“We are frankly stunned to find a focus… on intemperate social media posts, papers that didn’t after all get retracted, and books being published by second-choice publishers.”
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The Vanderbilt “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” was published this past summer, with a special report about academic philosophy authored by Kit Fine (NYU) and Gideon Rosen (Princeton).
In the following guest post, Talia Bettcher (Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Gender-Based Violence and Trans Community Resilience, University of Waterloo) and Jennifer Saul (Canada Research Chair in the Study of Hatred, Misinformation and Communication, University of Waterloo) respond to Fine and Rosen’s report.
Major Threats to the Health of Philosophy, Real and Imagined:
a Response to Fine and Rosen
by Talia Bettcher and Jennifer Saul
Following the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences (Boghossian et al, 2026), Fine and Rosen have released an appendix report on the health of academic philosophy specifically (October 15, 2026). In this report, they single out the philosophy of sex and gender for special concern. We write as philosophers of sex and gender who have long been concerned with the health of both philosophy and our own subdiscipline. Unfortunately we think they very seriously mischaracterize the threats to the health of both.
Fine and Rosen argue that academic philosophy is “healthy” with two notable exceptions. One of them we can sideline quickly: the misuse of science, mostly by theorists outside academic philosophy. As Fine and Rosen note, this is not relevant to academic philosophy (even though Fine and Rosen themselves discuss it for close to one third of their report). The more important exception concerns the subfield philosophy of sex and gender. They characterize the unhealthiness as “extraordinary” pressure, the effect of which is to suppress disagreement with a cluster of ideas which constitute a de facto orthodoxy. The de facto orthodoxy includes the following ideas: (A) “Socially relevant sex and gender categories are socially constructed”; (B) “Sex in human beings is not binary”; (C) “Most importantly, trans women are women and should be treated as such for every social and legal purpose”.
In defending this position, Fine and Rosen begin with an extended discussion of the controversy concerning the publication of an article by Rebecca Tuvel in the feminist journal Hypatia. As they note, Tuvel’s paper does not actually contest the alleged orthodoxy at all. So this example does not actually support their central contention. Moreover, the controversy concerned calls for a retraction which were followed by a decision not to retract—a puzzling choice of illustration for a claim of suppression.
Crucially, Fine and Rosen’s attribution of this orthodoxy to the subfield is inaccurate and reflects ignorance of the nuanced philosophical discussions that actually occur. (This isn’t surprising for scholars who are outsiders to a field; what is surprising is their confident assertions about a field that is far outside their expertise.) According to them, an orthodoxy reigns according to which “trans women are women and should be treated as such for every social and legal purpose”. But rich and complex discussions of the metaphysics of gender have been taking place in analytic philosophy for decades, and many if not most participants have argued for views that are at odds with this supposed “orthodoxy”. Some of the earliest participants were primarily concerned not with trans issues but with whether there was sufficient commonality among women to even make sense of gender kinds. This led to views like Sally Haslanger’s (2000) and Natalie Stoljar’s (1995) on which not all trans women count as women, even though this result was not a goal of the theorists. More recently, many theorists (including some who are themselves trans) have been concerned to accurately
capture a world which contains trans-exclusionary conceptions of gender. As a result many of the most prominent recent views (e.g. Talia Bettcher (2013, 2025), Matthew Cull (2024), Robin Dembroff (2018), and Katharine Jenkins (2024) explicitly and deliberately endorse the idea that trans women don’t count as women in every context. And these anti-orthodoxy views are not minor outliers: Haslanger (2000), for example, has been cited 1785 times.
If we put aside Fine and Rosen’s misguided idea of an orthodoxy, we might charitably characterize their worry as one on which a certain subset of feminist philosophers ( “gender critical” ones) are specifically targeted and subjected to suppression. On the face of it, this is surprising. Aggressively anti-trans views such as Janice Raymond’s have been discussed in Talia Bettcher’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry “Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues” since its first publication in 2009. Its most recent revision includes an extensive section on “gender critical feminism.” Mari Mikkola’s SEP entry “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender” similarly includes discussions of “gender critical” views and of biological determinism about sex and gender. Given the SEP’s discipline-defining status, these count strongly against the thought that “anti-orthodoxy” views have been excluded from philosophy of sex and gender.
However, Fine and Rosen allege “intense pressure on journals and academic presses to suppress” gender-critical views; rejections of gender-critical papers and books; absence of gender-critical views on syllabi; and criticism of gender-critical scholars that they argue amounts to harassment. Yet these allegations are puzzling: Fine and Rosen point to petitions against articles and books—whose demands were rejected; books being rejected—and then published elsewhere; a long list of papers which have been published—but which they think should have been published in better journals. We think it should be obvious that none of this amounts to suppression.
