Even better: let’s just have our ISPs install Wrongthink filters that will keep our offensive thoughts from ever getting into public view, and get the neuroscientists to work on devices that will deliver a tiny electric shock when such thoughts so much as occur to us.

There is a difference between “explain[ing] these apparently puzzling attributions of transphobia,” on the one hand, and “explain[ing] why some of J.K. Rowling’s writings and statements are transphobic,” which is how the video is described at the top. The former characterization is consistent with it’s being false that Rowling’s writings and statements are transphobic; the latter is not.

Could I suggest a (perhaps helpful) counterweight to ContraPoints? Try this interview with the redoubtable Julie Bindel: https://audioboom.com/posts/7739303-the-misogyny-of-trans-activism-with-julie-bindel.

Unlike ContraPoints, Bindel isn’t luxuriating in a rose-petal filled bathtub, but apart from that it’s pretty good.

To my mind, the most important takeaway from the video is that there’s good reason for trans people and their allies to be suspicious of gender critical feminists and their allies when they claim to be solely concerned with safeguarding cisgender women’s rights and wellbeing. In particular, the analogy with the polite homophobia of the 90s and early 2000s struck me. When I hear a politician express concern for the sanctity or marriage or when someone tries to restrict gay couple’s adoption rights out of a supposed concern for the safety and wellbeing of children, I rightfully don’t believe for a second that they actually care about those things. And I also don’t think that, if given enough political power, they will stop with simply restricting marriage and adoption rights. It’s possible, of course, that they really have nothing against gay people personally, that they really do just strongly believe in safeguarding the institution of marriage and the wellbeing of children. But that’s not where I would I place my bets, especially given that I know that it’s a common tactic to cloak bigoted beliefs in palatable language and to keep one’s ultimate political aims out of the public discourse. I think it is very difficult to read Rowling’s tweets and those of many gender critical feminists and still maintain that have anything but contempt for trans folk, in the same way that I can’t read a philosopher like Swinburne and think he has anything but contempt for homosexuals. And I cannot believe that they will be contented with simply excluding trans women from women’s spaces, in the same way I cannot believe that anti-gay politicians will be content with merely restricting gay couple’s access to wedding cakes. It’s perhaps unfair, and I wouldn’t claim it’s an attitude suitable for a professional setting like an academic conference. But when you’re a member of a marginalized group, trust is hard-earned, and you don’t take people at their word or assume their intentions are benevolent. And when you’re agitating for political change, someone merely saying they are an ally in your political struggle carries little weight.

I think that some commenters have been too quick in their judgments about the quality of the content of Wynn’s video, and about the demerits of this format. But I disagree with David’s rather strong suggestion that this indicates ‘bankruptcy’ in analytic philosophy. Many of philosophy’s problems seem irrelevant to this discussion.

For instance, I think that philosophy has a problem with overspecialisation. However, the topic of Wynn’s video is very specialised (many ethically significant topics are). Philosophy also has a problem with the availability of its content. However, that seems largely extraneous to philosophy itself, and many philosophers make draft papers openly available. Then there’s the problem that philosophy can appear unnecessarily technical and jargon-laden. However, my (unlearned) impression is that this is less of an issue here.

There are also fair-minded reasons to be concerned with videos like Wynn’s.

The first is simply put: they’re too cool! They are glossy, extremely well produced, edgy. They are very clickable and Likeable. But that makes their content seem much more persuasive than it would otherwise appear, in a soberer format. (Generally speaking, I think that our epistemic ecosystem would be healthier if prominent actors on social media were less concerned with the popularity of their content.)

The second is that there is no real equivalent to the peer review process, or even to basic journalistic codes and standards, in the world of individual online content creators. Not saying those are in perfect order in the academy and elsewhere, but overall everyone suffers if they go by the wayside.

Public philosophy can be accessible without relying too much on theatre, and whilst ensuring some bias- and quality-control on its content. For instance, the popular YouTube channel Capturing Christianity often hosts long-form discussions between theists and atheists: discussions which, needless to say, touch on highly divisive and impassioned debates. The moderator is on hand to make sure the discussion stays relatively grounded. It would be better, I think, to encourage that sort of online public philosophy.

