The audacity to defend a view they think is right
Certainly not all academic philosophers are politely liberal defenders of tolerance. Recently, a small but vocal minority of philosophers have taken it upon themselves to defend a view that, it seems, they strongly feel is right—and to hell with anyone who sees things differently.
What? Some people have “taken it upon themselves to defend a view that, it seems, they strongly feel is right”? Well what else are they supposed to do? Is there some social rule against defending views we think are right? Should we be defending views we think are wrong, instead? Or should be be keeping quiet? Or should we be asking for permission first? (But from whom?) I suspect it’s not an accident that most of the people doing this “taking it upon themselves” to defend views are women while the author, Tom Whyman, is not. (The aptness of the surname is no fault of mine.)
Anyway, clearly he has carefully cued us to find these views reprehensible before we even know what they are.
Faced with an alleged PC consensus that proclaims the right of trans women to identify as women, and trans men to identify as men, these scholars have adopted a position they call “gender critical feminism.”
No, that’s not accurate. Getting it wrong in the very first sentence; that’s not auspicious. The issue isn’t people’s right to “identify as” anything they like; the issue is forcing other people to treat the “identifying as” as dispositive. You can identify as the Pillsbury dough boy if you like, but that doesn’t mean you can force anyone else to believe in your identity.
They’ve become known to their detractors as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs). In short: they think that sex is a matter of biology, not a “social construction”; they also believe that the interests of cis and trans women can radically diverge—so much so, indeed, that they contend that giving trans women access to women’s spaces often, if not always, constitutes a physical threat. (Trans men, by contrast, are usually just “misguided” lesbians forced to transition by the woke mainstream.) For obvious reasons, people with gender critical views are often accused of being transphobic.
Note the complete failure to explain how and why giving trans women access to women’s spaces can not possibly ever constitute a physical threat, and even to admit that he’s not explaining – note the breezy, careless, confident skipping right past that point, without pausing to consider for instance how women can know who is a trans woman and who is faking in order to spy on or assault women. Note that and then marvel at the “for obvious reasons” that precedes the “transphobic” smear.
Meanwhile, a guest post on Daily Nous (the other big philosophy blog, alongside Leiter Reports) took umbrage at a piece written by trans woman philosopher Rachel McKinnon in which (during, as it happens, a symposium on Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works) she used the TERF acronym—a coinage that gender critical feminists often insist is a “slur.” This is largely because it has been employed—and forcefully so at times—by trans opponents of their views: people who, to be clear, comprise a marginalized group who might understandably feel threatened by the implications of gender critical arguments.
Unlike mere stupid commonplace women, who have no right at all to feel threatened by being called “TERFs” or bullied for saying anything about women’s rights.
The very fact that anybody has to defend the view that a man cannot be a woman beggars belief. It’s a simple, basic matter of fact, not something that people ‘seem to strongly feel’ is right. As for ‘to Hell with anyone who sees things differently’, well, that’s just bullshit. If Whyman took a ten dollar piece of cheese to the checkout and the cashier asked for twenty, would Whyman just hand over the larger amount because the cashier’s alternative reality is valid, or would he stand up for a strong belief that the price is what it says on the label?
And who is the group who really says “to hell with anyone who sees differently”? It’s the TRAs. They feel free to threaten and harass anyone who sees differently, to the point of getting them deplatformed (when is the last time a “TERF” got a trans activist deplatformed? And how often?), censured, possibly even fired (I don’t know if that has happened yet, but there have certainly been attempts). They bully gender critical feminists nearly non-stop, 24/7, in an effort to force their view on everyone else, even those of us who are biologist who understand the differences between male and female, the real meanings of intersex, and so forth. They threaten violence, and beat up elderly women who are not male-bodied and not young like their attackers.
Yet we still hear this whack.
Tom Whyman – nominative determinism in action.
Ghastly misrepresentation of the entire gender critical movement. I also noticed the handwaving dismissal of “trans men as misguided lesbians”. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone say that, other than TRA’s mischaracterizing GC positions.
It’s a shame there’s no comments section. I’d bet it would make an interesting read, kinda like the comments following the ACLU articles on transgirls in girl’s sports.
He characterizes Kathleen Stock as indulging in “aggressive forthrightness.”
He would never say that about a male philosopher. That doesn’t even make any sense as the insult he clearly wishes us to receive.
Aggressive forthrightness – I would like to be accused of that. I would take it as a compliment.
Um, yes? The ‘social construction’ stuff is the set of expectations placed on people for their biological sex. That is, sex is biology, gender is social.
…Yes? The former is female, the latter male. Is the author crazy? Of course some needs differ; for example, how many trans women have ever needed an abortion?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone claim that trans women are always a threat to women when included in such spaces. The argument is actually that a) services can exist to cater specifically to the female sex without it being considered discrimination (in the same way that services can exist for other demographics uncontroversially), and b) some spaces should be female only not only for safety but also for the perception of safety as seen by the women in those spaces.
