Constructive, supportive dialogue
How can we do more? More more more? The situation is desperate; we must do more.
The profession being discussed is philosophy (i.e. the university job).
After reading several accounts by transgender colleagues reporting very negative experiences in the profession–accounts that a number of other trans colleagues wrote on social media cohere with their own experiences–Helen and I commissioned the following guest post on ways to support our trans peers better. We hope the post will lead to constructive, supportive dialogue on this important issue – as we believe that our profession should be a welcoming and supportive place for all of its members, particularly those who have been marginalized and who experience the profession as less welcoming that it should be.
Which of course doesn’t mean women. Women are not and have never been marginalized, and they do not and never have experienced the profession as less welcoming than it should be.
Supporting Our Transgender Peers in Philosophy
By Isela González Vázquez, Jules Holroyd, and Rory Wilson
Department of Philosophy, The University of Sheffield
Many of us will have been saddened to read the two pieces – here and here – from trans students describing their experiences within academic philosophy. While we strongly disagree with the views of ‘gender critical’ philosophers, and are grateful to those who have engaged with their arguments, that’s not what we want to do in this post. We don’t want to add more fuel to the flames here. Instead, we want to ensure there is space to discuss the kinds of support we should be making available to trans staff and students. What we can do better? How can we, academic philosophers, cis and transgender, together support trans staff and students within our departments and within our discipline?
And how can we make sure to let gender critical feminists know we don’t support them right at the outset?
Jumping way ahead (it’s a long piece, as is only right for this Most Important Subject of All) –
In addition, there are some basic support measures that each of us, as individuals, could work towards on a daily basis:
- Adopting the general practice of considering the specific needs of transgender individuals. Crucial here is respecting gender identity. Misgendering, or the act of referring to a person with gendered language that does not match their gender identity is frequently encountered by transgender individuals. Whether intentional or not the act can serve to make a trans person feel a host of negative emotions.
- Often advice around misgendering is to ask people their pronouns outright. We believe this is not always the best approach as especially in the context of a classroom, asking such a question can be experienced as harmful in its own right. A person you are asking might be not out, so the asking of the question of pronouns makes them either come out not on their own terms or position them to misgender themselves. It also could put someone in a position of being unsafe if there are others who have intent to do harm to this person on finding out this information.
- A better approach is one of respecting gender identity as a matter of privacy. Always use pronouns that a person voluntarily shares with you.
Never ever misgender anyone. Don’t ask people what gender they are. Look out!
Have a nice day.
To beat my usual drum, this is an illustration of collective Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s the social mirror of how it is to deal with a Borderline person individually. It’s impossible by design, inherently.
Treat me right—but don’t ever ask me what “right treatment” means.
Know instinctively what I want you to do, and don’t ever be wrong.
Say the words I want you to say, but do not give any hint that you may not know them already. Your ignorance will be taken as an aggression against Me.
If the rules change midstream, you’re wrong.
This is abusive, and it’s insane. Dealing with it in real life as many of us have, in just one person we love, can lead to physical and mental crisis, sickness, suffering.
Watching it happen collectively in a professional setting makes my blood turn to ice. There is nothing even a little bit whimsical, funny, or “roll your eyes at them” about this. It’s the definition of a hostile workplace, a hostile field, even. It’s quite literally psychopathic.
And, along with all that…the abusiveness itself apparently convinces all these “allies” that the need is desperate and the rights are absolute and the critics and doubters are demonic fiends.
Why do I keep thinking of cuckoos when I read these posts?
It’s intensely frustrating. I think it works so well on “allies” for the same reason abusive spouses/parents are invisible to those outside the family, even when the kids try to tell on them.
Most people simply don’t believe in the existence of humans with such distorted, evil-minded characters. It’s so extreme to them that they think to themselves, if they think at all, “This MUST mean they’re in deeper pain than I can even conceive of. No one would say this if it weren’t true, because saying it if it weren’t true would mean the victim is actually a very bad person of the type that only exists in TV shows.
Shorter: Just World Fallacy.
It’s very difficult to believe. I say this from experience. I keep being surprised. Over and over and over and over. I understand what you’re saying (for example) yet it seems to have no effect on that surprise.
Maybe it’s not so much just world fallacy as…bumbler fallacy? “We’re all just bumbling around, trying to do our best but fucking it up a lot”? I think that’s approximately my subconscious starting position, with “all” understood to mean not actually all, but the generality.
Oh, it’s continually vexing, yes. How could it not be? One can intellectually know how this works, but that doesn’t make one’s moral feelings congruent, necessarily. It still outrages. It still makes one say, “How can this be possible?”