I don’t think that any of the above is in tension with Justin Weinberg’s favourable presentation of the video. And it shouldn’t qualify as the sort of ‘stuffy gatekeeping’ that Christopher Britton finds so depressing – though maybe this jobless post-grad is too deeply wedded to the system to see beyond it!

Thanks Justin! Thought it was a great video; watched all of it and learned a lot. If, like Wynn does, more philosophers would situate their thinking culturally and politically , while at the same time keeping the humanity of those they argue against front and centre our discipline would be the better for it.

This is a reply to Justin’s reply to me. For some of those items on your list, Wynn certainly says that she is doing or not doing them, but simply announcing that you are doing or not doing something does not always make it so. In this reply I am not providing you with an example of what I mean.

How are we to have this discussion without confusion and conflation and conceptual slippage between psychological, sociological, political, and philosophical issues? Right from the outset it seems distorting to make transphobia a philosophical concept. Phobia is psychological and motivational. So, arguably is bigotry. Similarly, to speak of how a trans-person feels about certain concepts or arguments is psychological. And, while such psychological conditions may be empirically true or false for any individual or set of individuals how they relation to philosophical arguments and concepts itself needs philosophical explanation. There are also clearly various sociological facts that can be researched and described regarding the behaviors of groups and subgroups. Some of these might have to do with the effects within groups of certain ways of identifying and behaving, and how it fits or doesn’t fit into the reference group. Issues of alienation, of nonacceptance, even of violence. Theres a lot to discuss and explore here, but the connect of this with philosophy isn’t transparent either. While we may be personally compassionate to suffering whereever we see it, the philosophical argument for the ideal forms of social organization are separable from the empirical facts per se. DIscrimination is a sociological concept in this regard. And, while sociologically we can describe the operation of discrimination within society, and perhaps demonstrate its effects, its rightness or wrongness requires a different sort of argument. Some of this would be political. Politically one has to develop concepts of one’s societies relevant groups, the different interests and rights of such groups, and the methods for balancing and adjudicating between those, groups, interests, and rights. Whether trans- rights are relevant, or are just human rights, nevermind whether they trump the rights of biological women, would need to be established not assumed. Philosophy has a role here again. But, its place it different from the political power of various groups.

@ Mathieu Rees

I may be alone in this, but I really like the kind of frivolity and slickness of much of the content produced for YouTube and the like. To my mind it’s not that far off from at least some professional philosophical writing. The philosopher who sticks out in my mind, perhaps oddly, is Jerry Fodor. Part of why I enjoy reading Fodor in a way I very, very rarely enjoy reading professional philosophy is the constant jokes, the oftentimes bizarre framing of the paper (such as framing it around a children’s story about ontology), the dialogues between Granny and her various interlocuters, and so on. It may well be that I’m more sympathetic to Fodor as a result of him being fun to read (I certainly have read more of him than many other philosophers as a result of it). And maybe I’m less sympathetic to other philosophers of mind that I find a miserable slog to get through for the converse reason. Similar points apply to philosophers who are simply very eloquent and write beautiful prose, such as Martha Nussbaum, who I maybe would not not be as sympathetic to if they wrote in a dry, lawyerly, analytic style. So some of these worries apply, in a more limited form perhaps, even to well known work in professional philosophy. All other things being equal, a philosopher who is actually a good writer, who can inject their own personality into their prose and make engaging with it fun, will always be more persuasive than the philosopher who’s writing is dry, stilted, and unimaginative (the unfortunate norm in analytic philosophy).

Making public and professional philosophy accessible is one thing. I’ve certainly seen longform debates with moderators that a non-specialist could easily follow. Making it actually enjoyable, especially to the kind of person who isn’t deep enough in philosophy to devote their life to it, is another. There’s a reason Wynn can get upwards of four million views on her videos, whereas most philosophical content on YouTube is lucky to break a hundred thousand views (and even then, that’s quite rare). If making philosophy known to the wider public and making it more enjoyable to engage with requires a bit of pageantry and theatre, I personally consider that worth the risk of making some philosophy too rhetorically convincing.

