...by someone claiming to be a philosophy graduate student. Maybe she is, and maybe she is leaving because she can't abide people having verboten thoughts and beliefs, and expressing them. But we don't know, do we? (If she's really a grad student leaving the profession for the reasons stated--and not for other reasons--why not sign her name to this? It hardly matters what philosophers think of her going forward, after all.) But it's certainly a dramatic way to encourage others to impose social and professional sanctions on Kathleen Stock (and me and even Justin Weinberg!), which the author explicitly calls for. Will it work? That's up to the academic community; I would hope that academics committed to academic freedom will now go out of their way to invite Professor Stock to speak. I will note that the tweets she quotes from Professor Stock--literally the only evidence of "transphobia" adduced (she adduces none from me, since she can't)--ignore the fact that Professor Stock always uses "male" to mean a biological male, and female to mean a biological female. (Trans women are biological males, that's why they're trans women after all. This isn't hard. And that's compatible with thinking they should be treated as women in most or all contexts.) Readers can decide for themselves whether any of this is evidence of "transphobia.
UPDATE: A number of philosophers have written me about this noxious, and I suspect fraudulent, display, and I apologize that I can't respond to everyone as I'm participating in an intellectual event, and so trying to avoid engaging with the usual social media grandstanding and narcissism as much as possible. But I will share one set of comments from a philosopher elsewhere, since it makes clear the absurdity of this essay:
In what amounts to an AI-driven performative contradiction of its thesis, I've seen numerous philosophers on my Facebook feed share the article as something with immense moral import, with exactly zero of my hundreds of philosopher Fb friends offering even the mildest criticism. (One friend of a friend tried to do so, and was promptly told to take it elsewhere.) All this praise is for an article that,
(i) Frames as a "hateful" and "phobic" practice of "debating my existence" any philosophical discussion of gender which "does not proceed from [the] initial assumption ... that trans people are the gender they say they are" (though NB many gender-critical types insist that they are concerned with sex, not gender, and are happy to let people be what they say in the latter respect as long as this doesn't mean that they can share prisons and rape shelters with people of the opposite sex) -- including under this umbrella not only the infamous Kathleen Stock (and Becky Tuvel I think??), but also yourself and Justin Weinberg, i.e. he of "moral resisters" fame; and further
(ii) Calls for a total no-platforming of gender-critical philosophers and philosophical arguments in journals, at conferences, and on blogs and social media.
Philosophers sharing this article, which in my feed have included several who were on hiring committees for departments I interviewed at in the past, have made it quite clear to everyone in the audience that it is people like me who are not welcome in the profession -- that my existence as a non-hateful or -phobic scholar who thinks that "gender identity" might be a pseudo-concept, or that biological sex isn't a matter of inner feeling, is very much up for debate -- and that even the mildest refusal to toe the party line on gender means being framed as the moral equivalent of a white supremacist.
Of course, if you post this letter (without my name, please), then those same philosophers will tut-tut about how this all goes to show ... -- while the rest of us keep our disagreements to ourselves and the few other like-minded philosophers whom we might be lucky enough to know. I'm not sure if we really are such a minority -- I expect that we probably are not, even among the circles that you and I run in. But the poisonous atmosphere of philosophy where topics like these are concerned is entirely the fault of those who are presently freaking out over how terribly hateful that atmosphere is.
Recent Comments