Woke philosophy’s most recent moves
Daniel Kaufman at The Electric Agora walks us through the t philosopher-Justin Weinberg campaign to ostracize and silence The Evil TERFs, starting with t philosopher:
Woke philosophy’s most recent moves can be found in an “open letter” to the profession, published anonymously (by “t-philosopher”) and entitled “I am leaving academic philosophy because of its transphobia problem,” as well as a lengthy essay, written by none other than our intrepid Weinberg, “Trans Women and Philosophy: Learning from Recent Events” and published at the Daily Nous. The two pieces are an exquisite pairing: T-philosopher is wounded and empowered and terrified and accusatory and defeated and defiant, all at once – sometimes, even in the same sentence – and then, suddenly, thankfully, as if out of a puff of smoke, Weinberg appears on the scene to help us sort it out so that we all might become Better People.
T-philosopher announces to the profession – all of it – that she is leaving because of philosophy’s “transphobia” and the terrible harm she has suffered at the hands of “bigots” like Kathleen Stock (who else?), whose presence renders her no longer “safe in professional settings.” Then comes the inevitable “call to action”: Journals must refuse to publish articles critical of gender identity theory and activism; conferences must no-platform philosophers seeking to present gender critical arguments; gender critical thinkers must be barred from public discourse, whether on blogs, discussion boards, social media sites, comments sections, or other online venues; and anyone and everyone who is going to engage in both professional and public philosophical discourse on the subject had better accept that “any trans discourse that does not proceed from this initial assumption — that trans people are the gender that they say they are — is oppressive, regressive, and harmful” and that “trans discourse that does not proceed with a substantial amount of care at amplifying trans voices and understanding the trans experience should not exist.”
If you’ve raised a teenager, as my wife Nancy and I have done, you’ll immediately recognize this as very typically adolescent behavior. The clueless narcissism (“to the academic philosophy community…”); the catastrophizing (I know Kathleen Stock. You can watch video of Kathleen Stock. One cannot possibly be “unsafe” because of Kathleen Stock); the empty (because toothless) demands; the emotional blackmail (You see what you’re making me do!); even the proverbial running away from home (I’m leaving and never coming back!) It’s all there.
Another way of understanding it is simply as narcissism. The two are pretty much the same thing – we know narcissists when we see them because they act like angry teenagers even though they are grown-ass adults. They don’t all threaten to run away from home, to be sure, but the trans activist variety sure do invoke suicide a lot.
Then he gets to Weinberg. He is not an admirer.
Suffice it to say that Weinbergism is alive and well and holding court: the phony even-handedness (a not-very-effective trick he employs is to repeatedly suggest that those on his side of the issue are likely as dismayed by what he has said as his opponents); the credulous embrace of the testimony of those with whom he is already sympathetic (“Reader, what do you do when you are confronted with the anguish of another person?”); the breathtaking hypocrisy (“Be attentive to hostile rhetoric in work you are considering hosting or publishing”); the false modesty (“Yes, that’s my name up there. No, I’m not going to defend myself in this post. That’s not the point of this”); the obligatory swipe at Brian Leiter, with the equally obligatory misrepresentation of things that anyone with a pulse, two fingers, and an internet connection can check for themselves (“a well-known philosophy-blogger’s obsession with belittling graduate students who use Twitter to discuss trans issues” (2)); the by-now legendary lack of self-awareness (“Note the venues. Much of the trans-exclusionary writing by philosophers that has fueled recent controversies has been self-published (e.g., at Medium) by philosopher-activists..,” published on Weinberg’s personal site, in an essay about a politically-soaked letter published on Medium). It’s classic Weinberg; Weinberg as only Weinberg can be.
He goes on to point out that woke philosophy isn’t philosophy at all but politics. I would think, though, that philosophers could carry the skills and the norms they rely on for philosophy into their other endeavors. Is that fatuous? Kaufman points out that their goals are very different: politics is about working for a specific outcome, while philosophy is about good arguments. (Sloppy paraphrase, but you get the drift.) If you can’t come up with a good argument for your favored outcome you should probably conclude that you ought to stop favoring that outcome…but political commitments often have to do with loyalties. It’s tricky. What if a good argument, one you can find no way to dispute, justifies an abhorrent conclusion? What do you do?