I know I’m a bit late to the game, but I got through the entirety of the video late last night, and I must admit I really do enjoy Natalie trying to bring philosophy to the masses with her videos (I’ve seen a handful of others over the last couple years). I agree with huge portions of the video. I also had no idea that that book (The Transsexual Empire) existed, and it was pretty disturbing to read that it’s reception was largely positive when it first came out.

All that said, there were a few elements to the discussion that I’d push back on:

~ 30:00 (She brings up Wittgenstein and dissolving the question–here in relation to the common statement “trans women are women”–which to her is just more metaphysics and scholasticism…saying at one point “Life is too short for metaphysics”). I had to laugh at that last quip, though I would hope that this is maybe a limited view (perhaps with respect to gender), because if taken globally: it makes things incoherent. We all have metaphysical presuppositions (whether admittedly or not). For instance, in order for me to understand progress in science, there needs to be feedback from an objective external reality. And if I say things like “believe in science”…it can’t just be with respect to vaccine efficacy or global warming resulting from humanity’s machinations. If you believe in science, you realize that this universe has existed for almost 14 billion years, with modern humans appearing about 200,000 years ago. In addition, utilizing Wittgenstein can be risky because he seems to be interpreted in vastly different ways by different people. One of those ways is anti-relativist (and indeed one might say more “metaphysical”). David Wootton, in his fantastic and dense “The Invention of Science”, discusses this at length in some notes at the end, citing several passages that indicate Ludwig’s belief in objective facts.

~1:00:00 (She mentions “Have I got news for Dr. Freud” after discussing his belief that men discovering that women don’t have a penis might be behind crossdressing and similar fetishes) I laughed at this one, and I completely agree with her that his psychosexual analysis of all sorts of things is pretty much complete nonsense. The only thing is, earlier in the video she mentions a book, “The Anatomy of Bigotry” by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. It seemed very intriguing, so I looked it up and, well, apparently the analysis depends significantly on Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Now I haven’t read it, and I realize that plenty of people could say “One can onboard some elements of Freudian psychoanalysis while jettisoning other parts”. That’s absolutely true, whether it’s a socialist that still thinks Marx was wrong about all sorts of things (historical materialism, labor theory of value, etc.) or a mathematical realist that believes mathematical statements are objectively true statements (without believing in some universe of Platonic Forms). So this may be much ado about nothing, but it could also be a case of “Yea Freud be a jackass…and here’s this really important book I recently read (with no mention of the author’s own intellectual background being steeped in Freudian thought).

1:10:03 (She says “When the target of that aggression is a member of a marginalized community, then it becomes bigotry”) Not related explicity to trans issues, but comments like this remind me of the Critical Race Theory redefinition of racism back in the 1970s. It makes no sense. Natalie should have just said “When any group of any member is targeted”. This is not some “white people have it rough too” whataboutism (although, coming at this from a class perspective, there are indeed a shitload of white people, both in the US and around the world, that currently live a miserable existence). i get that racism against minorities in this country is far worse. What I’m saying is, we don’t teach people “Don’t be bigoted, unless the group has some inordinate power in society. Then be as bigoted as you like! Anyone telling you not to is tone policiing you!” This is nonsense. It only takes a second to look at hate crime statistics in this country and see that about 20% of them are anti-white (a very significant minority). It only takes a little bit of listening to rap lyrics from Jay-Z or members of Wu-Tang or Jay Electronica to hear references to Yakub and other NOI/Five-Percenter nonsense (still love the music though, I’m one of those “its possible in many cases to separate art from artist”). You don’t get a pass from me on this, and funny enough, Natalie gives one of the best retorts to this sort of behavior I can think of (~1:09:35): “You’re not less of a bigot when your bigotry resulted from a tragic backstory”.

