I’ve got more ideas for future Substack posts stashed in badly transcribed voice memos than I know what to do with it but I thought an Ask Me Anything would be fun.
When I first started following you, I was surprised to read that you are in grad school, considering the total capture of academia on this issue. Do you plan to pursue a career in academia after your degree? Do you have hope that the capture of major institutions can be reversed such that academics such as yourself can remain in the academy?
I'll limit myself to 2: one on Gender/Trans, and one personal.
Question on Gender/Trans:
Much of the Trans Rights movement is often described as being akin to a men's rights movement. But some of the most vocal are women. And not just young women, but women in their 40s and 50s who have children. Have you any thoughts or insight into why that might be?
Personal Question: you're someone to whom the words 'heterodox, iconoclast, contrarian etc' might be applied. How much is that hard wired into you and how much is a product of your upbringing?
Have you noticed any similarities between TRAs and the sorts of people (okay, men) who, possibly in a search for some meaning to life or somewhere to direct their natural anger/negative energy, become incels or join ISIS or some other group which actively hates women? The images of people [men] holding guns wearing ‘kill TERFs’ T-shirts remind me of the videos put out by the men who became radicalised online and went overseas to join religious fundamentalist groups.
What would you say to each of the following statements if a relative whom you like made them:
1. Trans women are women!
2. It is ‘right-wing’ and ‘fascist’ to say otherwise.
3. It is offensive to the trans community to even raise any questions about spaces for ‘cis’ women only.
4. To do so is to deny the ‘rights’ of ‘trans women’.
5. If you want to exclude ‘trans women/girls’ from women’s/girls’ toilets, you should by analogy be even more willing to ban ‘cis’ men from teaching at girls’ schools (or any schools with female students), because (it is claimed) male teachers commit assault at higher rates than ‘trans girls/women’.
6. Most trans girls/women would never commit assault. You can’t exclude them from womens’ spaces just because a tiny minority might commit assault, just as you can’t ban men from working with women just because some men assault some women in the workplace.
I have encountered all of this from relatives I like and otherwise respect, and am sad to say that I either made a hash of my reply or did not really give a reply, intimidated as I was by the conviction of the majority in the room. I have wondered for a while how you would respond, as you write with (to my mind) unmatched clarity and eloquence on these topics.
Relatedly: would you consider writing a kind of guide to talking to people who have bought in, a compilation of statements/arguments such as those above and your suggested responses to them?
Likewise on your definition for "female". And whether you would agree with the definition endorsed and promoted by the more or less sensible Helen Joyce, and that, as she put it, "female" - and, mutatis mutandis, "woman" - is simply not something one can "identify as":
"woman: An adult human who identifies as female
— Anonymous Twitter account
Marks for cunning, I suppose. Using 'female' instead of 'woman' is clearly an attempt to avoid circularity. The problem is that 'female' is not something you can identify as. It’s a word with an objective definition that holds right across all of biology, and hardly any of the things it refers to are capable of identifying as anything. It means: 'of or denoting the sex class that produces large gametes ...' ...."
As Joyce suggests and elaborates on, categories, if they're to be of any use or value at all, have to be grounded in objective criteria and properties that qualify as membership dues.
Rather depressing the extent to which both "female" and "woman" have been "decoupled" from any of those requirements - which largely makes the terms meaningless and useless for any matters of social policy and scientific research. For instance, from a newsletter I get from Impact Ethics:
"I will preface this entire commentary by acknowledging that I have referred to ovarian cancer as a women’s cancer in the past. I have since become aware of the ways in which this terminology fails to reflect the wider spectrum of gender identity, and can actually perpetuate harm against people with ovarian cancer who do not identify as cis women."
I really don't think "we"are going to turn the transloonie tide until we are ready, as Posie Parker commendably did, to draw a line in the sand, to defend the idea that words have meanings, that categories have objective criteria for membership, that "self-identification" is one of the most incoherent, unscientific, "unintelligible", odious and mephitic ideas to come down the pike in a very long time.