Scathingly brilliant. Have you seen Kathleen Stock, et al.’s. piece in Medium? I think it’s very well done, but of course a writer at FtB condemns it as incoherent. I don’t this second author addresses any of the questions posed in the Stock article.
Oh yeah, that FTB post was exasperating. It has an inauspicious start by assuming the gender critical position on the origin of male violence is entirely anatomical – what happened to acculturation? – but then gets worse as soon as he starts trying to criticise Kathleen Stock’s position.
Biological essentialism is the idea that differing behavioural trends between the sexes are innate to those sexes, and HJ thinks that using the english word ‘woman’ to mean ‘adult human female’ is an example of this; the implication being that if you use a word as a label for a sex, you are a biological essentialist.
How the fuck is one supposed to engage with this drivel? I couldn’t read any further, the idiocy was already up to my eyeballs.
Maybe that’s the idea. Spread so much nonsense on toast that we simply drown in it, our eyes glaze over, or we throw up our hands and walk away in anger and disgust. Then they get to claim we could not answer their claims, which is sort of true, not because there is no answer, but because how can one answer something that is so ridiculous on the surface? It’s like answering a kid’s question about why is why why? (Yes, I got that once. I shrugged. No answer.)
It is a tactic frequently used by Christians. “Explain why there is something rather than nothing” they ask. You do – organic chemistry and evolution being at least part of my usual answer. Then they throw something else at you, something so ridiculous, such a non sequitur, that you just look at them with a “are you really that uninformed?” look and walk away. They then announce to their friends that you were unable to answer their question (maybe true, because it was too ridiculous to engage), and that you were simply astonished when they asked it (also true, but not at their brilliance). This is the tactic the TRAs are using.
I remembered the other evening one day when I was a teen and my mom wanted to know what “doo wah ditty ditty dum ditty doo” meant. I told her it meant “doo wah ditty ditty dum ditty doo”. That’s sort of like the definition of a woman as anyone who identifies as a woman. The only difference is, my answer to my mother had the benefit of being true.
Yeah well, Hornbeck was never as sharp, analytical or reasoned as they seemed to believe. Even academics and true intellectuals struggle to write in an ‘intellectual’ style. Most of the time attempts to write like that come across as drivel, because it is. Best to keep it simple unless you have both talent and time to craft a masterpiece.
It is rather difficult to engage with Hornbeck’s drivel, at least directly, as there are no comments allowed on that blog. Seems a touch cowardly to me. Well, that, or it’s an ingenious (disingenuous?) way of claiming victory in every argument.
By Hornbeck’s criteria, it seems that any definition is essentialist. That would include defining woman as anyone who identifies as a woman.
iknklast, it seems like your young interlocutor was ripe for a lesson in etymology. But can someone tell me what “ditty wah ditty” means?
Rob,
I would strike the “unless” and everything after it. Good writing doesn’t come across as self-consciously “intellectual.” Good writing is clear and straightforward and makes the reader feel more intelligent for having read it; writing that leaves the reader feeling dumb and confused is often poor writing, caused by egotism or an intent to obscure, or both. Of course, writing for a specific audience will assume familiarity with certain background and jargon, and sometimes a “ten-dollar word” is the right one because it has just the right shade of meaning.
Anyway, it seems to me that Hornbeck’s attempted response to Stock was just an elaborate “NUH-UH!” that misses Stock’s point. Stock (if I read that excerpt correctly) is saying that there’s a difference between using biology to define a category (“women are adult human females”), and biological essentialism, which is the attribution of certain traits to that group for biological reasons (“women are made of sugar and spice and everything nice because they evolved to be nuturers and caregivers,” “women don’t do thinky because it’s an estrogen thing”). Hornbeck, without spelling it out, is assuming that “any use of a biological term” = “biological essentialism,” and springing this as some kind of “gotcha.”
I also don’t see how the existence of intersex people is the death blow Hornbeck seems to think. The fact that there is some fuzziness or indeterminancy around the edges of a category doesn’t invalidate the category or mean that anything goes. Much has been written over the years on the topic of who “counts” as black or African-American (how to handle “mixed” heritages, etc.), with no absolute consensus of which I’m aware — but that doesn’t mean that it’s just totally up for grabs for a Rachel Dolezal to claim the label.
