The error-ridden letter attacking Kathleen Stock now has several hundred signatures; strikingly, most signatories are students (some, I believe, undergraduate students), and maybe a third are actually philosophy faculty. (The majority of signatories, faculty and students alike, are active Twitter users, a notable aspect of this display, related to the "group polarization" phenomenon on Twitter we've noted before.) As philosopher Jason Stanley (Yale) observed on Twitter, "maybe 1% of tenured professors in top 20 Philosophy departments" signed the letter. I count just nine, out of some 350 or so faculty in these departments, so maybe 2-3%. I saw no signatories at all from NYU, Rutgers, Harvard, Berkeley, UCLA, Columbia, Texas, Brown, Notre Dame, Arizona, etc., and only one each from MIT, Yale, Pittsburgh, CUNY, North Carolina, Michigan, and Stanford. Southern California has the "distinction" of being the only U.S. top 20 department with two signatories. I also saw no faculty signatories from Oxford or Cambridge.
Jason concludes from all this (and the fact that Stock got an OBE and was invited to speak at the Aristotelian Society in the UK [Jason notes he's never been invited]) that senior philosophers support Stock. I hope that's right, but I don't think the abductive inference is very strong: senior philosophers haven't much of anything to do with the OBE, and the Aristotelian Society regularly invites philosophers "despite [their] having very few publications or citations" (compared to Jason). But the real problem, I suspect, is that (1) most senior philosophers have no views at all about Stock's Gender Critical Feminism; and (2) most senior philosophers are skeptical of "open letters," especially those involving "the usual suspects" in philosophy whose credibility is nil, and especially now that everyone knows the letter is a mess.
If the letter seems to be a bit of a dud, it still continues to generate a lot of social media chatter. Different readers called my attention to some interesting, if certainly debatable, comments on Justin Weinberg's blog (in this instance, Professor Weinberg required signed comments, and this seems to have had a salutary effect, so I hope he'll do it more often so that the comments are worth reading again). I'll mention a few. The first is from John Collins:
If viewed as a first-order philosophical topic, the trans issue is indeed curious in that, for many, normal standards of rational debate ought to be abandoned; those who think otherwise are literally phobic, violent, or whatever, and deserve to be hounded and discredited by any means possible, all in the name of higher virtue. If viewed sociologically, however, the fog clears. The real problem with KS and others is that, if they are right, then mainstream academic feminism is not serious, morally, politically, and intellectually. This is evidenced by the previous open letter, referred to in the present one, which inconsistently claims that all positions are debated and that no-one should question self-identity as a basis for categorisation. Worse, KS has mostly operated outside of the channels that can be policed; and when KS does publish in a forum that can be policed, one finds letters to editors, protests, etc. Whether KS et al. are right or wrong, what one is witnessing is simply centres of academic power and prestige defending themselves in the manner power always does, and since the academy selects for obedience (a herd of free thinkers), one finds a general coalescence in support of that power. The trans issue itself is mostly an abstraction, a mere signifier of virtue and would-be philosophical insight. It thus becomes explicable how supposedly morally serious people can blithely shove poor, abused, imprisoned women under the bus for the sake, essentially, of middle-class manners in academia. No-one bats an eyelid at hyper-privileged white straight males sticking it to an uppity lesbian. For a certain kind of progressive male, if trans people didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent them.
The second is from Dennis Arjo:
The way in which this letter is tension with the ‘principles of free speech’ is in its attempt to put a philosopher and her views beyond the pale on the basis of her politics by proclamation. Academic freedom protects far less speech than the principles of free speech does–it allows for rigorous gate keeping when it comes to what is taught and published. That gate keeping needs to be taken seriously, and done according to disciplinary standards, not political litmus tests.
This letter attacked Kathleen Stock’s integrity and decency and accuses her of grave wrongs. Predictably, it has proven to be highly divisive and controversial. Those who propagated it and the more prominent signatories, it seems to me, now have the burden of justifying such a public attack on a colleague. So far, I’ve heard the point was just to show that not everyone in philosophy agrees with Stock, which was already obvious, and that the problem was that Stock doesn’t have enough scholarly citations to warrant an obviously politically award handed out for political reasons, which is…well, never mind. Can anyone do better?