ICYMI, Kellie-Jay Keen - AKA Posie Parker - at least suggests or broaches that question with her YouTube video, "Is transgenderism the fault of Feminism?"
Can't say that I've watched all of it - though I've left a comment or two there more or less defending it - but certainly some justification for that "thesis" of hers.
Decent article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, though I've really only skimmed it, that gives some history of the concept of gender, and how "feminism" was more or less an "early adopter" of it:
I think, in particular that there's some merit in the concept of gender itself - as with the article's defense of the idea that gender might reasonably be seen as "feminine and masculine personalities" (item 2.2), of which there are billions and billions.
But the problem is that too much of gender has been "trans-mogrified" - pun intended 😉 - into "gender identity" which is more or less if not completely incoherent, quite unscientific, and entirely subjective twaddle - being charitable. Gender identity has become something of a frankensteinian monster, the result of corrupting and bastardizing gender with, as Sahar Sadjadi of the University of McGill puts it, a "magico-spiritual undertone", a mephitic and toxic amalgam "of science, magic, and religion":
Moot of course as to exactly how much blame feminism itself bears for much of the transgender clusterfuck, but I and many others - including philosophers Kathleen Stock and Amia Srinivasan - argue that it's not inconsiderable:
"The objection I have in mind is that feminist philosophy rests on a mistake: namely, a conflation of epistemology and politics. Philosophy, at least on the conventional understanding, is an epistemic project, a project oriented toward truth or knowledge, and thus committed to the kind of unfettered inquiry that is conducive to the acquisition of truth and knowledge. Feminism meanwhile is a political project, a project oriented toward the emancipation of women and the dissolution of patriarchy. How then could something be at once philosophy and feminist? How could the unencumbered pursuit of knowledge itself have a political orientation? In other words how could there really be feminist philosophy?"
Great deal of justification for arguing - as Kathleen Stock has done recently - that that is pretty much exactly what has happened with too much of feminism. Which, as she puts it, is riven with no end of "risible absurdities":
I recommend Kathleen Stock's Material Girls -- she is a philosopher who has worked on the philosophy of fiction writing, and it is indeed super relevant here.
Much to commend Stock for, not least that she has "sounded the alarums" about the "risible absurdities" in much of feminism that has followed from transgenderism:
"Effectively, the stupid story [transgenderism? gender identity?] functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
Though I think her "thesis" is still under development and somewhat obscurely laid out.
But I gather from this comment over at the blog "Why Evolution is True" that her book - haven't read it yet myself - provides something in the way of a supposedly or superficially decent analysis of the different possible definitions for "male" and "female" that are on the table:
"Kathleen Stock distinguishes between three biological accounts of maleness ... and femaleness ... :
1. 'the gamete account'
2. 'the chromosome account'
3. 'the cluster account' (with maleness and femaleness respectively defined in terms of some cluster of morphological/phenotypical sex characteristics such as genitals)
She then mentions that 'on both gamete and chromosome accounts, there are occasional cases of DSDs [Disorders of Sexual Development] not easily characterised as either male or female.'
The problem with the cluster account is that 'what counts as having enough of the important properties in a cluster is in some sense a practical decision, relative to wider collective theoretical goals'. For example, does a post-operative transwoman with female breasts, a vulva, and a vagina (but without any postvaginal female sex organs such as a uterus and ovaries) have enough of the 'woman-making' morphological sex characteristics, such that she can properly be counted among the women from the perspective of the cluster account?"
However, I think she too has a number of "prior commitments" - i.e., articles of faith - of her own that precludes her from even countenancing much less dealing honestly with the scientific and biological definitions which, while also based on a "gamete account", are based on actually having functional gonads of either of two types.
Stock herself seems rather "desperate" to shoehorn feminist dogma, if not women's vanity, into the "glass slipper" of biology - so to speak - by refusing to consider that, under her own "gamete account" and the standard biological one, those with DSDs, and many others in a similar boat (infertile), are in fact sexless.