More plausible are the allegations of online pile-ons, which are a genuine and often deeply problematic phenomenon. However, these are a much discussed problem of online discourse quite generally. Though Fine and Rosen suggest that this area of study is unique in the involvement of philosophers, this is clearly not true. Philosophers such as Nathan Cofnas were very involved in the public criticism of Jason Arday, and philosophers have also been involved in the public criticism of Nathan Cofnas, both for his attacks on Arday and for his advocacy of racist views. Scholars working in philosophy of sex and gender have indeed been subjected to online pile-ons. But this is hardly surprising when one group of philosophers argues for the removal of basic human rights (e.g. access to public spaces) from a marginalized group of people. (And some of those subjected to pile-ons have been trans scholars, including very junior ones.)
Fine and Rosen’s most severe allegation perhaps is that Kathleen Stock was “driven out of her position” by opponents of her views. The first thing to note here is that the opponents Stock pointed to as most consequential were students at Sussex University, and the Sussex branch of the Universities and Colleges Union. Although there might be philosophers amongst these groups, this is hardly good evidence for Fine and Rosen’s view that philosophers in this area are especially intolerant of opposition. It should also be noted that the students were exercising their right to peacefully protest through signs and demonstrations; the leadership of the university supported Stock; and the union, which did call for action against transphobia, also made it clear that they were not calling for Stock to
be fired. So this is, to put it mildly, a poor example of academic philosophers suppressing gender critical speech.
In general, it’s a little unclear whether Fine and Rosen’s concern is about pressure from within philosophy or from outside.
Many of their examples, as we have seen, concern pressure from outside. But if they are worried about pressure from outside the discipline, perhaps they should discuss the decades-long campaign to depict the field as excessively politicized and intolerant of views which question its orthodoxies. Fine and Rosen’s report unfortunately contributes to this campaign, which we hope to have shown is grounded in falsehoods. Even more important, however, is the current onslaught of attacks on academic freedom from both the US federal government and many state governments. These have particularly (though not exclusively) focused on the study of gender, but have painted with such a broad brush that even the study of Plato has been disallowed in some places. Federal and state governments have also attacked trans people, labelling them as dangerous and blocking their access to necessary medical care, to public spaces, and even to driving licenses. These attacks threaten philosophy, because some philosophers are trans people, who are no longer able to live and work safely. (Indeed, one of us was forced to leave the US due to these attacks.) Importantly, some philosophers have even collaborated with the federal government in their assault on the rights of trans people. Yet none of these are threats that concern Fine and Rosen (though they mention some briefly in passing). It seems obvious to us, however, that the threats discussed in this paragraph should be at the top of the list for philosophers concerned about the health of our discipline.
In short, we are frankly stunned to find a focus instead on intemperate social media posts, papers that didn’t after all get retracted, and books being published by second-choice publishers. We, too, are worried about problems facing our discipline. They are not, however, the ones Fine and Rosen identify.
Actually one wonders about the whole concept of ‘sub fields’ in Philosophy. One wonders at what point our aping of the Natural Sciences should be itself questioned? Used to be a ‘let’s see how everything hangs together at the highest level… Bit idealistic for sure but let’s try and try to make our ‘field’ if such there is have something to differentiate it.
Whatever one makes of the rest of this response, the discussion of the Tuvel affair is wild. The fact her paper wasn’t in fact retracted doesn’t at all speak to the idea that the massive (and massively embarrassing) response to the piece created a chilling effect with respect to pursuit of similar ideas (let alone the personal harm it imposed on Tuvel). Similar reactions, discussed above under the headings of pile-ons which obscures, i think many of their crucial features, merit similar treatment with sensitivity to other effects than simply if the paper was retracted. Come on.
I’m shocked by the suggestion that Fine and Rosen are not experts in everything.
“[T]he controversy concerned calls for a retraction [of Tuvel’s paper] which were followed by a decision not to retract—a puzzling choice of illustration for a claim of suppression.”
Not puzzling at all. As Tuvel put it in a recent interview, “That’s like saying the arsonist tried to burn down your house, but your neighbors put out the fire.”
More than 800 academics—including a member of her dissertation committee and many other philosophers—signed an open letter condemning her paper and demanding its retraction. Many openly admitted on social media that they hadn’t read it. She was called “stupid,” “ignorant,” “racist,” and “transphobic.” Some demanded that she be fired. The letter claimed that the review process “painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege” and asked Hypatia to “issue a statement taking responsibility for the failures of judgment associated with publishing this article.”
These claims and demands are silly melodrama. The paper is widely available: read it and you’ll find entirely standard philosophy. Its central argument is that the considerations supporting recognition of transgender identities also support recognition of transracial identities. The argument is plausible and addresses the obvious objections, leaving critics few easy ways out. But it can run in either direction: as a modus ponens, as Tuvel presents it, supporting transracial identities; or as a modus tollens, as her opponents might run it, challenging transgender identities. *This* explains why it touched a nerve and why the philosophy-of-gender police rushed to the scene of the “crime.”
So they tried to ruin her life over her views. What’s the big deal? They didn’t actually succeed!