Maybe we should just take a break from letters like this for a good while.
The third is from Mary Leng, herself an articulate defender of Gender Critical Feminism:
To my dismay (but not, alas, to my surprise) an open letter has been circulating denouncing my friend and colleague Kathleen Stock for contributing to an alleged atmosphere of ‘transphobia’ in philosophy. Kathleen’s sins, such as they are, are to raise the question of how proposed changes to UK law around the recognition of gender (specifically proposals to amend the 2004 Gender Recognition Act to allow people to change their legal sex on the basis of self identification alone) might interact with currently existing protections for female people (specifically, the 2010 Equality Act, which includes sex as a protected characteristic but allows for discrimination on grounds of sex (e.g. in single sex provisions) where this can be shown to be a proportionate means to a legitimate end). There is an unfortunate lack of clarity in the relation between the 2004 GRA and the 2010 Equality Act, in that the GRA says that a GRC holder’s acquired sex is their legal sex ‘for all purposes’ (though ‘all’ here turns out to be qualified: a trans man is not allowed to inherit titles that are passed down the male line even though the GRA says they are male for ‘all’ purposes). The 2010 Equality Act however seems to follow the ‘qualified’ sense of ‘all’, allowing single sex exemptions for female only services to exclude trans women with a GRC despite their status as legally female, where this meets the proportionate/legitimate requirement. Along with lobbying for self ID, prominent LGBT+ groups in the UK, including most notably Stonewall, have also been vocal about their desire to remove the single sex exemptions from the Equality Act (indeed in advising many institutions on how to interpret the Equality Act, it seems that Stonewall have contributed to a widespread impression that these exemptions already cannot be used to draw a distinction in service provision between natal females and females with a GRC). Many of us are concerned that this combination (self ID plus interpretation of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act to mean ‘legal sex’ in all contexts) removes important protections and provisions for female people that are needed both because of our female biology itself (eg in sports) and because of the history of discrimination against people perceived as female (eg all women shortlists). (It is perhaps worth noting here that one of the letter’s original signatories, Sally Haslanger, in her own published work on sex and gender, has argued that the history of patriarchal oppression means that people who are perceived as female are an important political category. The UK Equality Act protects this group by banning (except in the aforementioned exceptions) discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sex. The changes that Stonewall have been lobbying for would erode these protections if ‘sex’ is in effect interpreted to mean ‘gender identity’.)
Aside from this question about revisions to the GRA and their interaction with the Equality Act, there have also been moves in the UK to change how we record ‘sex’ in data gathering – most prominently via the UK census, where there has been a push to change the ‘sex’ question on future censuses so it tracks self identified sex, rather than birth sex. Kathleen (and others) have argued against this move, and in favour of asking two questions: one concerning sex and one concerning gender identity, so that meaningful data can be collected to allow for tracking both sex based and gender identity based inequalities.
I am in full support of Kathleen in raising these issues, and I am grateful for her for doing so and continuing to do so despite an atmosphere of extreme hostility in philosophy. I would like to share two things I’ve written on the topic that elaborate on my views and why I think it’s important to discuss them, even though it is doubtless upsetting to my trans friends and colleagues to dwell on the issues on which one’s natal sex might matter:
https://medium.com/@mary.leng/harry-potter-and-the-reverse-voltaire-4c7f3a07241
https://medium.com/@mary.leng/where-metaphysics-meets-politics-in-gender-critical-feminism-1fe565e2093aI am saddened to see that so many fellow philosophers have signed this letter denouncing Kathleen (and, by implication, me, as I’m aware of nothing significant that Kathleen has said on the topic that isn’t in line with my own views as outlined in these two articles). I would encourage colleagues in philosophy to read the posts above if you would like to know more about why left wing women in the UK have suddenly turned into dreadful ‘transphobic bigots’.
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