And people are different. These things no longer shock me or surprise me; I expect them. I think I’ve had the shock beaten out of me a long time ago. That’s just how it turned out for me, and it turned out differently for you, etc.
Most would say my p.o.v is “cynical”. I expect the worst, I expect amoral behavior, and I expect that even innocent and well-meaning people will be totally fooled by one of these types in such a way that intent no longer matters. And yep, I can go overboard on that. But on balance I think it’s served me better than the opposite choice. If there’s a happy medium I don’t know how to find it.
Sooner or later, offices/workplaces/fields like this collapse under their own weight. The narcs and borderlines start killing each other (sometimes literally).
But it’s only an episodic cessation or crumbling. The next set of employees/colleagues/administrators will re-enact the dynamic in their own way, so it’s nothing but a cycle with brief reprieves. There’s no happier day to hope for. Not in our politics, our intellectual endeavors, our fields, anything.
OK that’s quite enough, and thank you.
It turns out everything is episodic: political progress and everything. The new rising generation thinks it has discovered everything and then the next rising generation thinks that and the next and the next and the next so it’s sane people versus the Adrian Harrops all the way down.
I’m not a Woke Bloke. I’m just a middle-aged man who wants to be thoughtful and decent. I am at least moderately interested in other people’s lives. I can’t get over the breath-taking cluelessness or insistent lack of sympathy (or both) when it comes to recognizing the experiences of women in academia, business, entertainment, athletics, etc. etc. etc. Do these “philosophers” and activists really not know how frequently (incessantly?) women are demeaned, ignored, sexualized, and back-burnered? Can they really be this ignorant of the decades-long feminist project? Where the hell have they been? What are they doing? Are trans people really the first to face obstacles or indignities? (And let’s ignore the irony: as soon as they experience treatment they find disrespectful, it’s as though TRAs say, “I’m a woman in every way, and yet people are not seeing me as I’d like to be seen! You ‘cis’ women have no idea!”)
One thing that strikes me about this earnest nonsense is that it’s so wordy, yet says very little. “Let’s support our transgender colleagues!” “How?” “Well, don’t misgender them. (But.) Also center them in everything. Keep Transgender Persons in the forefront of your consciousness at all times, scorn TERFS, and remember that TRANSFOLX ARE THE GENDER THEY SAY THEY ARE.”
That’s about it, but it requires saying over and over again, plus meetings.
Since when is disagreement shunned purely on the basis of “it makes the disagreed-with feel bad”?
@Josh:
I’ve certainly noticed this in myself, specifically with the idea of people telling lesbians that they have to have sex with men if they say they’re women. The idea is very clearly the absolute apex of all this absurdity and so trivially refuted that it’s hard to believe anyone has entertained it for even an instant.
When I first heard about it, I figured it was satire or exaggeration. Then when I spotted it in the wild I assumed it was a fringe view held by one or two bonkers people. But I’ve since seen it taken seriously in quite a few places.
Every time I come across it, I feel like that Star Trek robot that exploded because Kirk tricked it into a contradiction.
“The specific needs of transgender people,” and the very first, top, most crucial and important NEED is “don’t misgender.” Really? That’s the most important “special need”?
Not equal pay, not equal promotion opportunity, not personal safety, not protection from hiring discrimination, not physical or economic safety.
Pffft. BORING. Those are everyone else’s needs. Nothing special there. Getting people to recognize and validate your delusion? Priceless. If you can get people to believe the impossible, the rest comes easily. You just demand it. People will come running to offer support, and offer things that are not theirs to give, like women only spaces. Seems to work with philosophers. And police. And prisons. And sporting authorities. And swimmining pools…
I managed to screw up the blockquote @11. But I’m sure you can work it out for yourselves ;)
Josh’s and Ophelia’s ‘episodic’ remarks got me thinking about something else that historically repeats itself. Whether it’s on a large or small scale, when a group of people with otherwise disparate interests come together to overthrow a rival group, one thing is almost certain to happen. If the disparate group is successful, once the perceived enemy is overcome and there are no outsiders left to fight, the group will turn on itself, with each factor vying for the top position.
The Crusades are one excellent example, when the nobility of Europe stopped killing each other and united to march on the Holy Land to free it from the ‘Musselman’ invaders. The one time they were successful in driving out the Muslim forces (under Saladin, if memory serves), the crusading nobles immediately turned on each other in order, all previous agreements forgotten, to vye for the position of ‘King of Jerusalem’. Some of the minor or weaker nobles simply packed up and left in a hissy fit, the others had their followers fighting for their own leaders, and so on. The upshot was, of course, that the focus on fighting each other took attention away from the muslim armies, giving them the opportunity to sit back in peace whilst they regained strength enough to eventually sweep back through the Holy Land in vast numbers, defeating and driving out the Europeans.
