Quite to the contrary, the trans-exclusionary side of this debate has recently seen publication by non-experts on precisely this matter in Philosophical Studies (Alex Byrne) and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Kathleen Stock). These publications I find even more remarkable given neither of these philosophers had previously published anything on the subject of philosophy of sex/gender, and given that the matter of trans pronouns was confined mostly to specialist feminist philosophy journals before the recent growth of ‘gender-critical’ philosophy. The burden of proof has certainly not been met for the argument that all other generalist journals are unusually unwelcoming to this viewpoint.

I am merely falsifying the view, the one you proposed in your earlier comment, that generalist journals are ‘exceptionally unwelcoming’ to the trans-exclusionary side of this debate. I am not advancing any alternative theory of my own and so I am unsure what evidence you would ask me to supply. As for the phrase ‘trans-exclusionary’, I am using it to refer to the fact that these views propose gender categories which exclude trans people from the categories in which they believe themselves to reside. From what I know of Bogardus and his work, I do not believe he would call himself ‘gender-critical’, and I cannot think of another moniker to use which unites Bogardus, Stock, Byrne & the pseudonymous author of this article other than language you would likely find even more loaded.

I do not think a non-expert writing on a new topic is ‘remarkable’, or that Alex Byrne is generally ‘non-expert’ in philosophy–you have moved my phrases around in odd ways to make me say things I do not. I do, think, however, that it is remarkable that one of the rare publications in a very highly-regarded generalist journal on a topic on which there is much existing literature in specialist journals by specialists was by someone who has not previously published on the topic. Of course Byrne is welcome to publish what he wishes and his writing on the topic is not ipso facto remarkable. I was making a point that to me seems highly suggestive that there is no bias in generalist journal editorial policy against philosophers without background on the philosophy of sex/gender successfully publishing ‘trans-exclusionary’ stances, which I would conjecture describes this paper, and Bogardus, as well.

JTD: “The claim that Alex Byrne is a non-expert seem dubious to me.”

Then you should read Dembroff’s response to Byrne, which makes plain just how much Byrne’s piece suffers from not engaging the literature. Don’t take my word for it. Read the response.

JTD: “One of his research specializations is philosophy of language and his Philosophical Studies paper is essentially applied philosophy of language. ”

Which makes one the central arguments of Byrne’s paper, his “The Dictionary Says ‘Woman’ Means ‘Adult Human Female’, So Women are Adult Human Females” argument, all the more galling.

It’s encouraging to hear that you view the Dictionary Argument as a minor one.

Since you’re reading and replying, I’ll take this opportunity to ask: Which of your arguments are you more keen on? Can’t be the ‘girl’ argument, since that’s another Dictionary Argument. Is it one of the epistemic arguments involving Mitochondrial Eve or the role reversal argument, both of which beg the question? How about the argument that relies on the Serano quote, which in that very same quote, also contains evidence against what you say?

The point isn’t that you should always and everywhere engage with the literature for its own sake The point is that, in the case of philosophy of gender specifically, people are parachuting in and raising all of these supposedly devastating objections that people have actually been puzzling over and offering solutions to for decades. That’s why, in the case of philosophy of gender specifically, ignorance of even the broad strokes of the preceding literature is arrogant, disrespectful, and disqualifying.

I think the field should be intellectually conservative, in the sense that we shouldn’t value the kind of “brilliant, off-the-wall innovation” that comes from shooting from the hip and not citing anybody.

Your analogy with 18th-century materialism strikes me as inapt. For one thing, it seems to me (I’m not an early modernist, so maybe I’m wrong here) that those figures *were* in conversation with their theist, dualist opponents, responding directly to counterarguments and so forth. Again, I don’t really know, so maybe I’m wrong about this. So let’s say that they did totally ignore their would-be interlocutors, and overlooked philosophically serious objections embedded in the theistic philosophical tradition. If that’s so, they should be judged wanting from our perspective as contemporary philosophers – we shouldn’t be imitating them in that respect.

This does *not* entail the “be silent and listen” stance, nor the “The response is in there somewhere” stance. It seems like you’re imputing those views to me because you’re skeptical of the philosophical seriousness or quality of the existing literature on gender and trans issues – or, more specifically, skeptical that the issues raised by folks like Byrne and Bogardus have been addressed in that literature. I can’t help you there, since such skepticism is plainly unwarranted. But I’m pretty sure Dembroff’s most recent paper gives several (non-exhaustive) examples of the oversight of existing coverage of these issues.

