Kathleen Stock (Sussex) has written a reply to the piece by Talia Mae Bettcher (Cal State/Los Angeles) that we noted yesterday. I find it hard to believe that anyone not already in an epistemic bubble could read both pieces, and come away finding Professor Bettcher more persuasive. An excerpt from Professor Stock's reply below the fold:
Minus the condescension, a main complaint against me in Bettcher’s first section is that I haven’t engaged with the trans literature, which, I take it she is implying, already deals with the issues I discuss sufficiently deeply for me not to worry about it. I’m not reassured. What would have somewhat reassured me, would be to find in that literature is some direct, open, and charitable engagement with the concerns of female-bodied women, about what material social effects expanding the concept of ‘woman’ via self-identification will have on them. Though in her SEP survey article, Bettcher cycles through several ‘oppositional’ texts (her word), it’s the (critical) section on Janice Raymond’s work, written in 1979 and republished in 1994, that comes closest to engaging with related concerns. However, if there is anything there about self-identification, I don’t find it — unsurprisingly given that this is a relatively new development, and one fairly irrelevant to the current US political climate. In fact, though I might be missing it, I don’t see anything about the issue of self-identification in Bettcher’s Daily Nous piece either, despite this being a constant and central theme in my pieces.
But let’s say that such considerations have been discussed in certain journal articles and books, and I’ve missed it. Would this show I was wrong about the stultifying atmosphere in the profession surrounding open discussion of these matters? I think not. The fact that a particular view is articulated in journals or books is completely compatible with their being a general strong social pressure not to articulate that position, especially since social pressures can become newly pressing in certain contexts. The fact that my own essays have met with such outrage in some quarters seems to me clear proof of this pressure (NB I haven’t even argued for a Gender Critical position! I’ve just argued that there should be room for such argument). The fact that in Mari Mikkola’s, SEP survey ‘Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender’, Gender Critical views (or even views which don’t take themselves to be explicitly Gender Critical) are criticised in a way implied to be damning, is another sign. Or, should you prefer a more current example: to date, on the UK-based site whose tagline is ‘News Feminist Philosophers can use’, there has been no discussion of the self-identification issue that I can find. Up until two weeks ago, the term ‘TERF” was freely used there, without quotations. As I write, a recent post on site (put there since I started writing, in fact) touts for signatories to an open letter describing the organisation ‘A Woman’s Place UK’ as a ‘platform for hate speech’ ‘solely committed to campaigning against trans rights’. ‘A Woman’s Place UK’ is an organisation set up to discuss concerns about the Gender Recognition Act, mostly in relation to women-only spaces and groups. To assume that trans women have the ‘right’ to enter such spaces is precisely what is in question, of course. Its speakers include trans women, trade unionists, domestic violence survivors and those who work with them, and second wave feminists. Its meetings have met with aggressive protesting and in a couple of recent cases, violence.
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