Another post attacking gender-critical feminists at Daily Nous…an exceptionally bad one this time.
It starts badly.
The following is a guest post* by three philosophers who wish to remain anonymous (though their identity is known to me).
As many people have been pointing out on Twitter – this is Jason Weinberg allowing three authors to be anonymous while they attack named people. Isn’t there something a little skeevy about that?
But also…
The current crop of trans-exclusionary “gender-critical” philosophers is first and foremost an activist movement. Their writings and behavior are best understood as aimed at achieving their activist ends, such as preventing trans women from using facilities designated for women, or making it more difficult for trans women to be legally recognized as women. Like other activists, they will denigrate or vilify their opponents, make use of dogwhistles, appeal to people’s baser emotions to increase support for their cause, and ignore inconvenient facts. Far from being worthwhile contributions to a scholarly discussion, their writings rehash discredited claims from the 1980s (if not earlier), express demeaning and offensive ideas about trans people, and inhibit truly careful, critical, and thoughtful scholarly debate.
The claim that they are three philosophers becomes hard to believe. Three philosophers wrote that?
We don’t want to advance a view about the correct way to respond to these writings. We understand the worry that suppressing them could do more harm than good. Our main point is that readers need to understand that the central problem is not how to uplift the message of “gender-critical” voices, but how to understand them as activists, and how to manage content that is disrespectful, fear-mongering, and misleading, while avoiding harm to the scholarly community.
Nawwwwwww, come on, they’re pulling our leg, they’re not philosophers.
But it gets worse.
It’s disrespectful to publicly speculate about your colleagues’ genitals, about whether you wish to have sex with them, or about who else wishes to have sex with them. This kind of speculation creates a hostile environment, and does not conduce to legitimate academic debate. And yet, we often see “gender critical” philosophers scrutinizing trans people’s bodies and sexualities in inappropriate ways.
Consider Kathleen Stock’s recent lecture for the Aristotelian Society, which discusses whether lesbians would or should want to have sex with trans women. Stock objects to “two conclusions” typically drawn by her opponents.
The first conclusion effectively says that a lesbian, understood as subject with a ‘female gender’ who is disposed to desire others with a ‘female gender’, might, as such, straightforwardly and repeatedly experience attraction to trans women as part of the normal terms of their own orientation, even under ideal conditions (see for instance, Chuck Tate 2012). The second is that any trans woman who is exclusively attracted to others with a ‘female gender’ counts as a lesbian (Chuck Tate 2012; Sharpe 2019). In other words, biologically male people can be the objects of genuine lesbian desire, and even can be lesbians themselves.
There are many reasons to be wary of such claims… But the main point to take away from present discussion is that such claims look confused.
Stock appears to be making the following two claims:
- Trans women are not objects of genuine lesbian desire (although lesbians might under “abnormal” or “non-ideal” circumstances experience sexual desire for trans women).
- Trans women cannot be lesbians.
There’s no reason for academic philosophers to publicly debate the sexual desirability of trans people in this way. This is something we can all sort out in our own private lives.
No. These are not philosophers. Not possible.
At the end:
Comments are closed here, but readers are welcome to discuss this post on Twitter (#DNrecognizing) as well as on the Facebook update for this post.
That’s nice. The authors are anonymous but they get to name their targets, and comments are closed. Hold still while I punch you.
Comments
16 responses to “How to uplift the message”
Trans people are the ones who brought it up, you lying numpties. Trans people are the ones judging lesbians for not being interested in trans “women” as sexual partners.
How can people be this self-blind?
So, like trans rights activists?
I am afraid it is. Are you not aware of the distinguished scholars of the Philosophy Department of the University of Wooloomooloo (Sydney)? Or of their seven faculty rules?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruces_sketch
Not exactly the most charitable expression of gender-critical beliefs, is it? Gender-critical feminists aren’t at all motivated by protecting, respecting, or providing justice for women. All they care about is being mean to trans people.
Um. All people writing on this topic – or any other for that matter – are writing to get their point of view across to the reader, whoever that may be. If this makes a writer an activist (more on that below), it makes all writers activists, gender critical feminists and gender accepting TRAs equally.