For the record, I do agree that it is not helpful to just say “the literature” rather than rehashing the responses that exist there. Obviously the fact that disagreements still persist about this is evidence that earlier work on gender and trans issues hasn’t reached a wide enough philosophical audience, and in some cases this may have to do with writing style, being published in venues not usually consulted by philosophers, and so on. So we’re going to need to rehash the arguments for a mainstream philosophical audience (and I think, by the way, that Dembroff and Barnes, among others, have already done a huge chunk of the work necessary for that, and am awaiting the publication of responses to their arguments). I’m *just* arguing that, ceterus paribus, it is justified and sensible to take issue with people not engaging with the literature.

Hello, Fed Up Grad Student and E.

Perhaps we don’t have a substantive disagreement on the right norms here. That would be good! My position is that people should be welcome to present whatever arguments or objections they like, even if they haven’t read all the literature. If someone makes a blunder because he or she hasn’t read a wonderful and decisive argument or objection that was published elsewhere, then that should be pointed out by the reviewer or by readers. This would present a good occasion for everyone involved to hear, once again, the powerful argument for the case in question and see that the argument really is as strong as it’s said to be.

E, it isn’t that I can’t be bothered to read a 5-page article. I don’t have access to it from this computer (I tried following Justin W’s link).

You say that Byrne commits a massive blunder in what he has written on the subject, and that Dembroff points it out. I’ll leave it to Byrne to respond to that charge if he wants to, and reply instead to what you say you want me to draw from this example: that it must be very frustrating for people who have spent so much time working on these areas to have to raise arguments that should be well known to those familiar with the literature, or otherwise to have to deal with what are perhaps very ignorant objections.

No, to be honest, I don’t see it! If someone takes the time to comment publicly on something I’ve studied a great deal, and commits a major error that I can demonstrate, I’m always glad to be able to deploy the great argument once again in front of a new audience. Clearly, if that is going on, the argument is not yet widely-enough known, and it advances the discipline for it to be repeated yet again. And really, how hard is it on one to win a debate by being able to pull out a decisive argument?

If the argument is not that decisive, though, well… there I can understand the annoyance. But that seems to be annoyance at something that’s beneficial to philosophy.

“Clearly, if that is going on, the argument is not yet widely-enough known, and it advances the discipline for it to be repeated yet again. And really, how hard is it on one to win a debate by being able to pull out a decisive argument?”

First, there’s nothing to be proud of in showing that some scholar isn’t upholding standards of scholarship. Second, I’d wager that, no, the discipline isn’t being advanced on the whole. Most people, including, I might add, yourself, as you said so above, aren’t even going to read the exchange between Byrne and Dembroff. Instead, they’re going to read about the exchange, and think things like, “Well, a distinguished MIT professor defends the view in print, so the arguments for it can’t be THAT bad,” when many of them are in fact that bad.

It should not be controversial that scholars should be scholarly. I find it amusing that out of everyone, it’s the feminist metaphysicians that are the ones here doing as Williamson instructed all of us to do when he wrote, “Must Do Better”.

To Fed Up Grad Student: I don’t yet know what cherry picking you refer to. You make another point, though: “Of course, in those cases – as far as I know – you aren’t a trans person whose interlocutors are implicitly (or explicitly) accusing you of conceptual confusion by being trans. So I’m not surprised you don’t see the frustration.”

True, I’m not trans, as far as I know (I find the newer definitions of ‘gender’ so confusing that it’s difficult for me to tell). But it’s quite common in philosophy for others to say things that imply one is conceptually confused about things one takes to be an essential part of who one is. Religious people are told that their self-conception as ensouled bodies is nonsense even in principle. Atheists and agnostics are told that they aren’t even capable of reasoning if they don’t believe in God, and that they can’t possibly be moral. I think we’ve all experienced things like that. Is that exactly the same as having someone doubt one’s ideological commitments on trans issues? No, because no two things are exactly the same. But where does the argument go from here? Is your position that only trans people, or non-trans people who have a prior commitment to agreeing with mainstream trans ideology, should be permitted to contribute to the philosophical discussion? If so, then I don’t understand how the result can be a genuinely philosophical discussion. Whatever one can affirm in a philosophical discussion, one must be able to deny. Do you disagree?