From an Aeon essay by professor, philosopher of science, and co-author of Genetics and Philosophy Paul Griffiths who endorses and summarizes those fairly ubiquitous and well-accepted biological definitions and their logical consequences:
"Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from DEFINING each sex by the ability to do one thing: make eggs or make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can't do either [ergo, sexless]."
In a very important sense what we understand as gender has not changed in forty years. It is the social expectations placed on a body by social and political forces on the basis of that body’s initial identification as either male or female. Once upon a time there was a politics of rejecting such expectations. Today there exists much the same the same thing but with a difference. Once it was unambiguously recognised that relationships between man and woman were based on a kind of toxicity, that it was power that sustained and perpetuated differences between men and women to the advantage of the male sex class, and that the politics of gender was about pointing this out, breaking down the toxicity, while encouraging men and women to be as happy as possible in their own bodies. The only thing that appears to have changed is that male toxicity, its reproduction by power and its creation of sex classes has been replaced by a celebration of maleness, a neutralisation of its power while female sex classes continue to bear the burden of the now invisible toxicity of masculinity. This whole process appears simply as covering up, denying and neutralising a particular nexus or assemblage of power, turning it into a kind of game for narcissistic children. Apart from obvious injections of actual and political capital into certain crucial societal processes and institutions, what else happened? How did masculinity persuade little children that it is non toxic, benign and just another thing you can be when you grow up?
When I first started following you, I was surprised to read that you are in grad school, considering the total capture of academia on this issue. Do you plan to pursue a career in academia after your degree? Do you have hope that the capture of major institutions can be reversed such that academics such as yourself can remain in the academy?
Tempting to ask you a hundred questions!
I'll limit myself to 2: one on Gender/Trans, and one personal.
Question on Gender/Trans:
Much of the Trans Rights movement is often described as being akin to a men's rights movement. But some of the most vocal are women. And not just young women, but women in their 40s and 50s who have children. Have you any thoughts or insight into why that might be?
Personal Question: you're someone to whom the words 'heterodox, iconoclast, contrarian etc' might be applied. How much is that hard wired into you and how much is a product of your upbringing?
Have you noticed any similarities between TRAs and the sorts of people (okay, men) who, possibly in a search for some meaning to life or somewhere to direct their natural anger/negative energy, become incels or join ISIS or some other group which actively hates women? The images of people [men] holding guns wearing ‘kill TERFs’ T-shirts remind me of the videos put out by the men who became radicalised online and went overseas to join religious fundamentalist groups.
What would you say to each of the following statements if a relative whom you like made them:
1. Trans women are women!
2. It is ‘right-wing’ and ‘fascist’ to say otherwise.
3. It is offensive to the trans community to even raise any questions about spaces for ‘cis’ women only.
4. To do so is to deny the ‘rights’ of ‘trans women’.
5. If you want to exclude ‘trans women/girls’ from women’s/girls’ toilets, you should by analogy be even more willing to ban ‘cis’ men from teaching at girls’ schools (or any schools with female students), because (it is claimed) male teachers commit assault at higher rates than ‘trans girls/women’.
6. Most trans girls/women would never commit assault. You can’t exclude them from womens’ spaces just because a tiny minority might commit assault, just as you can’t ban men from working with women just because some men assault some women in the workplace.
I have encountered all of this from relatives I like and otherwise respect, and am sad to say that I either made a hash of my reply or did not really give a reply, intimidated as I was by the conviction of the majority in the room. I have wondered for a while how you would respond, as you write with (to my mind) unmatched clarity and eloquence on these topics.
Relatedly: would you consider writing a kind of guide to talking to people who have bought in, a compilation of statements/arguments such as those above and your suggested responses to them?
Thank you so much for your work.
How do we get out of this mess - the gender ideologies have captured most academe and so much else - the NHS included?
