I confess that I don’t understand the risks
From a comment on a guest post at Daily Nous, “When Tables Speak”: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy by Talia Mae Bettcher (who is a trans woman):
TMB suggests that trans people “find these same erasures and invalidations perpetuated within a philosophical context,” referring to being abused, assaulted, and stripped. But those things do not happen within philosophical contexts, or in any case asking whether trans women are women is not doing these things. She continues: “To invite me to a philosophical forum in which I prove my womanhood is to do something far different from inviting me to share my views on mathematical Platonism. Do you understand the risks?” I confess that I don’t understand the risks. What are they? I’d be very surprised to hear that inviting trans women to philosophical fora where they prove their womanhood has a lot of causal impact on the abuse, assault, etc. that trans women suffer outside of philosophical fora. I’d be even more surprised to hear that any causal link had been established by empirical inquiry.
That’s what I was saying (over and over again) on that post last week about (ironically, or inevitably, or both) the misogyny of the response to women trying to talk about what we mean by “identify as” and similar jargon. It’s both funny and disgusting that the basic point was “we can’t even discuss this without getting shouted at and bullied, which makes it hard even to discuss it” and that it instantly sparked comment after comment full of shouting and bullying and subject changing and accusation, as if to underline the very point I was making. And it all started with, basically, DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE RISKS?
The risks of writing about it on a blog? No, I don’t understand those risks, because I don’t believe they exist. I think saying that is saying “shut up or else.” Nothing more.
1. It’s not as though philosophy is singling out trans people. Doesn’t philosophy, on some level, challenge the nature of everything and everyone? What does it mean to be human, to be a good person. Do you have free will, does a god exist, etc. I don’t doubt that some of those questions and discussions may be uncomfortable for some people — there are folks who really get agitated at the suggestion that free will doesn’t exist, and of course we all know examples of theists getting genuinely emotionally hurt and outraged at the suggestion that their god isn’t real.
2. I’m not trying to belittle the idea that someone may experience genuine emotional pain from hearing a frank philosophical discussion of a subject that is personally painful for them. I don’t doubt that some trans people don’t want any part of a discussion about gender theory. I’m sure that parents of children with leukemia would be hurt by hearing clinical discussions among oncologists of treatment protocols and survival rates. But it’s hardly a radical free speech proposition to suggest that those are reasons for absenting yourself from certain discussions, not for trying to stop others from having those discussions.
3. If challenging someone’s definition of gender is tantamount to abuse and bullying, then aren’t trans people (or more precisely, a certain strain of thought about trans people) “guilty” of doing the same when they challenge “traditional” definitions of gender?
Philosophy does at least treat everything as subject to analysis.
And the claims of trans dogma are increasingly counterintuitive and bizarre, which surely ought to make them especially subject to analysis, as opposed to especially subject to angry silencing. Trans people don’t exclusively own words like “identity” and “experience” and “feel” and “sex” and “gender”; we all have a stake in what they mean; women in particular have a massive stake in what sex and gender mean and how we understand them and talk about them.