To E: I take your point: since there are vastly more philosophical articles than there is time to read them all, none of us are in a good position to judge the status of most of the philosophical disputes. You say, because of this, that people will come to think, on the grounds that professor at a highly respected philosophy department continues to engage in a dispute with someone else, that the position held by the professor from the respected department is probably at least somewhat philosophically viable. I think you’re right about that.

But I don’t know what you’re suggesting as a better alternative. Is the suggestion that nobody should be permitted to publish in a field unless he or she can demonstrate deep familiarity with that field as a whole? If so, who will make that judgment? Suppose a bunch of activists with a very strong ideological commitment mark off a field of study for themselves, and use it to produce a discourse that never comes to question its core ideological doctrines. That discourse then becomes the ‘literature’ on the topic. Now journal editors pick people from that discipline — again, mostly or entirely activists, few or none of whom doubt the core doctrines — to determine whether a given article is up to snuff. If an article is critical of all the literature, or if the literature is deeply flawed because it has failed to doubt some core doctrines of the movement, it will now be very easy for the activist-reviewers to report back that the article has not engaged adequately with the literature even if it has in fact utterly demolished a core claim in the literature. We all know that activists in the service of a certain cause tend to dismiss objections much too quickly: being able to gesture to the literature, or being unable to doubt the core doctrines behind the literature, could make that very easy. And then we would have a way for the activists behind a movement to block any criticism of their core ideology from appearing in print.

Considering that all this is meant to be philosophical, that seems far worse than the chance that someone will think a position or objection is probably viable when it isn’t.

My own intuition for what it’s worth is that while there are very loud voices in philosophy that take extremely strong stances on trans issues and regard any work that takes the other side as presumptively illegitimate, there is likely a much larger pool of people who are less invested.

“an argument does not “beg the question” simply because someone who is determined to dispute the conclusion will also dispute either the reasoning or the premises.”

I didn’t say or assume so. Nor did I read your piece with any “determination to dispute the conclusion of your arguments”. But I will admit that I was caught off guard by the fact that the first argument of your paper has the same structure as the structure of the arguments I see from some of my intro students: “The OED defines ‘justice’ as…, therefore…”.

“The positive case in the first part is complemented by the objections to contrary arguments in the second part.”

Thanks for clarifying.

” I think you have Dembroff’s footnote 25 in mind, but that is about some quotations I give later in the paper, not the Serano quotation.”

That’s right. I misremembered the relevant footnote. Sorry about that. I do wonder what you think about the charge of cherry picking to which I’m alluding. I mean, it’s hard to imagine that you’re not familiar with the fact that there are entire communities that don’t use gender terms in the way your view predicts.

Our differences of opinion are likely influenced by our views about the quality of the Bogardus papers and about the background biases against such views in other generalist journals. (I have no view on the quality of the paper prompting this entire discussion.)

“I found myself having a similar thought to Bogardus while reading Dembroff’s argument: surely a professional philosopher wouldn’t make such a silly argument. But there it is.”

Bogardus doesn’t call Dembroff’s argument “silly”, so I’m not sure why you think he thinks it’s silly, nor why you think you’re in the same company as him in this regard. Indeed, some evidence that Bogardus doesn’t think Dembroff’s argument is silly is that Bogardus spends time trying to refute it. Silly arguments are not refuted in this profession – they’re ignored or dismissed in a note.

Moreover, Dembroff’s argument, at least on Bogardus’s interpretation, is a classic Leibniz Law style argument: Being a man has normative features that being male doesn’t, so the properties aren’t identical.

But you know what is silly? Claiming in response to Dembroff’s argument that, get this, being a man DOES have normative features, including such normative features as, I hope you’re ready for this, “males ought to protect those in their care”. And what else is silly is not even considering the most glaringly obvious response to this claim, which is that being male doesn’t, on its own, without supplementation from some extra purely normative principle, have this normative implication.

Talk about silly arguments.

“Silly arguments are not refuted in this profession – they’re ignored or dismissed in a note.”

Google “Eliminative Materialism.”