Annette Lawson
Well, I sure would like to know your definition for "woman", whether you subscribe to the one championed by Posie Parker, i.e., "adult human female":
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45650462
Likewise on your definition for "female". And whether you would agree with the definition endorsed and promoted by the more or less sensible Helen Joyce, and that, as she put it, "female" - and, mutatis mutandis, "woman" - is simply not something one can "identify as":
"woman: An adult human who identifies as female
— Anonymous Twitter account
Marks for cunning, I suppose. Using 'female' instead of 'woman' is clearly an attempt to avoid circularity. The problem is that 'female' is not something you can identify as. It’s a word with an objective definition that holds right across all of biology, and hardly any of the things it refers to are capable of identifying as anything. It means: 'of or denoting the sex class that produces large gametes ...' ...."
https://quillette.com/2020/06/20/she-who-must-not-be-named/
As Joyce suggests and elaborates on, categories, if they're to be of any use or value at all, have to be grounded in objective criteria and properties that qualify as membership dues.
Rather depressing the extent to which both "female" and "woman" have been "decoupled" from any of those requirements - which largely makes the terms meaningless and useless for any matters of social policy and scientific research. For instance, from a newsletter I get from Impact Ethics:
"I will preface this entire commentary by acknowledging that I have referred to ovarian cancer as a women’s cancer in the past. I have since become aware of the ways in which this terminology fails to reflect the wider spectrum of gender identity, and can actually perpetuate harm against people with ovarian cancer who do not identify as cis women."
https://impactethics.ca/2022/06/03/corrigendum-ovarian-cancer-is-not-a-womens-cancer/
I really don't think "we"are going to turn the transloonie tide until we are ready, as Posie Parker commendably did, to draw a line in the sand, to defend the idea that words have meanings, that categories have objective criteria for membership, that "self-identification" is one of the most incoherent, unscientific, "unintelligible", odious and mephitic ideas to come down the pike in a very long time.
Do you think that the radical feminist movement of the late 60s contributed in any way to the transgender craziness of today?
ICYMI, Kellie-Jay Keen - AKA Posie Parker - at least suggests or broaches that question with her YouTube video, "Is transgenderism the fault of Feminism?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXj9NUihA8Y&lc=Ugw-BiDZTnar88ypgUx4AaABAg.9WtI4wo7ViV9X-K33KnBV4
Can't say that I've watched all of it - though I've left a comment or two there more or less defending it - but certainly some justification for that "thesis" of hers.
Decent article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, though I've really only skimmed it, that gives some history of the concept of gender, and how "feminism" was more or less an "early adopter" of it:
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/feminism-gender/
I think, in particular that there's some merit in the concept of gender itself - as with the article's defense of the idea that gender might reasonably be seen as "feminine and masculine personalities" (item 2.2), of which there are billions and billions.
But the problem is that too much of gender has been "trans-mogrified" - pun intended 😉 - into "gender identity" which is more or less if not completely incoherent, quite unscientific, and entirely subjective twaddle - being charitable. Gender identity has become something of a frankensteinian monster, the result of corrupting and bastardizing gender with, as Sahar Sadjadi of the University of McGill puts it, a "magico-spiritual undertone", a mephitic and toxic amalgam "of science, magic, and religion":
https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/3728/430
Moot of course as to exactly how much blame feminism itself bears for much of the transgender clusterfuck, but I and many others - including philosophers Kathleen Stock and Amia Srinivasan - argue that it's not inconsiderable:
"The objection I have in mind is that feminist philosophy rests on a mistake: namely, a conflation of epistemology and politics. Philosophy, at least on the conventional understanding, is an epistemic project, a project oriented toward truth or knowledge, and thus committed to the kind of unfettered inquiry that is conducive to the acquisition of truth and knowledge. Feminism meanwhile is a political project, a project oriented toward the emancipation of women and the dissolution of patriarchy. How then could something be at once philosophy and feminist? How could the unencumbered pursuit of knowledge itself have a political orientation? In other words how could there really be feminist philosophy?"
https://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_files/Does%20Feminist%20Philosophy_KCL%20talk.pdf
Sadly, too often "political projects" wind up corrupting science, often because they put feelings and ideology ahead of facts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Great deal of justification for arguing - as Kathleen Stock has done recently - that that is pretty much exactly what has happened with too much of feminism. Which, as she puts it, is riven with no end of "risible absurdities":
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp?s=r
Does transgender ideology rely on the
fiction-writing device of suspension of disbelief?