…What. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this put forth by someone calling themselves gender critical. I’ve seen it made into law in I think Suadi Arabia, which is so rabidly anti-homosexuality that they made forced sex reassignment into law, but I don’t think they call themselves gender critical at all. Rather, they seem to be entirely gender supportive, in that they believe in gender roles so strongly, that they are enshrined in law.
In other words, the views this author ascribes to gender critical feminism are either facts rather than opinions, or they are not held by gender critical feminism at all.
This reminds me of the first time someone said that I was a terf and that it was descriptive rather than pejorative; I went to look the term up and find out my beliefs supposedly are; needless to say, they were entirely alien to me.
First, it was too obvious. Of course there’s a comic supervillain called The Baffler, there had to be:
Apparently his major weakness is his roller-coaster self esteem. Something about The Baffler seems vaguely familiar.
But anyway, it’s that “taken it upon themselves” part that I find especially disingenuous. Isn’t… isn’t that a fairly big part of what philosophers do? They find absurdities or contradictions or misalignment and ‘take it upon themselves’ (by which I mean ‘do their job’) to take or make a position, don’t they? I mean, they probably have to fill in forms and stuff too, but that’s kind of what – to the layperson – philosophy is about.
It’s bewildering how the “strongly believe” has become a pejorative here where “sincerely believes” hardly ever does. In these circles, a man’s sincere but incorrect belief that he is a woman trumps a philosopher’s strong belief that the man is not, regardless of the evidence and the entire reason for defining sexes as classes in the first place.
But like many such articles, the wrongness is fractal. Look at this, for example:
That’s a blinding non-sequitur (the ‘so much so’ bit) as well as pure invention (the ‘if not always’) part. The language and tone make it perfectly obvious who the baddies are without ever bothering to say why.
That is exactly the kind of thing I hate. Lay out a thesis. Contend that being gender critical automatically makes you a radical feminist, that that’s somehow the bad kind of feminist and that you’re the bad kind of the bad kind of feminists and feminists are already automatically bad. Go on, I fucking dare you.
Don’t weasel away the argument by calling to senses of reasonableness, fairness or politeness (explicitly done right at the top in this case). It reminds me of when someone asks a question, the other person replies honestly and the questioner responds “don’t hold back, tell us what you think.”
Yeah… I thought that was the point.
And this is where they give themselves away. They will tell you that trans men sometimes need abortions, so you are being disingenuous. But the battle is almost always for male-bodied persons to have access to female spaces. This writer doesn’t even bother to mention trans-men except in the context of claiming we see them as misguided lesbians.
Trans-men are an afterthought in this battle, trotted out only when they feel the need to present something less threatening – say, female-bodied persons in male spaces, threatening to the trans man but not so much to the natal man except insofar as it challenges his hegemony and his manliness.
In other words, this really is about men, not women, because they don’t really believe “trans women are women. Period.” They know the difference between male and female, they just choose to ignore it.
Further, they are used as a means to an end: the gotcha. “So you’re against trans women in female sports because you say they are male… but no objection to trans MEN hmmm? They’re male too but you don’t mind! Hah, transmisogyny proven!”
Stock’s response:
https://medium.com/@kathleenstock/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-witch-2ff574209b32
“I know, I know: in academic Philosophy, you’re not supposed to attribute illicit psychological motivations to your opponents. You’re not supposed to get rhetorical, or emotional (particularly not if you’re a woman with the Wrong Views. That makes you Scary and Bitter too). You’re not supposed to resort to puerile insults. You’re just supposed to deal dispassionately and rationally with the arguments in front of you, no matter what the provocation. But here’s the problem: with some people, this strategy apparently doesn’t work. They just won’t play according to the rules you thought you were both co-operatively following. To make an arcane reference that philosophers will like: it’s like an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and I’m the mug who keeps playing the Always Cooperate strategy. Sometimes it’s better to go Tit-for-Tat.
“Philosophers online like to say that things are ‘exhausting’ for them. Cf: ‘it’s EXHAUSTING having to do emotional labour explaining why your arguments offend me!’. ‘It’s EXHAUSTING constantly having to be confronted with arguments that trigger me!’. Etc. But I’ll tell you what genuinely IS exhausting. Watching both my own personal reputation, and the philosophical tradition I normally try to cherish and respect, being flushed down the toilet in public, inch by passive-aggressive inch, by narcissistic lazy half-wits who have stolen the mike. It’s so exhausting that sometimes — just sometimes — I forget to be polite about them, or to them. After all, by now, what have I now got to lose?”
Feminists adopted ‘gender critical’ to shit on trans? That’s a level of idiocy that burns.
How do women’s rights and trans rights conflict? As a woman I can’t force people to accept any non reality based identity i choose, save, apparently, that of trans.
Women aren’t the only class (marginalized and not) to have access to their own safe spaces. Where is the conflict?