Any thoughts from Justin and/or the throng are welcome!

response to dave mathers

thanks for your thoughtful response. I agree that the word phobia has been attached to various other words [x-phobia] and isn’t exclusive to trans discourse. I didn’t mean to imply it isn’t used that way, nor that he categories I was distinguishing weren’t complexly related. What I was trying to say though, and it appears you disagree, is that there are differing sets of considerations and that the shifting meanings and category mistakes often make these discussions impossible to sort out. Phobia even as used in homophobia, is a psychological term. It implies a set of feelings associated with gayness that is stipulated as underlying the acts or assertions of the homophobic person. And, it may be there surely in many cases. I wasn’t trying to suggest that it doesn’t exist. I was however saying that my internal states are at least possibly philosophically separable considerations of politics or my ethics or my ontology. To refer back to transphobia and harry potter [or rowling]. When she says: “I support your right to wear whatever clothes you want and to call yourself whatever you want.”, she is making a point of political philosophy, i.e. the premise of liberal politics that individuals have the right to be left alone and to pursue happiness as the see fit. It says nothing else about her psychological states or motives for making such a political statement and we, all else being equal , should take her word about her psychological state. When she states that [as i understand what she said that got her in trouble here] that people who menstruate are women, or that a women is an adult biological human female, she is making a different sort of statement, perhaps ontological, but again isn’t stating anything about her psychological feelings about people who are trans. Her statement may be true or false regardless of her or anyone else’s feelings. Phobia has little to do with it necessarily, even though it is possible she is phobic, one cannot say unless one had more personal information. To give an analogous case separable from this— if I stated there is no god or that jesus is a man like any other man, would it be obvious that I was godphobic or religiophobic? I could say this while also defending the right of christians to believe and pursue their forms of life. I may have had some hateful experiences connected with religion and possibly do hate or fear such things but there is no way to know from the above statement. And, of course the religious person may feel misunderstood or even invalidated by my denial of god’s reality, but that doesn’t itself indicate anything philosophically. I think progress can be made if we let psychotherapists handle the psychological, engage politically around the political issues here of rights and the balance of rights and interests without making ad hominem assertions about feelings and motives, and separately try to clarify the ontology of natural kinds and social construction and so on. they are surely interrelated but mushing them up only leads to poor psychology, poor politics, and poor philosophy.

‘To give an analogous case separable from this— if I stated there is no god or that jesus is a man like any other man, would it be obvious that I was godphobic or religiophobic?’ You’d be expressing the view that Christianity is false, and in that sense would be taking a stance against Christianity. There’s obviously *a* sensible reading of ‘anti-Christian’ on which such a phrase would be anti-Christian, though there is another sensible reading of ‘anti-Christian’ on which it requires more, some kind of hostility to Christianity. Of course, it sounds silly to call it ‘godphobic’ or ‘religious phobic’, but that is because those are not real words! If people started using them, it would sound less silly. I don’t think we *should* start using them, but that’s because they are pejoratives and I don’t think the attitude their designed to stigmatize is worthy of stigma. It’s not in my view unjust or prejudiced to regard Christianity as false (or in my view, even to regard it as silly).

Now, I actually agree that in order to read at least some of the statements Rowling makes as transphobic, one has to make some guesses at what she was trying to *do* was those assertions, which yes, is, I suppose to make inferences about her psychological state, since there is nothing about their literal content that either denegrates. But actually, this is *totally normal*. Real conversations do not consist simply in people attempting to get other people to update their beliefs to include the literal semantic content of their assertions. We have known this at least since Grice’s work on implicature. To understand what Rowling is implying when she says ‘ people who menstruate are women’ or that ‘women are adult human females’ we need to apply the maxim of relevance. In the first case, this is extremely easy: she said it in the context of mocking the idea that ‘people who menstruate’ should be used in places of women, in order to avoid (allegedly) upsetting trans men or assigned female at birth non-binary people. When people try and stigmatize Rowling as transphobic for saying that, they aren’t making a mistake about her intention, her intention was clearly to argue against the trans inclusive view. They might be making a moral mistake in thinking that being against the trans inclusive view in this case should be stigmatized. But that’s not a mistake about either the meaning of ‘phobia’ words. Nor does it involve them attributing to JKR a mental state that she doesn’t have.

