A few thoughts occur to me immediately from the framing alone. 1. To the best of my knowledge, Kathleen Stock has not actually worked on a university campus for years. More importantly, university campuses are not representative samples of young people in general. If your impression of an entire generation is being formed largely by who you happen to notice at Pride events, universities and on social media, you have already introduced some fairly heroic sampling bias. 2. We also no longer hide physically disabled people away as though their mobility aids are something shameful that should remain invisible. Young disabled people are more likely to participate openly in public life, use aids when they need them, and customise those aids rather than trying to disguise them. Greater visibility is not necessarily greater prevalence. 3. Walking sticks are hardly an exotic sight in Britain anyway. Roughly a fifth of the population is over 65, and I live in a town where the proportion is closer to 30 per cent. We are surrounded by mobility aids because we have an ageing population. That makes the attempt to present the walking stick itself as some strange new cultural artefact feel especially peculiar. 4. And I have a nagging suspicion that, once I finally get behind the paywall, Stock's case will turn out to rest on some combination of selective statistics, anecdotal observation and whatever material her social-media algorithm keeps feeding back to her. The crucial question is very simple: has anybody actually established that there has been a significant increase in young women using walking sticks? Because before you start theorising about why something is happening, you really ought to establish that it is happening in the first place. Otherwise we are in the wonderfully circular territory of: I have noticed lots of young women with walking sticks, therefore there must be lots more young women with walking sticks, and now I require a theory explaining the increase I have inferred from noticing them.