of trans rights, submitting potentially sloppy evidence to Parliament that could negatively impact the lives of trans people. “I think this is actually serious”, commented Peterson. “They are presenting themselves to Parliament as experts, centrally on statistical matters, and then lift someone else’s work when asked to back that up”.
In response to Peterson’s concerns, Professor Alice Sullivan, in a now deleted tweet, said, “Loony grad student, best ignored”.
Doughty Street Chambers barrister Simon Cox replied to Sullivan, “Instead of disparaging a student critic as a “loony”, Professor, shouldn’t you answer her underlying concern? Was your submission presented to Parliament as if the language was the choice of the expert authors when much of it is an inadequately credited cut-and-paste?”
There are questions about the quality of the evidence submitted beyond potential plagiarism. In 2015, Dr Cecilia Dhejne, the lead author of the 2011 “Swedish study” Freedman, Stock and Sullivan mention in their submissions to the Select Committee, said the study’s data is often misrepresented by people to support spurious claims about trans people: for instance, the claim that trans women commit the same types of crime as cis (i.e., non-trans) men (particularly with the inference that trans women are likely to sexually assault cis women). As the summary at the end of the interview with Dhejne emphasises, “No, the study does not prove that trans women are rapists or likely to be rapists. […] No, the study does not prove that trans women … were convicted of the same types of crime as cis men”.
Other academics have specifically questioned Freedman, Stock and Sullivan’s submission to the Women and Equalities Select Committee. Dr Ruth Pearce wrote to the Committee to inform them of what she described as ‘inaccuracies in oral evidence’ that were ‘demonstrably untrue’. The barrister Professor Alex Sharpe wrote to the Committee saying, ‘some of the claims made and ‘evidence’ relied on’ in Freedman, Stock and Sullivan’s oral submission ‘raise significant concerns’. Pearce’s and Sharpe’s written evidence can be read in full on the Parliament website.
Professor Kathleen Stock was awarded an OBE in the 2021 New Years Honours for ‘services to Higher Education’.
