Philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) makes a number of good points in this essay. I'll provide a few excerpts, but I encourage readers to look at the whole essay.
Regarding the Dembroff/Kukla/Stryker tantrum about being featured on the same page with Stock, Lawford-Smith et al. at IAITV:
In their statement, the three claimed to have been the victims of “non-consensual co-platforming”—which meant being put on the same internet page as us. Yet as philosopher Dan Kaufman pointed out in a recent blog post, “there is no such standard in our discipline, according to which when asked to contribute to something, one’s consent to appear alongside all the other contributors must be solicited.”
Dembroff, Kukla and Stryker also claimed that our views constituted “acts of violence,” and suggested that entering into debate with us might be analogized to engaging with the question of “whether the Holocaust actually happened, or whether corrective rape should be used to cure lesbianism, or whether or not the white race is superior to all others.”
The extravagance of this rhetorical gambit should be shocking to philosophers and laypeople alike—especially insofar as it grotesquely co-opts such apocalyptic horrors as the extermination of Europe’s Jews and the African slave trade as a means to discredit a philosophical and political position on the nature of sex and gender. It is hard to imagine that the authors’ use of “corrective rape” being “used to cure lesbianism” was anything other than a grotesque barb hurled at me, Stock, Bindel—all three of us being lesbians.
The Institute’s staff were decent enough to let me respond. My main points were that debate over gender is a reasonable—as opposed to unreasonable—disagreement, no matter how badly the trans-activist side behaves, and that those on that side should “at least leave the rape talk out of it.”
....
The appropriateness of treating interlocutors as though they are doing harm with their assertions depends on the persuasiveness of the argument that they are in fact doing harm. And there are reasonable grounds for disagreement here, even setting aside difficult philosophical questions about the distinction between psychological and physical modes of harm. But in the past, philosophical disagreements over what is and isn’t a form of harm haven’t generally resulted in abusive behaviour, deplatforming and gatekeeping. British philosopher John Broome thinks that almost all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our actions do harm to the world. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University disagrees. It’s a very serious subject. Yet you don’t see Broome calling Sinnott-Armstrong a “cunt” on social media (as Rebecca Kukla has done to me).
Kukla, of course, thought it was appropriate for Georgetown PhD student Keyvan Shafiei to call Lawford-Smith a "vile fucking human" and "a piece of shit," so her abusive rhetoric is hardly surprising. That Kukla has not been widely condemned for her harassment of Lawford-Smith is itself indicative of the pathological state of affairs in the "profession" at the moment. (At least we now know that the APA's absurd "Code of Conduct" is indeed irrelevant.)
But Professor Lawford-Smith also offers a very interesting diagnosis of what's really gong on here:
From the point of view of establishment feminist philosophers, the disagreement over transwomen was settled long ago, so it’s infuriating for them to see gender-critical feminists bringing it up again. But remember that until recently, only very small numbers of male-born people asserted that they were actually women. And almost all members of these small groups of people were transsexual (a now unfashionable word that describes people suffering from severe sexed-body dysmorphia), most of whom had sex-reassignment surgery and thereby acquired female-appearing bodies.
Things are completely different today, with much larger-scale social uptake of newer ideas about gender and gender identity. Many more people now identify as trans, and many more of the people who identify as transwomen are choosing to keep their bodies male-appearing, including keeping their penises. This makes a difference in spaces involving full or partial nudity. So anything that was settled by previous generations cannot be assumed to be settled now. Trans people deserve full human rights and the legal protections necessary to deliver them. But it would make much more sense for such legal protections to be granted on the basis of their being transgender, not on the basis of being female. Transwomen and female people need different protections in at least some cases....
Perhaps there is simply a fundamental moral disagreement over the extent to which a person’s internally experienced identity matters, and should be respected and affirmed by others. If you can’t settle things with reason, yet you think they must be settled somehow, you’ll have to deploy other tactics. Is this the explanation we’ve been looking for?
...Add to this that trans people are one of the most vulnerable social groups in society; and that one of the most humane and effective means we have for lessening their vulnerability is to affirm their gender identity, and thereby lessen the suicide risk associated with dysmorphia and dysphoria. To the extent that questioning the veracity of gender identities may be said to interfere with the social acceptance of transgender people, such questioning may be cast as morally reprehensible, uncaring and dangerous.
If true, this would explain the abusiveness of establishment feminist philosophers—and the wider trans-rights activist community. This view presumes such high stakes that it can be invoked to justify even the most uncivil and abusive forms of discourse. But it also undermines the very idea of truth-seeking, since embedded within the argument is the idea that it doesn’t really matter whether transwomen are women: All that matters is that we act as though they are women, because the focus is on the instrumental value of assertions supplying trans women with a certain kind of emotional and moral support, not determining the existence of an objectively real truth.
Under this analysis, when gender critical feminists show up and argue that transwomen are not actually women, or that they shouldn’t be treated as women for all social and legal purposes, they miss the point and talk past the establishment feminist philosophers. The point of the discussion, as the establishment feminist philosophers see it, isn’t to determine the truth of the underlying claims, but to provide succour to a vulnerable community. They are doing politics and calling it philosophy.
Adding to the frustration and anger of the establishment feminist philosophers is the fact that there’s literally no way they can communicate their real argument—namely that we should act as if trans women are truly women, even if we know they are not—because if this argument were said out loud (or, worse, stated in print or online), the whole project would collapse. Transwomen would know what even their most vocal allies secretly believe. The only possible strategy is instead to yell out conclusory slogans and then protect them from contradiction with all available methods—insults, attempts to deplatform, social ostracism, reputational damage, complaints to employers, online harassment, the lot.
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