Similarly, we can argue over the precise definition of “liberal,” even in the specific context of American politics — there’s no one checklist of views that states clearly who’s in and who’s out. And so we can argue over edge cases, like “is Joe Biden a liberal,” while agreeing that Mitch McConnell is definitely not.
SM. Yes, you’re right.
#3 iknklast
Similar to the religious ‘stream of random bullshit’ approach is their other trusty favourite, the ‘refuge in vagueness’ approach. Some christians even brazen it out by stating god to be ineffable – too mysterious to even define. The goal being to quash debate by making the thing being defended so mysterious that it cannot be debated.
It’s amazing just how many parallels there are between TRAs and religious apoligists…
#7 SM
Yes, it definitely struck me as a shallow ‘gotcha’ type point: anyone that considers sex a valid way of categorising people is on that basis designated a gender essentialist, and dismissed as some kind of psuedoscience crank. Yet anyone that has even a cursory understanding of what a natural language is will be able to see that ‘woman’ and similar are simply the noun that was developed as a label for those people with chest bumps, arrived at by common use.
It might not surprise the people here to hear that in my arguments with the cult, I have not been very impressed by their grasp of such nuances.
WaM, #6. At a guess, I’d say it’s a mis-hearing of the English rock band, Manfred Mann’s 1964 hit song Do Wah Diddy Diddy* (There she was, just-a walking down the street, singing ‘do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do’).
*Originally recorded by The Exciters, an African-American, all-female pop group, in 1963, to little success, but Manfred Mann had a hit with it a year later..
AoS,
https://youtu.be/TyWTLfsXDQg
And the original:
https://youtu.be/t7sB8ycdbJo
What I want to know is, who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?
Because I’d like to shake his hand. Or hers.
https://youtu.be/lXmsLe8t_gg
And since we’re sharing silly YouTube videos–
When I learned from you guys’s comments that HJH had taken on Kathleen Stock, what immediately popped into my head? This–
https://youtu.be/8s3UogfAGg0
snort
Did you guys ever hear of a wish sandwich?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz0UvIZw-Y0
Hornbeck, et al. (Crip Dyke also chimes in) keep saying that “TERFs” are biological essentialists. However, they are part of the crowd who demand that everyone use the terms “menstruators” and “uterus-havers” when referring to “cis” women. Maybe I am completely unclear on the term, but how is that not biological essentialism – reducing a person to one function, or one part, of her body?
clamboy, it’s even worse than that. It renders those of us who no longer menstruate or have uteruses as – what? We’re not men, unless we “identify” that way. We’re not allowed to call ourselves women, because only trans women apparently can be women anymore. We are not “uterus-havers” or “menstruators”. We can’t ask for our rights based on anything, because we aren’t anything.
Oh, wait. I forgot. Women past the age of child-bearing have never counted for anything, so this is just business as usual, right?
Thank you, iknklast, you make such an important point. But have you considered the following: trans women are not “uterus-havers” or “menstruators” themselves, thus women sans menses and sans uterus are actually closer to being the realest of real women. Also, my mother, no longer a “menstruator” (I don’t know her uterus status) has had light facial hair for some time, and if Cathy Brennan has taught us anything, it’s that facial hair makes the woman!
I am an old straight man who has had the luck to be friends with a lot of lesbians over the years. These women have been some of the best and toughest people I know, and now the community they have worked in and fought for calls them “violent” and “fascists”, and is seeking to expel them for nothing. One of these women is a veteran who is trying to start a non-profit for other women veterans who have been subject to, among other things, the rampant sexual assault culture of the military, to come and do some actual work together for actual healing from actual violence (woman-centered work being woefully lacking in veterans’ services). But, no, this so-called community could never, I believe, recognize her as doing any good, because she qualifies as a “TERF”. … Sorry, this pisses me off. I was about to turn this into a true rant, but I’m done for the night.
SHOOT! iknklast, I put in opening and closing sarcasm tags in the first paragraph (just before “But”, and just after “woman!”), but I guess the use of the tag brackets doesn’t translate. Like I said, I am old.