ONLY because of TERFs
And then this pile of fetid dingo’s kidneys by “t philosopher”:
To the academic philosophy community:
I am a trans woman and a philosophy grad student, and I have decided to leave the discipline and seek a non-academic job because of transphobia in the academy.
t p has been at it a long time, t p has published research, t p has taught undergraduate classes, t p is the real deal.
I have not chosen to quit philosophy because I have fallen out of love with the work, or I want something else to do with my life. I am leaving academia ONLY because of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) — so called “gender critical feminists” — and those who amplify their voices.
Blame the women. If you get a chance, burn them.
I am writing this letter because I want people to know that there are real, concrete, macro-level consequences to allowing hate speech to proliferate in philosophy under the guise of academic discussion. In sharing my pain and anger at being forced out of a career that I once loved, I hope to stir some of you to greater action.
Of course he does. He hopes to stir some of them to do even more shunning and bullying of women who don’t agree that men who say they are women are women. He hopes to stir them to banish those women from academic philosophy altogether. By the way, saying that men who say they are women are not women is not hate speech, it’s just stating obvious facts.
The past two years have taken a toll on my mental health because of the amount of hateful discourse regarding gender identity and “biological sex”, starting with the Hypatia/Tuvel affair, and most recently concerning the actions of Kathleen Stock and her co-conspirators, Brian Leiter, and to a lesser degree, Justin Weinberg.
Notice that “t philosopher” is anonymous, and that that doesn’t stop him naming other people in hopes of getting them shunned or expelled or both.
I think that transphobia is particularly pernicious and harmful to trans philosophers (as compared to trans folks in other non-academic careers) for a few reasons. Firstly, a significant amount of professional socialization occurs on social media among philosophers. There is an opportunity cost to professional philosophers who choose not to use social media. Philosophers who stay off Facebook and Twitter miss out on job openings, conference opportunities, and networking. However, social media is also where gender identity discourse about trans people happens. An article will appear on Medium or Daily Nous, professional philosophers will start sharing and talking about it, and then the article and related comments will appear in my feed, letting me know that once again my colleagues are debating my existence.
No they’re not. Saying a man is not a woman is not “debating his existence.” The man continues to exist despite not being a woman.
It goes on in the same vein. Stress, vulnerability, anger, pain, feeling unsafe. I wonder if he’s ever given a second’s thought to women who feel those things routinely because of the conditions of life for women.
I can easily imagine running into Kathleen Stock or some other transphobic philosopher at the APA or an invited talk. It is reasonable to consider the possibility of there being a transphobic talk at the APA or another professional event, in light of Stock’s recent invitation to the Aristotelian Society. How can I be expected to attend professional events where people deny and question such an integral part of my identity and act like that is tolerable or normal?
Won’t somebody please do something about Kathleen Stock so that this guy can have everything his own way?
How can I be expected to attend professional events and participate in a professional culture where others allow this to happen? As a trans person, I deal with oppression on a daily basis. It is not hyperbole to say that I am fighting for survival.
raises hand Yes it is! Hyperbole is exactly what it is! The whole piece is hyperbolic.
Finally, because of the very subject matter that constitutes philosophy, I am expected to tolerate constant public discourse about the nature of my gender identity, whether I “count” as a woman, and what rights I am due in virtue of my gender. I am expected to tolerate public discourse regarding the things that demonstrate other people’s respect for me as a human being. I am expected to tolerate questions about fundamental aspects of my being, questions about my legitimacy as a person.
My gender is not up for debate. I am a woman.
But if he’s telling the truth about being a trans woman (and who knows, since who knows who t philosopher is) then he’s not a woman. He doesn’t get to issue a unilateral order that his claimed “gender” is not up for debate. Even putting it in bold doesn’t make it true or binding on other people.
Then there’s a list of bolded instructions for all the ways everyone is to expel wrong-thinking women from academic philosophy.
I have strong doubts that t p is a philosophy graduate student at all.
H/t Lady Mondegreen
I have for many years found myself in situations where people debate a core part of my identity. If I acted like this about it, I would be (rightfully) told to grow up.
-I am an atheist. People often have discussions about the reality of atheism, and doubt that an atheist is really an atheist
-I am an anorexic (recovered, fortunately). I have been in many a situation where people who are slightly overweight moan and sigh and tell me they wish they had my problem, thereby dismissing real pain and a life threatening condition
-I suffer from depression and anxiety. These are disorders that no one really knows what causes at this time, and some people actually do debate that they are real
-I am a woman. Need I say more?
