People in his own department
Yet another witch trial under way.
…feel it necessary to speak out.
While we are not here calling for official or unofficial sanctions, we the undersigned believe that your behavior (a) perpetuates harm toward the trans community; (b) constitutes a failure to uphold your responsibilities as an academic; (c) is the result of an extremely misguided decision to collaborate with the Trump administration.
Is it still 2015? Are people still pouring out these strings of meaningless bromides and malicious accusations as if they had merit? And not just people but academics?
Note “perpetuates” – as if it were widely accepted that knowing men are not women=harm toward the tranz communniny. Note the assumption that knowing and saying men are not women=harm. Here’s a shocker: the real harm is in encouraging people to think their fantasies about themselves are not fantasies at all but reality.
Given that (a) is complete manipulative bullshit, (b) is more of the same. His responsibility as an academic does not include encouraging people to believe impossible fantasies about themselves. His vile colleagues are the ones not upholding their responsibilities as academics.
As for (c), on what basis do they “believe” the snide bit about collaborating with Trump? On the basis of malice and brain-dead conformity to the current misguided and delusional trans ideology. They’re a nasty bunch. As Steve McGuire says, they should be ashamed.
To be continued.
Imagine that Trump changed his mind (i e his strategy) on gender ideology and the department of Health and Human Services was putting out a new report on gender pediatric medicine, one which was supposed to enthusiastically endorse Affirmation and reassure the public that it was safe and necessary.
Strange then to imagine that nobody on the Left would contribute — lest they support Trump — and thus the first report must stand.
Byrne’s response (PDF here) is excellent.
Funny, but I never thought of philosophy of all disciplines as being about following trends in lockstep. I was always of the (evidently mistaken) opinion that a philosopher instinctively disagrees with anything which comes from the mind of another philosopher, precisely because philosophy seems the one pursuit which argumentative people gravitate towards, as they don’t necessarily need empirical evidence for thought experiments.
A bunch of pholosophers agreeing with one another to exclude a philosopher who disagrees with their opinion have surely disqualified themselves from the profession, yes?