Christa Peterson's "hit piece" on Kathleen Stock

Christa Peterson (Southern California) will be known to readers of the blog for her penchant to tell all philosophers to "fuck off," to denounce work by feminist theorists and philosophers she doesn't like as "dumb as shit,", or just "shit", and, of course, her frequent tweeting "fuck Brian Leiter," after she tired of merely expressing her impatience that I wasn't dead and comparing my speech to that of Nazis.  

I mention all this because Peterson has now taken to scolding Kathleen Stock for being, shall we say, "unpleasant" on Twitter.  Seriously.   Peterson has taken her own voluminous tweets and turned them into an essay attacking Kathleen Stock.  (The essay has been retweeted more than 1,500 times!)  Stock replies at length here, noting that "Christa Peterson...has monitored my tweets for two and a half years, offence-mining my twitter feed for anything that looked like it might harm my reputation and archiving it."  (Philosopher Tomas Bogardus also analyzes Peterson's claims and arguments here.   I will try not to duplicate points made by Stock or Bogardus.) 

Big chunks of Peterson's essay are given over to assertions about what she deems to be obvious about trans identity, and pronouncements about how to interpret empirical evidence.   Readers can evaluate those for themselves; I found them mostly unpersuasive.  (For a contrasting view on "gender identity," see this.)   Peterson does not deign to discuss Stock's paper for the Aristotelian Society, she just refers to it derisively. This is a standing pattern with Peterson; recall her response to the paper "Are adult human females women?" by philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT) that appeared in Philosophical Studies:

That's Alex Byrne alright, he shall henceforth be known as Mr. Bad, Lazy Philosophy Guy.  But it's not just Byrne.  Leslie Green--the Professor of Philosophy of Law at Oxford who has written for decades about philosophical issues about sex and gender--commented on transgender issues in an interview, which led Peterson to declare his views "repulsive and DEEPLY UNSERIOUS haha philosophy is horrible!"   Condescension from below, with no self-awareness, may not be horrible, but it is certainly risible.

Of course, it would be unfair to dismiss Peterson solely for her Twitter behavior, but that is mostly what Peterson does to Stock.   Sometimes Stock has been rude (or "a bit sharp" to use Peterson's preferred euphemism for her own abusiveness), although in most of the cases Peterson either omits or misrepresents the abuse and insults to which Stock was responding.

Peterson's primary charge, however, is that Stock has been rude not just to those who attack her, but to trans people.   It is a shame Peterson did not have an editor to help her organize her polemic.  Buried in the document are a handful of tweets (mostly Stock responding to tweets by others) that are quite insensitive and/or wrong-headed (Stock discusses them in detail, and expresses "regret" for some of them, while correcting Peterson's misrepresentation of others).   The zeal of advocacy often leads people astray, and especially on Twitter.  Readers will judge for themselves whether a handful of bad tweets mean they can now dismiss Stock as a "transphobe" and ignore anything else she has to say.  That is not my conclusion, even though I am not a "gender critical" feminist and I strongly disagree with some of those tweets.  It is certainly not the conclusion of the hundreds of feminist activists, especially in the UK, who have been inspired by her work.

Indeed, it would be odd to assess someone's work based on their tweets, rather than their more discursive, long-form writing.  As noted, Peterson just dismisses out of hand a philosophical piece by Stock.  When Peterson does cite Stock's other essays (not often), she misrepresents some of them.  For example, Peterson asserts that "the 'gender critical' movement posits catastrophic effects, an undermining of the very fabric of society, from every advance for trans people."   The link, however, takes us to a sentence in an article by Stock which says nothing of the kind:   "Some transwomen argue for a conceptual revision, not just of the term ‘woman’ but also the term ‘mother’. The social implications of this, if successful, are unknown and under-theorised."   Peterson isn't always this untrustworthy, but readers need to check her "evidence" for themselves.

Peterson even manages to misrepresent some of the tweets.  For example, Peterson asserts that, "Stock once announced, for example, that GRCs 'should not be issued to anyone with a criminal record after age of 18.' To Stock, even a hypothetical risk, to even one cis woman, is enough for trans people's needs to be simply dismissed."  In fact, Stock was commenting on a news article about a pedophile who had tried to rape 12- and 13-year olds, who had subsequently gotten a GRC and was being sent to a women's prison.  As "hypothetical" risks go, this seems rather concrete.

Peterson suggests "the things Stock has portrayed as infringing on her academic freedom have in fact been other academics' substantive but decidedly negative responses to her writing."   Stock has indeed sometimes complained about abusive personal attacks, but not in connection with her academic freedom.  Stock took the occasion of receiving the OBE to list many examples of "gender critical" feminists having their talks cancelled or being threatened with violence for expressing their views.  Peterson is silent on all this. Just last month, a conference cancelled Stock's talk because some participants objected to her views. Peterson is silent on this too, since it would undermine the lie that the threats to academic freedom are simply a matter of Stock's hurt feelings.

An editor might also have advised Peterson that it wasn't helpful to her narrative to go off on a tangent about my criticisms of the well-known misconduct of Nathan Oseroff-Spicer.  Here, I fear her own "zeal of advocacy" has rendered her unable to tell the difference between truth and falsehood.*  She complains that, "If you Google Nathan's name today, one of the first results brings you to these completely fabricated, retaliatory accusations of workplace [sic] misconduct. This is probably actually defamatory."  It's not "defamatory" because nothing was "fabricated."  One might ask Peterson which of the following documented actions by Nathan Oseroff-Spicer is not "misconduct" (at the time, he was an associate editor of the APA Blog):

1.  Using his editorial privileges to post a comment on the APA Blog that violated the commenting policy of the blog, which the editor had to then remove.

2.  Misusing his role as an associate editor of the APA Blog to try to police the conference practices of a professional philosophy organization, when he had no authority to do so.

Peterson notes (unironically) that, "The APA was not willing to publicly defend its graduate employee."     Indeed, far from defending Oseroff-Spicer, the APA Blog explicitly adopted policies to preclude future employees from engaging in misconduct like his, requiring of blog editors:

Professionalism

• Exercise good judgment and professionalism at all times.
• Communicate and conduct all work with honesty, integrity, respect, fairness, objectivity, and in good faith. This means not engaging in any conduct likely to cause offense to a reasonable person. Comments that would be regarded as unprofessional in a normal academic context, wherever they are made in electronic media or otherwise, are incompatible with serving as an APA Blog Editor.
• Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views that an Editor disagrees with.
• Be cautious when engaging in political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility of the APA Blog.
• Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information.

Public statements

• Editors are not authorized to speak for the APA or the APA Blog. If contacted by the press about an issue related to the Blog, refer the person to the Lead Editor.

• If posting or commenting on a blog, website, or social media, be clear that although an Editor can offer perspective, Editors do not speak for the APA Blog.

Does Peterson really think these policies were adopted after Oseroff-Spicer's departure merely by chance?  It's possible that the APA Blog is part of the same conspiracy to "defame" Oseroff-Spicer for "fabricated...misconduct," or it could be that the APA Blog learned its lesson from its bad experience with his actual abuse of his position at the blog and his generally unhinged behavior on social media.  Readers, once again, will have to decide for themselves. 

(My thanks to several readers and Twitter followers for help with pertinent links.)

*Peterson begins her digression by asserting that, "Philosophers go to great lengths to avoid becoming a target for Leiter."  A brief social media search would reveal this to be the nonsense it is.