The inclusion
Misogynist philosophy bro strikes again.
Womanphobia on the other hand will be firmly ignored on pain of further punishment from Jonathan Ichikawa.
The Letter:
We are professional academic philosophers committed to the inclusion and acceptance of trans and gender non-conforming people, both in the public at large, and within philosophy in particular. We write to affirm our commitment to developing a more inclusive environment, disavowing the use of professional and cultural authority to further gendered oppression.
So we’re supposed to think that feminist women are “using professional and cultural authority to further gendered oppression.” Meaning what? Feminist women are bullying men? That’s what he’s saying?
Last week the UK’s Conservative government designated Kathleen Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, and a prominent critic of trans-inclusive stances and policies, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. This award was ostensibly given for services to higher education. Stock is best-known in recent years for her trans-exclusionary public and academic discourse on sex and gender, especially for opposition to the UK Gender Recognition Act and the importance of self-identification to establish gender identity, and for advocating that trans women should be excluded from places like women’s locker rooms or shelters. She used the occasion of her OBE award to post on Twitter, calling for UK universities to end their association with Stonewall, the prominent LGBTQ+ rights charity, describing its trans-inclusive stance as a threat to free speech.
This is such shabby dishonest manipulation, especially shabby coming from philosophers. The dishonesty is using “exclusion” to mean not counting men as women, and “inclusion” to mean counting men as women, and not just women but women who are vastly more oppressed and subordinated and subject to violence than actual women. That’s just a silly way to use the words – silly but also malicious and destructive. It’s exactly comparable to telling black people to “include” white people as black people if they demand it. That’s not a reasonable or fair way to define “inclusion.”
And then the “importance of self-identification to establish gender identity” bit – well sure it’s important to people who want to perpetrate the fraud, but the rest of us don’t have to cheer them on. The reality is that “self-identification” can’t “establish” that a man is a woman because that’s how he self-identifies. Again the claim is just silly, and also malicious and destructive and strikingly misogynist.
There’s more in the same familiar vein.
I mentioned on Spinster the other day that I recently realised that these people are doing the same kind of language manipulation that Edmund Cohen describes in The Mind of the Bible Believer:
https://archive.org/details/mindofbiblebel004837
The early Christians, Paul in particular, tried to convince people that words meant their opposites, to confuse readers and attempt to dissociate them from reality, e.g. ‘only through death does a Christian find everlasting life’. Gender identity proponents are using the same trick; trans woman=man, inclusive=exclusive, etc.
Here’s another example of “shabby, dishonest manipulation” which couples a word with its opposite: “trans” and “gender nonconforming.” A transgender person is claiming that they conform to their ‘true gender.’ They’re not an effeminate man: they’re a feminine woman. They’re not a mannish woman: they’re a manly man. Transgenderism involves a refusal or inability to be a gender-nonconforming person. It endorses gender, to the point where one has essentially jumped sex.
Whereas neither Stock nor anyone who agrees with her have a problem with gender-nonconforming people. Ichikawa is in fact furious because we consider trans people gender-nonconforming members of their own sex, and think that’s fine.
The definition of philosopher changed and no one bothered to tell me. Is buying into dogma a new prerequisite? Maybe just the speech act of saying they are philosophers? Seems like most of them nowadays couldn’t reason their way out of a wet paper sack. I hate to use the word dipshit for people who have that level of edumacation, but if the shoe fits…
But also that trans men be included in those spaces. They always seem to forget that one.
Sastra: Thank you thank you thank you. The trans activists are NOT radical. They are usually so excruciatingly prim and proper and CONSERVATIVE. Verging on reactionary. Except when they are being “stabbed in the stomach” because their dear ears heard the wrong pronoun!
Even if one accepted their view of inclusion, there is the issue of social justice itself. Social justice may be an ethos, but is it a metaphysics? Should philosophers accept social justice as their primary loyalty?
[…] Jonathan Ichikawa’s open letter to blame Kathleen Stock for everything? (Not literally. Literally it blamed her for being awarded […]