Pass the marge
Vile colleagues part 2.
“While you claim to support the right of trans people to live freely, in practice your behavior does not support this right. Since 2020 you have published a number of academic articles, as well as one book, arguing against trans inclusivity.”
Excuse me excuse me – what does the second sentence have to do with the first? The right to live freely is not a synonym for inclusivity, and vice versa.
Philosophers of all people are required to be very precise about this kind of thing. That’s their job. Living freely is one thing, and “inclusivity” aka being included is another. They don’t even overlap. In some ways they’re in tension with each other. Being included tends to require giving up some freedom. If you freely shout insults all the time you’re not likely to be included much. So are these colleagues of Byrne’s even thinking here? Or are they just summoning the usual string of clichés and platitudes?
Yeah it’s that last one.
Furthermore I’m betting he didn’t “argue against trans inclusivity” at all…unless by “inclusivity” they mean not included in the human family, not-ostracized, that kind of thing, but rather included in definitions.
Is that what they mean? Is that what they all mean? That definitions are the same kind of thing as friendship groups? That it’s mean and cruel and cold to excloood people from their chosen self-definitions, no matter how wack those definitions are?
And this is in the philosophy department?
Give me strength.
I assumed philosophers were more likely to reject trans ideology than others in the humanities.
I’m not sure if I was wrong (I’d have to see statistics on experts in literature, history, and so forth) but I was overconfident.
I didn’t. I think philosophy departments are as riddled with conformity and fashion-following as the other humanities departments.
Professor Alex Byrne points out in his book Trouble with Gender and his interviews on podcasts that sadly what Ophelia wrote in #2 is the case.
He points to demands that his book and Prof. Holly Lawford-Smith’s books not be published, what happened to Prof. Kathleen Stock, and to Prof. Rebecca Tuvel.
One excerpt: “Philosophers who specialize in ethics love these kinds of questions. They are also highly motivated to work on new and sexy ethical topics, such as racial bias in AI algorithms, rather than plough the same old furrows, such as the permissibility of abortion. One might have expected, then, a lively debate in the philosophical literature over puberty blockers…. If any ethicists in philosophy were sceptical about trends in the treatment of gender dysphoric youth, they kept it to themselves…. The sole exception to the absence of robust philosophical debate over transgender social/ethical issues was in the niche area of the philosophy of sport.”
From Byrne’s Preface: “Surely all that philosophizing about sex and gender must have produced some gold, or at least shed some light? In my opinion, not very much. Despite their reputation in some quarters as unflinching logical thinkers, philosophers have done little to diminish the nonsense surrounding sex and gender and in some cases have even managed to increase it. I wrote this book partly to counteract these failings.”
Great stuff. I need to read his book!
I should get his book, too.
I mentioned in a related post that Byrne has written a response (PDF here) to that open letter, and it is excellent. Perhaps a favorite excerpt is this paragraph that is part of the response to the “domain of expertise” charge (bolding mine):