Kathleen Stock, Mary Harrington

Kathleen Stock and Mary Harrington: When Gender Ideology Became Law

How do changing definitions of gender impact medical care? In this episode of Socrates Dialogues, philosopher and bestselling author Kathleen Stock joins Mary Harrington to examine one of the defining moral questions of our time: should society legalize assisted dying, and how do changing perceptions of gender impact this?

Stock, best known for her fearless work on gender identity and women’s rights, brings that same lens to the end-of-life debate — asking whether men and women experience pressure toward assisted death differently, how caregiving and vulnerability are gendered in ways policy rarely acknowledges, and whether the language of autonomy obscures the particular risks facing women as this option becomes normalized.

Drawing from her book Do Not Go Gentle, Stock and Harrington explore what dignity requires, what underfunded palliative care reveals about who society expects to bear suffering quietly, and what happens when death becomes another service medicine can provide. The conversation weaves together Stock’s long-standing concerns about gender and sexuality with the deeper questions of suffering, compassion, and identity at the heart of the assisted dying debate.