How to uplift the message

Aug 6th, 2019 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

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:

  1. Trans women are not objects of genuine lesbian desire (although lesbians might under “abnormal” or “non-ideal” circumstances experience sexual desire for trans women).
  2. 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.

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