Another fine skewering by Daniel Kaufman at The Electric Agora, saying that what Philosophy’s Woke Brigade have been up to now is beyond a joke.

What they are doing now seriously threatens the professional credibility and public standing of our discipline, and anyone and everyone who cares about academic philosophy needs to oppose them in the strongest possible terms.

It’s about that Institute of Arts and Ideas symposium on sex and gender.

It was a useful, interesting clash of perspectives, civil in tone and offering a good overview of some of the major points of contention in the ongoing debate.

Today, you can only read the original symposium as a download. (1) This is because after being published, Dembroff, Stryker, and Kukla demanded that their contributions be retracted, to which the IAI acceded.  If one goes to the website now, only the gender critical portions of the symposium remain – the pieces by Stock, Lawford-Smith, and Bindel – while the original offerings from Dembroff, Stryker, and Kukla have been replaced with a joint statement, appearing on a separate page, in which they attempt to explain themselves. (2)

Kaufman points out how absurd of Dembroff, Stryker, and Kukla it is to claim IAI should have asked their permission to include the heretics.

…there is no such standard in our discipline, according to which when asked to contribute to something, one’s consent to appear alongside all the other contributors must be solicited, which in some cases may actually be impossible (e.g. where the contributor list is still being put together when the invitation is made or where a contributor may have to be replaced, mid-project, because another has dropped out).

And then there’s the despicable part.

Beyond this appeal to a wholly imaginary professional standard, the rest of the statement is standard PWB fare; the usual, foul mixture of: (a) garden variety misrepresentations and lies, such as when Kukla and Co. accuse the three gender critical contributors of “questioning transgender people’s fundamental legitimacy as people” and presupposing that “transgender people are by definition mentally ill or delusional” (a quick inspection of the three essays demonstrates that they do no such thing); (b) vile slanders, such as when Kukla and Co. suggest that platforming gender critical philosophers is akin to giving a platform to Holocaust deniers and compare Stock, Lawford-Smith, and Bindel, all of whom are lesbians, to those advocating “corrective rape to cure lesbianism”; and (c) the by now routine, cynical, disingenuous, obvious-to-anyone-over-six-years-old abuse of the harm principle, as in when Kukla and Co. claim that being featured on the same page as gender critical feminists puts their “basic safety at risk.”  (Somewhat incongruously, Kukla elsewhere has professed to being a competitive weight lifter and boxer, with photos of her flexing her muscles and kicking ass to back it up. (3))

It’s coin of the realm though. It’s the “blood on their hands” ploy. That’s his point: these are established academic philosophers and they shouldn’t be carrying on this way.

In a healthy institution or discipline, contemptible behavior like this would quickly turn you into a pariah, but academic philosophy today is not a healthy institution or discipline. It’s not just the ideologically captured APA, whose President co-authored the recent “Just Ideas? The Status and Future of Publication Ethics in Philosophy: A White Paper,” a transparent, cringeworthy effort to institutionalize the despicable conduct of the PWB in professional journals. Or Justin Weinberg’s seemingly inexhaustible commitment to use his philosophy news website, the Daily Nous, to shill on behalf of the PWB and perform hits on gender critical philosophers, by way of a selective posting of articles and links. (One can only admire the providential timing of his latest linking to a hit piece on gender critical thinkers and activists, over at Vox. (4)) It’s Sally Haslanger, one of philosophy’s most notable, venerable scholars using her position and prestige to pressure the highly respected Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews to “revisit their standards,” because they published a review written by Kathleen Stock, on a book about feminist ethics. It’s a herd of scholars, writing and signing a petition to get Rebecca Tuvel’s paper on transgenderism and transracialism removed from the journal, Hypatia, after it already had passed peer review and been published. It’s the PWB piling on 3AM Magazine for having dared to publish Richard Marshall’s interview with Holly Lawford-Smith and thereby driving him from platform. (He’s had to re-open shop solo.) It’s Rachel McKinnon, of the College of Charleston, publicly celebrating the imminent death of a young, lesbian activist YouTuber from brain cancer and then doubling down when called on it. (5) And it’s the PWB’s next generation graduate students cyberstalking Kathleen Stock to compile a database of her tweets (for what purpose, one can only imagine) and being cheered on by one of the current PWB’s B-List members, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa. (6)

It is indeed.