Now ‘women are adult human females’ is a little trickier. I can imagine someone asserting that in a context where it didn’t imply any view about how trans women should be treated at all, and hence couldn’t reasonably be classed as ‘transphobic’. For example, I don’t think that Alex Byrne’s paper on this topic is, in itself, transphobic, since it presents itself as merely an attempt to figure out what is literally true in the metaphysics of gender, and, as Alex himself has said in his reply to Robin Dembroff, trans women only feature as a potential counter-example to his analysis*. There needs to be some kind of space in philosophy for doing purely descriptive metaphysics of social kinds even if some people might not like the answers. Nonetheless, ‘women are adult human females’ is obviously the kind of thing someone *might* cite as an explanation for why trans women shouldn’t be treated as women in a context where they have asked to be. Now, technically, to know that someone had done that, you need to know what their intention was. But again, this at least *can* be obvious.

There is clearly an element on the US identity politics left who delight in a) finding a statement they don’t like and most people consider perfectly acceptable, and b) simply asserting that it implies (is a ‘dogwhistle’) for some much more extreme statement that most people consider unacceptable, and insisting on this interpretation no matter how stretched it seems to everyone else. So the well has kind of been poisoned by bad faith in my view. But the response to this *can’t* be to simply pretend that understanding what someone is trying to implying or recommend or bring about by asserting a sentence is just impossible, and we should focus only on the literal content. That relies on a completely fantastical picture of how human communication actually works.

*I do however think that Alex’s citing of Julie Bindel upthread indicates that he is in fact at least somewhat sympathetic to the trans-exclusive agenda that Robin Dembroff famously accused him of trying to promote. I’m aware that on some level this is ad hominem and question-begging, but it is worth pointing out just how extremist Bindel is. In addition to talking about trans women in the most grossly insulting terms she has also denigrated bisexuality, and fantasized about putting men in concentration camps on the basis of their gender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Bindel#Gender,_bisexuality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Bindel#Men_and_heterosexuality

This is a response to Alex Byrne’s recommendation of the Julie Bindel interview. This interview didn’t seem helpful to me, someone with limited knowledge of these issues. The main problem I had with (the chunk of) it (that I got through) is its central contention: that trans activism is misogynistic. Bindel paints this picture by, among other things, identifying trans activism with obscure (online?) views about words like ‘menstruator’ as opposed to more mainstream goals on discrimination in housing, work, health care, and basic recognition of dignity. The interview thus works against actual, worthy efforts to improve the lives of transgender people.

It’s a given that transgender activism isn’t above criticism and that some of the specific goals or strategies can be reasonably debated. I’m not an expert on this movement, but this much follows from the platitude that no real-world activism is above criticism. But a goal of this criticism should be to improve trans activism, not oppose it wholesale in defense of the status quo on the treatment of transgender people (or the status quo of years past).

As I suggested parenthetically, I didn’t make it through the whole interview. (Apart from the problems I mentioned, Bindel practices a style of political communication that I just have no appetite for and that I think is harmful. But that’s another story.) Maybe it gets better. But even if it does, the damage is unlikely to be undone for the average listener, not only because this listener might not make it that far, but because of how, once they’re in place, the kinds of attitudes the beginning is intended to elicit are hard to change.

I’ll briefly mention that I’m coming to this debate with, in addition to concern about the treatment of transgender people in its own right, a concern about how anti-woke discourse about transgender people is weaponized by right-wing authoritarianism, particularly in the US. A couple of clear examples of this are Trump tweeting that he’d ban transgender people from the military and Ben Shapiro screaming about Elliott Page while his political party was trying to subvert an election. Again, the point is not that any transgender movement is above criticism, but, in this case, that such criticism should take better care than Bindel does to avoid reinforcing authoritarian propaganda.