And, writing with a point of view on a political matter does not make one an activist. Organising, attending, and/or calling for calling for: rallies, protests, town halls, community events, speaking engagements… is what makes someone an activist. Yet another casualty in the continued erosion of words having meanings.
Also, this reminds me of those apologists who try to reverse positions with evolution, saying things like “evolution is the one that requires faith, creation is the one well supported by evidence”… do they even realise they are implicitly attacking their own position?
!!!
OH MY GOD THE SELF BLINDNESS
Everything must be trans centered, don’t you know? Defending women and girls (against THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER HAPPENED AND NEVER WILL HAPPEN! SHUT UP !SHUT UP! SHUT UP!) is just a pretext to attack trans identified men./s
Translation: we can’t rebut them on the merits of their points, so we will denigrate them anonymously instead. They are bad people; don’t engage with them, just shun them.
Stock’s actual position is easy to find, as it is at the top of the linked-to text:
Subtle hints added. Stock asserts that sexual attraction is about biological sex. She is absolutely not “[debating] the sexual desirability of trans people”. Is this incompetence at understanding her point, or dishonesty in representing it?
Given this:
I think that you’re being much too generous by asking this:
I don’t think it’s a question at all. It’s pure dishonesty. Stock’s points are much too dangerous to be presented honestly, much too dangerous to be given space to be heard. The demonization and vilification of gender critical feminists is an attempt to have their arguments denied any hearing at all. It also means that TRAs don’t have to do the work of addressing their actual arguments od defending their own position. Just a fcutting and pasting a few dozen lines of TWAW is all they need to do. Case closed.
I have questions.
What happened to ‘transwomen are, and always have been biologically female’? When did ‘transwomens’ bodies are womens’ bodies’ vanish like a desert mirage? Why do I get the feeling they’re making this shit up on the fly?
It still amazes me that a few years have turned absolute commonplaces into vile heresy.
1999:
Speaker: Lesbians are (potentially) sexually attracted to people of the female sex.
Audience: Well… yeah? And?
2019:
Speaker: Lesbians are (potentially) sexually attracted to people of the female sex.
Audience: SHUN HER! SHAME HER! BURN HER!
I get the impression that it’s a mix of ex falso quodlibet and lying for Jesus.
In the first case, if you have a contradiction somewhere in your argument or set of beliefs/assumptions, you can derive literally anything, even A ∧ ¬A. The core transgender claim, being at odds with material reality, is a contradiction of a sort, and from it everything follows. But not everything at once (because knowledge isn’t closed under known entailment) and not even consistently across time.
In the second case, well, you know.
There should be a term, like Godwinning for Nazis, for Orwelling a thread. Well, here goes.
An “umbrella” that can have both trans identified men, who perform extreme versions of what they think passes for femininty, and non-binary people, who reject “masculine” and “feminine” altogether is a mighty flexible umbrella. It’s not important that it’s coherent or make sense, because it doesn’t. What is important that one agrees, and submits, and attacks those who do not.
I do love Stock’s response, though:
https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1158888028204687361
So, hang on a second.
If I see someone who appears to be (or, if you prefer, “is presenting as”) female, and find “her” attractive, but it turns out that “she” identifies as male, does that make me bisexual?
And if I don’t know for sure the gender identity of all of the outwardly-presenting-as-females who I’ve ever found attractive, am I some sort of Schroedinger’s Bisexual — simultaneously hetero and bi, to be determined only upon ascertaining the gender identity of all such people?
@Screechy Monkey:
Yes, this is one of the things that steadfastly refuses to make any sense to me.
I can’t stop thinking about this. How could it even work if people were actually attracted to gender identity?
Gender identity, we are always told, isn’t about anatomy and it’s not about conventions of appearance, presentation, or behavior.
So it would be impossible to feel an attraction to anyone whose gender identity hadn’t yet been disclosed to you.
And we can’t say you’re attracted to people’s presumed gender identities. Because gender identities are divorced from anything that is perceptible, there is no basis on which to presume anyone’s gender identity.
And yet we are capable of experiencing attraction to people we don’t know.