Pants on fire
Behold: an ethicist. “Friendly” Atheist tells us:
The following is a guest post by Aaron Rabinowitz, the ethics director of the Creator Accountability Network and host of two philosophy podcasts: Embrace the Void and Philosophers in Space.
Awesome, a philosopher of ethics at last; now all will be plain.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation recently faced criticism for posting and then removing an editorial by Jerry Coyne entitled “Biology is Not Bigotry,” which he wrote in response to an FFRF article by Kat Grant entitled “What is a Woman?” In his piece, Coyne used specious reasoning and flawed research to argue that transgender individuals are more likely to be sexual predators than cisgender individuals and that they should therefore be barred from some jobs and female-only spaces.
Well, speaking of ethics, I don’t think it’s all that ethical to single out one paragraph of a longish article as if it summed up the entire contents of the article. There are ten paragraphs before the one about sexual predators, ten paragraphs about the biology of sex, written by a biologist. The one about sexual predators is specifically a response to a claim of Grant’s.
But even here Grant misleads the reader. They argue, for example, that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” Yet the facts support the opposite of this claim, at least for transgender women. A cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry of Justice and the U.K. Census shows that while almost 20 percent of male prisoners and a maximum of 3 percent of female prisoners have committed sex offenses, at least 41 percent of trans-identifying prisoners were convicted of these crimes. Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.
Notice how cautiously Coyne words it, and how incautiously Rabinowitz describes his wording. I don’t think I’ll be consulting him on ethics any time soon.
However, focusing too much on debunking Coyne’s empirical claims ignores how irrelevant their accuracy is to his ethical inferences. Even if the data [were] high quality, arguing from that data to the claim that trans individuals should be barred from various professions, social activities, and female-only spaces is not only straightforwardly discriminatory, it’s terrible ethics.
But of course that’s not the claim. This is the claim:
It is not “transphobic” to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights. Transgender people should surely enjoy all the moral and legal rights of everyone else. But moral and legal rights do not extend to areas in which the “indelible stamp” of sex results in compromising the legal and moral rights of others. Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.
Ethics guy says “the claim that trans individuals should be barred from various professions”; Coyne says “transgender women…should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters.” That’s not “various professions”; it’s one profession, or line of work. Rabinowitz words it so that it sounds as if Coyne is saying trans people should not be lawyers, doctors, engineers, and similar. Coyne is pointing out that men should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters, for reasons that ought to be too god damn obvious for discussion. Ethics guy perpetrated a very glaring distortion there. Not all that ethicsy.
And then he repeats it.
It’s important to note that, even if Coyne’s biological definitions and data were high quality, a variety of confounding variables would still block the empirical inference that trans individuals are more likely to be sex predators. However, it is equally important to note that, even if all those variables were controlled for, Coyne would still need to make an ethical argument that the differences between trans and cis individuals are sufficient to justify denying trans individuals equal access in our society, with all the ethical costs that entails.
Coyne is not arguing for “denying trans individuals equal access in our society.” He’s arguing for not letting men serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters. There’s a yawning gap between those two claims.
Dud ethics, bro.
I find it disturbing that he implies that it would still be okay to allow trans identified males into women’s spaces even if the data showed they were more likely to commit crimes of sexual violence against women. An appropriate ethics depends upon determining who is entitled to be considered in an ethics equation; for instance, most people don’t include jellyfish or zebras, extending their ethics only to humans, so that human needs trump those of jellyfish or zebras.
In his formulation, he seems to be suggesting that the needs of trans-identified males trump those of women, which means he does not extend moral consideration to half of the human population.
It’s not even barring them from a line of work… surely there is gainful employment in being a rape councillor at a trans’ or men’s shelter?
It is not a right for men to have access to women.
Bingo. The old incels used to whine about their not having access to women being unfair, because other men do ‘have access’, without realising that the reason women favour certain men is precisely because those men don’t see us as a commodity, but as people.
The new bunch, equally clueless, are now whining “You’ve got to let me have access to women because I am one!”
Tigger, that’s just it. Rabinowitz’s argument is weak if we don’t assume upfront that trans-identified males actually are a type of woman, a broad category. If we agreed that black women are more prone to violence than white women, say, we wouldn’t agree that this means we refuse all black women access to women’s spaces, putting them in some segregated third space. We ought to do the same to the trans women.
Frankly, I would have left out the whole “sexual predator” issue. It distracts and draws like a magnet. I thought it a mistake first time I read Jerry’s rebuttal.
Sastra, you explained the issue so well that all I have left to do is put the proper name to it–begging the question. That a philosophy professor should base his entire argument around such a basic fallacy is… well, par for the course in these discussions, of late, but still very disappointing. He should have his Philosphizing License suspended.