I recommend Kathleen Stock's Material Girls -- she is a philosopher who has worked on the philosophy of fiction writing, and it is indeed super relevant here.
Yes, you gotta read Kathleen Stock on this. She nails it. I'd only be quoting her.
Much to commend Stock for, not least that she has "sounded the alarums" about the "risible absurdities" in much of feminism that has followed from transgenderism:
"Effectively, the stupid story [transgenderism? gender identity?] functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp?s=r
Though I think her "thesis" is still under development and somewhat obscurely laid out.
But I gather from this comment over at the blog "Why Evolution is True" that her book - haven't read it yet myself - provides something in the way of a supposedly or superficially decent analysis of the different possible definitions for "male" and "female" that are on the table:
"Kathleen Stock distinguishes between three biological accounts of maleness ... and femaleness ... :
1. 'the gamete account'
2. 'the chromosome account'
3. 'the cluster account' (with maleness and femaleness respectively defined in terms of some cluster of morphological/phenotypical sex characteristics such as genitals)
She then mentions that 'on both gamete and chromosome accounts, there are occasional cases of DSDs [Disorders of Sexual Development] not easily characterised as either male or female.'
The problem with the cluster account is that 'what counts as having enough of the important properties in a cluster is in some sense a practical decision, relative to wider collective theoretical goals'. For example, does a post-operative transwoman with female breasts, a vulva, and a vagina (but without any postvaginal female sex organs such as a uterus and ovaries) have enough of the 'woman-making' morphological sex characteristics, such that she can properly be counted among the women from the perspective of the cluster account?"
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/06/01/the-friendly-atheist-becomes-the-misleading-atheist/#comment-1997726
However, I think she too has a number of "prior commitments" - i.e., articles of faith - of her own that precludes her from even countenancing much less dealing honestly with the scientific and biological definitions which, while also based on a "gamete account", are based on actually having functional gonads of either of two types.
Stock herself seems rather "desperate" to shoehorn feminist dogma, if not women's vanity, into the "glass slipper" of biology - so to speak - by refusing to consider that, under her own "gamete account" and the standard biological one, those with DSDs, and many others in a similar boat (infertile), are in fact sexless.
From an Aeon essay by professor, philosopher of science, and co-author of Genetics and Philosophy Paul Griffiths who endorses and summarizes those fairly ubiquitous and well-accepted biological definitions and their logical consequences:
"Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from DEFINING each sex by the ability to do one thing: make eggs or make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can't do either [ergo, sexless]."
https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
In a very important sense what we understand as gender has not changed in forty years. It is the social expectations placed on a body by social and political forces on the basis of that body’s initial identification as either male or female. Once upon a time there was a politics of rejecting such expectations. Today there exists much the same the same thing but with a difference. Once it was unambiguously recognised that relationships between man and woman were based on a kind of toxicity, that it was power that sustained and perpetuated differences between men and women to the advantage of the male sex class, and that the politics of gender was about pointing this out, breaking down the toxicity, while encouraging men and women to be as happy as possible in their own bodies. The only thing that appears to have changed is that male toxicity, its reproduction by power and its creation of sex classes has been replaced by a celebration of maleness, a neutralisation of its power while female sex classes continue to bear the burden of the now invisible toxicity of masculinity. This whole process appears simply as covering up, denying and neutralising a particular nexus or assemblage of power, turning it into a kind of game for narcissistic children. Apart from obvious injections of actual and political capital into certain crucial societal processes and institutions, what else happened? How did masculinity persuade little children that it is non toxic, benign and just another thing you can be when you grow up?