A PROFESSOR who resigned amid transphobia allegations has broken her silence - claiming she has been bullied by colleagues.

It comes after Kathleen Stock stepped down from her role as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Sussex last week.

The professor has been repeatedly accused of transphobia over the past month for her views on gender identity, with a group of students actively campaigning for her to be fired.

Earlier this month, the University of Sussex said the institution would not tolerate threats to “academic freedoms”.

But last week, Prof Stock said she will be leaving her job after “an absolutely horrible time” – 18 years after joining the university staff.

In her first interviews since resigning, Prof Stock suggested some academics may have fuelled student protests against her.

She told BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour: “I don’t know that the student activity would be there if the colleague activity already hadn’t been there.

“There’s a small group of people who are absolutely opposed to the sorts of things I say and instead of getting involved in arguing with me using reason, evidence, the traditional university methods, they tell their students in lectures that I pose a harm to trans students.

“Or they go on to Twitter and say that I’m a bigot. So thus, creating an atmosphere in which the students then become much more extreme and much more kind of empowered to do what they did.

“I’m not saying that they intentionally set out to cause this end point, but I do think that academics are treated by students as role models quite often.”

She told Woman’s Hour this week that there is a “small number” of academics at the University of Sussex who are “quite extreme”.

Prof Stock claimed they “radically misrepresent” her views in departmental meetings.

She said: “The recent student activity against me has been pretty intense obviously and that’s what everyone’s seen, but it’s really the end point in three-and-a-half years of low-level bullying and harassment and reputation trashing from colleagues and I’ve just had enough of it.”

Prof Stock also did a 50-minute interview with online magazine Unherd.

During this interview, she said a barrage of “intimidating” behaviour led to her fleeing campus.

“They were setting off flares. And they later took a picture of a man in a balaclava, all in black, looking just like Antifa,” she said.

“I ran back to the station, got the train home, tried to teach a class on Zoom, burst into tears and my dear students said I must be having a tough day and they let me off.

“It was the beginning of the end of the campaign to intimidate me out of my job.”

The interview was conducted by Julie Bindel, who has also been criticised by trans rights activists.

During the interview, Prof Stock said her resignation acts as a symbol for similar issues around the world.

“It’s not just what’s happened in the high-profile cases like you and me. It’s what’s happening in every institution, not just universities, to women who feel like they’re choking,” she said.

“They cannot get their words out — or if they do, then they’re put through complaints systems, they’re socially ostracised, they are told by their bosses, ‘we’re watching your Twitter feed'.

"There’s just this feeling of surveillance that is unacceptable.”

In January, hundreds of academics criticised the decision to make Prof Stock an OBE for services to higher education.

In an open letter, the philosophers condemned academics who use their status to “further gender oppression” and said they denounced “transphobia in all its forms”.

Prof Stock has previously said she is “at odds” with some academics as she believes gender identity is not more important than facts about biological sex “particularly when it comes to law and policy”.