A more recent, possibly tongue-in-cheek example would be PZs ‘Horde’, who will unite to shit-pile on any ‘outsider’ who happens in and says something unwoke, but who get bored when things are quiet, so start policing each other in a contest to be the wokiest of the woke.
If history continues to repeat, I can foresee that if the TRA’s are successful in getting all they want (and the way that officialdom is crumbling before them, that possibility looks increasingly likely), it won’t be long before they begin to compete with each other for superiority. The only question is what the divisions will be. My guess is that the surgically transitioned will split from the ‘visually’ transitioned, but only after staying together to defeat the self-declarers who don’t even try to look feminine. That will brobably happen after they all remove themselves from the LGB part of the letter salad, having no more need of those and their other cis-allies.
AoS – another thing that has happened is that, in some ways, the woke are in alliance with the most unwoke of all, the religious right, to drive women out of any level of protection and rights. This is an unspoken alliance, of course, and we (the ‘TERFs’) are accused by TRAs of being the ones in alliance with the religious right (and to be sure, the religious right does dislike trans intensely), so this may be a bigger, bloodier battle than anyone can imagine. In the end, someone will need to come in and clean up the mess.
Since cleaning is usually left to the women, does that mean we will get to have our turn, finally? No, I imagine they’ll find another way to push women into the kitchen and bedroom.
The problem is that women have been fighting against each other for so long, with the conservative women, the “I’m not feminist, but…” women, the various “wave” feminists, and now the “woke” women.
While this accounts for Karen White and co. is there any substantial body of TRA writing that’s willing to say this out loud? I suppose there may be a few Lesbians out there who might ‘date’ bearded, be-penised, ‘wimmin;’ has anyone suggested that this is an obligation?
Yes, John. That’s why I said it.
I’m not aware of any ‘substantial bodies’ making it a policy, but it is not difficult to stumble across people who seem sincerely convinced that lesbians shouldn’t get to decide what sort of sex organs they interact with.
For the most part (as far as I’ve seen) this takes the form of shaming women who are uninterested in penises, but I’ve seen some astoundingly hyperbolic posts and articles insisting that such discrimination should be unlawful.
My point wasn’t that it’s a mainstream view, but that – like you – I was highly skeptical that this was really a thing. And I was wrong.
Josh, it’s not that people are calling on lesbians to compulsorily have sex with men-calling-themselves-women, it’s that all lesbians who are not willing to do so are bigots. Same for heterosexual men unwilling to do so, though the anger at them is relatively muted.
@AoS:
As far as I know, that never doesn’t happen. As we know, it is happening fractally in movement skepticism/atheism.
The comments at Pharyngula are a good example, but the ones at David Futrelle’s place are often much worse. *NOBODY* is woker than those buggers. I was once roundly condemned for using the phrase “holy cocksucking christ” to express frustration at some horrible thing an MRA or incel or someone did. I was deemed unacceptable because actually there are actual people who suck actual cocks actually and… somehow I was saying those people are bad. Of course, I was simply using blasphemy to make a point that swear words alone couldn’t quite make but my attempts to explain this fell on woke ears.
I enjoy David’s blog (although the most commonly-used word there these days is “cis”) but the commentariat there will turn on each other with no provocation at all in the blink of an eye to prove that they are more wokier than thou.
It doesn’t seem terribly constructive.
AoS, I would suggest that that has already taken place within LGBTetc activism, or is beginning to. The T of LGBT has declared itself superior to the others already, and is in the process of attacking the L at the moment.
@Holms, #19:
There are certainly some people strongly implying that lesbians ought to be compelled to have sex with the bepinised whether they want to or not. In their minds, calling penis-exlusionary radical lesbians bigots is insufficient and legal measures are entirely appropriate.
I have no idea how they imagine this is supposed to work, but some people definitely think it should work that way regardless.
As I said earlier, I really didn’t believe there were such people saying such things at first, but I found quite a few of them without even looking. Of course there are such people. It seems dangerous to dismiss them as fringe cranks, especially given the other batshit craziness everyone seems to be asking us to accept as normal.
Definitely a thing. Google “riley j. dennis magdalen berns” for some background.
