...at The Philosopher's Magazine. The review concludes with some comments of more general professional interest:
Trouble with Gender is proof that Byrne’s nerve has not failed him. He is one of few philosophers who can exhibit such proof (other monographs that take a broadly sex-realist approach include Material Girls by Kathleen Stock and Gender-Critical Feminism by Holly Lawford-Smith). According to orthodoxy in the philosophy of sex and gender, the sex-based account of woman is not a live option. It is not even allowed as a good approximation to the truth. Rather, it is widely treated as unacceptable to rely on even as a simplifying assumption. From an outsider’s perspective, it is as if physicists had collectively adopted a ban on ever explicitly invoking Newton’s first law of motion. As would probably happen in the physical case, much orthodox theorising about sex and gender thrives on implicitly reasoning in a way which subverts the ban.
Outside of mainstream philosophy of sex and gender, the situation is better, but not by much. Many philosophers privately recognise that the sex-based account of woman is the natural default hypothesis and are yet to be persuaded of the alleged counterexamples to it. However, almost none is willing publicly to challenge the orthodox rejection of the sex-based account. Tenured professors have proved at least as shy about speaking out as more junior members of the profession; among senior faculty in particular, Byrne is almost unique in his vocal defence of sex realism. When issues in the vicinity arise professionally, some philosophers are prepared to challenge publicly the de facto taboo on defending the sex-based account of woman, on the basis of generic principles of freedom of enquiry and related professional norms. A standard justification of liberal norms on enquiry is that restrictions on what can be expressed risk inadvertently ruling out the expression of knowledge. It is often felt safest not to mention that the case of the sex-based account of woman is plausibly exactly of the kind for which, given that justification, such liberal norms are most needed.
An important related consideration is that even well-informed and well-intentioned people get things wrong. In practice, for any given philosophical question, no matter how consequential, a serious and intelligent thinker can get the answer wrong, while getting the answer to other difficult philosophical questions right. It may even be that the very same dispositions which enable them to get those other questions right are the source of their error: like how someone on the look-out for poisonous berries is at once likeliest to spot the genuinely poisonous ones but misidentify the only apparently poisonous ones. Thus an intellectual community which imposed agreement on any specific question as a requirement for participation would be impoverished in the long run, even if it happened to be right about the very case at issue.
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