Hi Vincent,
That’s not my complaint against the Bindel interview. Motives are sometimes hidden and it would be foolish to never try to uncover them. The problem with this interview, as I see it, is that, in it, Bindel opposes the very effort, in and of itself, to improve the lot of an oppressed group. She treats misogyny as the central, driving force of the trans gender movement and, from what I heard, wasn’t about to clarify that improving life for transgender people was nonetheless a worthy goal that should be distinguished from the putative misogyny. (And, as I say, if she did say something to that effect later, it would have been too late.) For example, one could theorize about the motives behind use of the word ‘menstruator’ without painting this kind of general picture of “the” movement for a group of people.

I didn’t pay close attention to the parts of the Contrapoints video on gender critical feminism. And I also don’t know much about gender critical feminism. So, for two reasons, I can’t say whether those parts of the Contrapoints video were fair or not. But even if they were unfair, the disanalogy I just mentioned is why I would have more of an issue with the Bindel video. To reiterate: Bindel, but not Contrapoints, is in effect opposing the attempt to improve the situation of an oppressed group.

response to dave mathers

Thanks again for your considered response. I think there actually is much we agree on so I will not belabor many of your points. My main stress I think gets lost in the point about contemporary conventional usage. Trans-phobia as an attribution isn’t simply a descriptive term— as I would guess you agree. It is a critical judgement, except not of the point at issue directly but of the person/motives behind the issue at hand. It has in other words a rhetorical function to dismiss the issue raised by pointing to the person making the statement or argument. For example, if a person raises an objection to trans-women within a women’s prison or women’s shelter as a political point having to do with the rights of women, the objection of trans-phobia is supposed to dissolve the political issue having to do with how to balance the rights of various groups into one of the claimant’s psychological state and motive. Relatedly, if someone makes a claim about woman as a natural kind or criticizes the theories of women as a purely socially constructed category, nevermind a self-identification category, then a claim of transphobia diverts the philosophical argument again to an assertion about the claimant. I find such approaches make inquiry difficult and seem defensive and inauthentic. It really seems like the claim that one is perpetrating a war on christmas just because one doesn’t accept jesus as one’s savior.

and in a similar vein, however mocking it may seem, I read Rowlings statement in response to some discussion using intellectual contortions of ‘persons who menstruate’ in a discussion, that we have a word for that, ‘woman’, as akin to—however sarcastically stated– my sons saying ‘duh’ in response to something they feel is obvious. obnoxious, perhaps, phobic, eh?

Hi Vincent,

I don’t accept that standard either. The propriety of a given criticism of a movement or institution will usually depend on the particular features of the movement or institution, of the person articulating the criticism, and of the audience. A standard like the one you state, which we both reject, is insensitive to all of these particularities and this is one reason it’s absurd. In my view, religious belief is such that, if a non-believer is going to mount a public criticism of a belief, there will be all kinds of pitfalls they should avoid if they want to be helpful. The exact same pitfalls won’t beset criticism of, say, a political party.

In previous comments, I’ve tried to indicate some particular features of the movement for transgender rights that seem to me salient to determining whether and how to criticize it and that seem to make Bindel’s criticisms unhelpful. Here’s an analogy to illustrate. To reject “the black movement” wholesale, as driven by some vicious attitude, without even the slightest hedging, would be , shall we say, unhelpful. And not *just* because it would be false; also because of what it says about the basic need to address racial injustice and the legacies thereof. (You can imagine features of the speaker or their audience that would also affect the degree of unhelpfulness.) For someone to reject an ideology like “sex-negative feminism” wholesale wouldn’t be nearly as unhelpful. That wouldn’t entail any sweeping view about addressing a major kind of group-based injustice. Again, this is because of particular differences between “the black movement” and sex-negative feminism.

I suppose if the mistreatment of and lack of concern for transgender people weren’t significant problems, the Bindel interview wouldn’t be unhelpful in the way I’m claiming. No need to entertain that possibility.

Jonathan,

That’s helpful, thanks. But try to take your analogy further – what criticism of the civil rights movement do you think would be (or perhaps was) analogous to the criticism that Bindel is pressing against trans activism?

