Daniel Kodsi and John Maier say Philosophers Shouldn’t Duck the Gender Debate.

Over the last decade, elite academia has uncritically embraced gender-identity ideology, according to which self-identification as a boy or girl, or a man or woman, takes priority for all practical and legal purposes over whether one actually is male or female. No doubt a contingent of true believers in gender-identity ideology exists within academia. But mantras like “trans women are women” became accepted in universities in part because many academics who don’t agree with gender-identity ideology failed to speak up against it. However expedient or harmless it may have seemed to give gender-identity ideology a free pass, doing so was a serious mistake.

I can’t really figure out how it seemed even expedient or harmless. The harms are obvious and were sharply pointed out, and the expedience is questionable. I think what it seemed was 1. the latest in the chain of overlooked victims of Prejudice and 2. one of those things you have to do if you don’t want to get yelled at. That’s expedience, I suppose.

How was our essay greeted by the discipline at large? It’s hard to tell. It kicked off a wave of discourse on social media, which crested with an article by Kathleen Stock, a prominent gender-critical philosopher, turning the screws on the cowardice of philosophers, though of course many others in academia, journalism, and medicine are implicated, too. We also received some supportive emails from far-flung individual philosophers—including a prominent, now-retired moral philosopher; an Asia-based philosopher of mathematics; and some prominent public observers of the academy.

But the primary channels for sharing professionally relevant articles—the blogs The Leiter Report, hosted by Brian Leiter, and The Daily Nous, hosted by Justin Weinberg—declined to disseminate it. As Weinberg wrote to us: “Thanks for sharing your essay with me. I finally had a chance to read it, and I’ve decided that I won’t be linking to it or posting about it at Daily Nous. I understand that this may come as a disappointment to you. One thing to note is that I get many requests to share or discuss material at DN, and I turn down a good number of them. I do not normally elaborate on these decisions. Particularly in cases in which people submit material on hot-button topics advancing positions they believe I disagree with, I’ve learned it is difficult to say anything to them, as I turn them down, that they accept as reasonable or in good faith.”

That’s so Justin Weinberg. So quietly boastful, so smug so de haut en bas. You’d think he was The New York Times or something.

On previous occasions, Weinberg has found room on his blog for an unevidenced 5,000-word post by a self-identified trans graduate student in philosophy who had decided to quit the discipline on account of alleged transphobia in the profession. Around the time that he sent us the email quoted above, among the many fresh links on his site was one to a routine by a stand-up comic who “brings up [philosophy] in his act sometimes.” More ironically, one popular recent post on Weinberg’s site, by the philosopher Elizabeth Barnes, was devoted to celebrating the importance of engaging with philosophers with whom one seriously disagrees, lest, among other things, one foster “harmful silos and echo chambers” and acquire bad or lazy philosophical habits.

Hahahahaha that’s truly funny.

What makes this regrettable is that philosophers are well positioned to contribute productively to debates about the myriad issues caught up in the sex-gender nexus. At around the same time as the Skrmetti decision was handed down, the MIT philosopher Alex Byrne wrote a Washington Post column revealing that he was one of the coauthors of a systematic review by the Department of Health and Human Services of treatments for gender dysphoria in minors. As he explained: “Philosophy overlaps with medical ethics and, when properly applied, increases understanding across the board. Philosophers prize clear language and love unravelling muddled arguments, and the writings of pediatric gender specialists serve up plenty of obscurity and confusion.”

Well that’s why it’s so necessary to protect them by banishing all critics and dissenters.

Byrne’s path has not been cost-free. Like other academic philosophers who have criticized aspects of gender-identity ideology before him—such as Kathleen Stock and Holly Lawford-Smith—he has been targeted by cancellation attempts and a hostile open letter from his academic colleagues. But his perseverance, again like that of Stock, Lawford-Smith, and others, is proof that philosophers and other academics can defy the trend of complacent adherence to gender-identity ideology.

Important clarifications need to be made, and bad arguments refuted. We hope that more of our colleagues find the courage to use their expertise to help advance the truth about sex and gender identity—not suppress or obfuscate it.

And that they then apologize.