I was once condemned there for referring to my own history of anorexia as a negative because I lost too much weight, fainted all the time, and was on a crash course toward death. The idea that I could suggest I was underweight was roundly criticized, even though I was dying. Even though people often die from anorexia and its complications. I was “body shaming” myself.
And others who insist (1) this isn’t happening; and (2) it’s the fault of the lesbians for being such bigots as to be attracted to someone and then back off once they discover that someone has a male body.
These arguments sometimes start with the idea that what is being condemned is a lesbian who is attracted to someone, gets happily ready for sex with a person who has fully transitioned and has no penis anymore, then discovers the someone is trans and says whoa. This, they inform me, is not a person simply choosing who they want to have sex with, but someone expressing transphobia. Then they move seamlessly to number two, without acknowledging that they are moving to number two, still pretending they are referencing number one (the fully transitioned non-penis-having transwoman), without ever, ever, ever being willing to acknowledge that, even in the case described, everyone is entitled to decide who they do or do not want to have sex with and on whatever basis that decision is made.
In the end, they remind me (again) of the followers of Jordan Peterson and the enforced monogamy and demands that women have sex with incels, while denying that they are saying anything about enforced (while using the word enforced) and that they aren’t really arguing for the forced redistribution of women, just that women should quit being so choosy and must have sex with these poor, unhappy incels.
In both cases, it comes down to the same thing: Male unhappiness must be resolved, even if it is at the expense of female happiness and freedom. (I suspect it is the case that males must be made happy especially if it is at the expense of female happiness and freedom).
Sorry about the apostrophe error in the last sentence. A rogue apostrophe was roaming around looking for someplace to jump into the wrong spot, and chose my post. (well, that’s my story. I’m sticking with it).
#25: They’re buggers like that, although over here they tend to roam around in gangs. Their favourite target seems to be grocers’ shops, where they attack innocent price label’s.
I wonder if it’s ever occurred to TRAs that the reason for all the opprobrium they apparently suffer has less to do with the ‘trans’ part and more with the ‘woman’ (q.v. the complete lack of corresponding fuss surrounding trans men).
Personally, I think it’s mostly to do with the ‘self-centred arsehole’ part.
Funny, that, because I used to see Dave’s comments section as a Horde training ground. I haven’t bothered reading the comments there for a couple of years, let alone commenting, because the last time I did comment I posed a hypothetical scenario for one of them as a way of showing that their view on the military was somewhat short-sighted. Aside from several commenters doing the Horde thing of deliberately misunderstanding me and attacking their own false interpretation, the person I addressed told me that my hypothetical situation was stupid because it had never happened before. I haven’t bothered commenting since then simply because I don’t see the point in banging my head against a wall.
@Ikn:
That doesn’t surprise me. I bet we’ve all been told off in various places for calling people or positions crazy or something along those lines. It is unacceptable to say that people who react in a way that makes no sense and/or is contra to the way things actually work might have a point.
However, your apostrophe is unacceptable and you are no longer welcome here.
I hope you’ve all realized that David Futrelle has shown you exactly what kind of amoral character he has, though I have a sinking feeling some don’t.
This is not a man of good character. This is an egotistical prick who’s made a name for himself as a niche commentator, and has made it clear that he is willing to back the most outrageous and fascistic trans demands. He will countenance and support any level of abuse against women in his commentariat.
He is not a woke dude. He’s a misogynist in cheap sheepskin. This shouldn’t be difficult to see at this point–at all.
That last was more acerbic than it should have been. I’m sorry.
I do mean that it ought to be obvious what Futrelle is really like by now, but I shouldn’t have been so mean about it.
Whew, I’m glad you added that, I was just trying to figure out how to say it without erm coming across as Madam Scoldy.
I think Futrelle means well or at least thinks he does. Most of his posts are well researched and nobody exposes the various excesses of the manosphere like he does, kudos for that.
But he does tend toward the bus-throwing, doesn’t he? Every mention of actual women has to come with an attached “cis”. Almost all of his posts are about misogyny, but he seems terrified to admit that it’s actual women who are the target of the misogyny he reports.
I do think he means well. I have several complaints with how he goes about it.
Ophelia, the intrepid apostrophe fighter, has overcome the rogue apostrophe. It has now been sent to the fate it deserves, leaving my comment to stand alone and make those who aren’t familiar with this commentariat wonder what the hell I was talking about.
I found the comment amusing and couldn’t bring myself to delete it. A little mystification is good for people!
AoS @#15:
“That will brobably happen” after T remove themselves from LGB.
Hilarious typo. I roared.
Fortuity is my comedy god, maddog.