Personally, I agree that criticism of trans activism is best accompanied by concern for the rights and dignity of trans people – since I think that a theory which marginalises biological sex will no more be able to do justice to the experiences of trans people than to the experiences of women. But I’m quite reluctant to say that criticism as severe as Bindel’s must be prefaced with some sort of claim to really be internal criticism. Aren’t radical challenges supposed to be the best ones, by the lights of much of the theory that underpins trans activism?

I know I am extremely late to the party, but I felt compelled to add my 2c worth so here goes!

Helen De Cruz quotes Contrapoints as saying “Bigotry is hate that poses a political threat to the target group. The problem with TERFs is not that they’re mean but that they’re reactionary, they want to dial back trans liberation.”

This quote offers a great illustration of the fundamentally question-begging nature of this whole debate. If we think of female people (a group that includes people who identify as cis women and people who identity as trans men,) as a target group, then we could think of politics and policies that prevent female people from being recognised as a target group as dialling back female people’s liberation. A significant amount of feminists do indeed think that female people are a target group, and that the politics and policies being pursued by the trans movement and its allies do indeed prevent female people from being recognised as a target group. This is why feminists including JK Rowling don’t see themselves as anti trans, rather, they see themselves as pro female person. They see the amelioration of the definition of “woman” to include male people, without having recourse to an alternative noun for female person, along the loss of female only facilities, events, awards, sports leagues, etc, as part and parcel with the denial that female people are a target group.

It all hinges on a) whether we should think of female people as a target group; b) whether preventing female people from being recognised as a target group dials back their liberation; c) whether the politics and policies being pursued by the trans movement and allies does prevent (or at least pose significant barriers for) female people being recognised as a target group. To appraise these questions solely from the vantage point of whether they pose a political threat to trans liberation is to beg the political question at the heart of this debate.

(My first comment should say “along WITH the loss of female only facilities, events, awards, sports leagues, etc”)

I wish the gender critical folks would get beyond stating their “genuine concerns” and actually take the business of defending public policy positions seriously. Every public policy or law that has ever been put in place has benefitted some and harmed others. One doesn’t get anywhere with one-sided arguments that, for example, move from the premise that some reproductive females will be hurt by some policy (e.g., a policy that enhances the bodily autonomy of trans men might lead some trans men to regret their decisions later on) to the conclusion that the policy should not be adopted. What I also see way too much of is the anti-trans tail wagging the pro-female dog.

Stating the broad outlines of a position falls far short of providing a serious defense of that position. Maybe my expectations as someone who does work in normative ethics and political philosophy are too high, but this does not even come close to meeting them.

Wow that’s me told @kaila Draper. I’m sorry to disappoint. I will of course defer to your greater wisdom and experience on what an appropriate level of detail is in a submission of brief evidence to a UK parliamentary select committee. (Tbh I thought I was pushing it by sticking in a reference to the literature.)

My apologies. My reading of the interaction was as follows:

You: “look these gender critical philosophers are just using talk of ‘genuine concerns’ as a transphobic dogwhistle. If they really did have genuine concerns they’d be making serious policy proposals that address them, rather than playing to the gallery of transphobic bigots.”

Me: “what you mean like this one?”

You: “well that’s not a peer reviewed journal article is it?”

Maybe you can see why I bristled. It felt very much like an accusation of bad faith in response to my first post on this discussion. Sorry if I’ve read you wrong.

Fair enough. After all, Justin hasn’t yet made ‘reading what gender critical philosophers actually say’ a requirement on posting on discussions of what awful transphobes we all are 🙂

@Kaila Draper: just to be absolutely clear, I think the behaviour you describe (pasted below) is horrific and I would in no way wish to be associated with it.

“ For example, one gender critical philosopher mocked an autistic trans woman’s selfie and also referred to her own little collection of GhastlyPhotos of transwomen with a little ‘tm’ for ‘trademark’ beside the label GhastlyPhotos. All the while, she professes to be only concerned about female sex-based rights and not in any way hateful or transphobic. ”