“Woman” is not a gender.
His “existence” is not under debate. He exists no matter what. If he moves.through life as a male.who.dresses femme, and he teaches, writes, works, participates, attends, and generally lives his life presenting as femme, and nobody has beat him up, or fired him, or evicted him, then wtf is the harm done? If somebody calls him a man to his face, he’s going to get them disciplined or fired for telling the truth and not hurting him in any way. If he shrugged and said, “yeah, so?” that would be the end of it. The harm isn’t “concrete” or “macro.” It’s minuscule and ephemeral, not to say imaginary.
About that bizarre and irritating “deny my existence” trope trans activists always use:
It never made any sense to me (nobody’s ever denied that trans people exist!) until I started reading more about autogynephilic transsexuals and autogynephiles-in-denial. Then a light went off and I came up with a theory: when they say “deny my existence,” I think they’re speaking in the persona of their “self-girlfriend” — the target of their sexual/romantic obsession, which has been rebounded onto themself/their own body and transformed into a fantasy persona of a woman. (That’s what a fetish is, essentially: a misdirection of sexual attention away from sex partners towards something else — say, dirty sneakers, amputated limb stumps, or even a fantasy of one’s own body as a female.) In the case of the autogynephile-in-denial, the whole enterprise is dependent on everyone indulging the fantasy that the self-girlfriend is real — that the “she” who he now embodies is “really a woman” — because to admit that “she” is a construct of his paraphilia is, to him, to effectively destroy his girlfriend. Weird, I know! Anyways, I ran this idea by a (rational, wonderful, intelligent) transsexual and she agrees the idea is compelling and plausible. (“I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.”) So maybe that goes some way towards explaining the “deny my existence” trope — it’s a dead giveaway the person using it is an autogynephile in denial.
And another thing, also hyperbole, why does he think that networking on social media is peculiar to or more essential or important for philosophers than for any other field? Where’s the evidence that that claim is true?
‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’. Not ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’, ‘ours’. No, it’s ‘The Universe must revolve around me me me me’.
Isn’t philosophy supposed to inculcate rigorous thought, an ability to, at least somewhat dispassionately, consider and engage points of view often radically different from one’s own, and to critically examine one’s own beliefs?
Geez, everyone knows that you use ALL CAPS.
And then there’s this:
“In sharing my pain and anger at being forced out of a career that I once loved, . . .”
Forced out, my foot. All you have to do is coexist with people who don’t agree with you.
“If you don’t silence these people, I’ll quit!”
From tp’s post:
This is directly below a tweet from Stock including:
That very much does not say what tp says it says.
Damn it, Bruce, you stole almost my exact words before I could write them…
To be fair, tp does explain why his “fight for survival” is not hyperbolic:
Nope, no hyperbole or non-sequitur there.
tp’s list of demands makes me doubt his credentials, too. For instance:
Well, that just plain isn’t in the job description for a referee. Referees explicitly have to make sure they assess a paper on technical merit alone, regardless of any preferred method, ideology or author. That’s one of the reasons that some journals and conferences anonymise papers before sending them to referees. If referees go around rejecting papers because they disagree with the content (rather than because of technical flaws) then they aren’t doing their job properly and the field is undermined because of it.
It’s all about controlling women, this time, by bashing them over the head with trans people’s oppressed status.
Also, I’ve never seen an example of people pushing for the denial of necessary medical care for trans people. What have I missed?
Well, it’s worth a try. Plato and Hegel thought in bold. So writing in it, he is off to a flapping start. (I would not go so far as to say a flying one.)
“Recent efforts to repeal trans rights in the field of medical care could literally lead to my death someday if an EMT or doctor denied me emergency care.”
What recent efforts have there been to “repeal trans rights” to medical care? What’s he talking about?
I would think it’s far more likely for him to die in emergency care because he insisted on falsifying his medical records to say he is female. There was that trans man a short while ago who lost her baby because her medical records falsely called her male.
@maddog:
Assuming tp is in the US, I suspect he’s referring to a recent announcement that Trump is seeking to roll back a policy instigated by Obama that bans healthcare providers from discriminating against trans patients. So – to be clear – healthcare providers will be allowed to discriminate against trans patients, which is indeed awful.
I find the US healthcare system fairly mystifying so I don’t know what kind of consequences there might be, but I sincerely doubt that it would ever result in paramedics or doctors refusing to save anyone’s life. I assume it has more to do with whether insurance companies will pay out for certain procedures. Which is bad enough, don’t get me wrong, but it just isn’t anything like tp’s hypothetical example.
I’ve never encountered anyone who could be described as a terf or gender critical who supports that rollback. Attributing a grotesque behaviour by Trump to people who don’t support it and using that as evidence they should be prohibited from speaking? Nope. Not letting that slide.
Yeah, this caught my eye, too. Every field I am involved in as vocation or avocation insists that you cannot survive if you are not on social media. (I’m not. I survive.)
Recent efforts to repeal women’s rights in the field of medical care could literally lead to my death someday if an EMT or doctor denied me emergency care – fixed it.
At this point, the health system in the US is doing everything they can to remove care from women; they are succeeding.
Also, while I don’t believe that doctors should be able to deny care to someone because they find their life style choices to be icky, I think a point could be made that trans ideology contributes more to a health risk, as someone listed as the opposite of their biological sex in the hospital records could make it difficult to accurately assess what is wrong with said patient.
Bruce C @ 6 – yes, it is, most definitely. That’s why I concluded with “I have strong doubts that t p is a philosophy graduate student at all.” The whole rant just shows no trace of philosophical training whatever.
Choice ==> forced. Similarly, “not because I have fallen out of love with the work” becomes “a career that I once loved”. This angry crying fit is muddled even when it comes to the simplest of things: explaining his own perspective.
I wouldn’t think much of a philosopher who can’t tell the difference between gender and existence.
I wonder what the Venn diagram looks like comparing people who find this essay moving and sad and people concerned about the hundreds (? probably more) of women forced to leave careers and vocations they love because of sexism/misogyny/harassment and abuse.
Bruce Coppola @6,
Agreed, though hopefully all academic fields do that. In philosophy in particular, the beliefs being challenged may really be fundamental to one’s identity. A field that asks questions like “do I have free will? Do objective moral standards exist, and if so what are they?” is going to challenge some rather basic elements of your self-conception.
I think it would be kind if somebody dropped a hint to TP that life outside academia might not be the prejudice-free utopia she’s expecting.Them there Terfs get everywhere these days spoiling things for us simple, wholesome sexists.
James Howde,
No kidding. I think the whole “college students are all overprotected snowflakes” thing is grossly exaggerated. Most students interact with all sorts of people with all kinds of ideologies, and are more concerned with jobs and debt and where to go drinking this weekend than the latest political tempest in a teapot. But there is a subset of students who really burrows into hidey-holes of like-minded people and thinks that’s the way life will always be, and that sure seems to be what we have here.
TP is distraught at the mere possibility that someone might give a talk at a hypothetical conference that she might attend. Or that she will hear something on Twitter that offends her. Or even that her colleagues will fail to be sufficiently vehement in their condemnation of people she disagrees with. I just don’t know how TP expects to function in any job in any place. I like in a very “blue” area, and yet I regularly encounter coworkers, neighbors, clients, friends of friends, etc. who hold beliefs I dislike. Beliefs whose implications are that I am not as good a person as they are. It doesn’t really come up all that much because they don’t spell out those implications and I don’t press the point. If I were to get emotionally worked up every time I see some MAGA-hat-wearer, or a bumper sticker about how us nonbelievers will get and deserve eternal torture, life would be fairly difficult.
“That’s why I concluded with “I have strong doubts that t p is a philosophy graduate student at all.” The whole rant just shows no trace of philosophical training whatever.”
Funny, that is what made me fairly certain that the writer is a philosophy graduate student in the current era
And even more so if, like me, you live in a deep red area where the citizenry own lots of guns and great big pickups great for mowing down counterprotestors. These are how they accessorize those MAGA hats.
“Of course he does. He hopes to stir some of them to do even more shunning and bullying of women who don’t agree that men who say they are women are women. He hopes to stir them to banish those women from academic philosophy altogether. By the way, saying that men who say they are women are not women is not hate speech, it’s just stating obvious facts.”
You are a typical of the anti trans feminist wing who believes trans women speaking out against transphobia is misogyny and bullying of women.
Your message is that trans women must put up with such shit or they are bullies.
How are you defining “transphobia”?
Do you think it’s impossible for trans women to be bullies?