Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The "cloak and dagger" campaign against Professor Kathleen Stock

The Times of London reports; an excerpt:

Rio Jacques, 23, a second-year history student at the university...is the first activist from the campaign to speak openly, added: “It’s very much cloak and dagger, but that’s not the way we want it to be. The masks — it’s not meant to be threatening. It’s just for the protection of the people that want to be vocal.

“No one wants to lose their place at university, but at the same time we don’t want to sacrifice our right to defend ourselves with our words.”

Jacques, who is transgender, is one of the leaders of Reclaim Sussex and is involved with Anti Terf Sussex, the two most prominent groups spearheading the campaign....

The group’s suggested reading includes an essay by Christa Peterson, a PhD student at the University of Southern California. For the past two years years, Peterson has led a Twitter campaign against Stock, culminating in the essay published earlier this year.

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.

Nathan Oseroff and Christa Peterson are not victims, they are wrongdoers

Kate Manne (yes that Kate Manne) is now on Twitter misrepresenting (or just lying about?) their abusive treatment of gay and feminist philosophers like Kathleen Stock, Holly Lawford-Smith, Leslie Green and others:  for details, see here and here (the update).  (Oseroff apologized for his misconduct, because that's what it was, but he's been dissembling about it ever since.) 

UPDATE:  A  reader points out that Prof. Manne is also feeling bad for this maniac.  Apparently calling a philosophy professor a "vile fucking human" is OK with Kate Manne (indeed she "admires greatly" all these abusive adults).  Good to know!

FUNNY:  The Twitter Red Guard is responding to the evidence of what those mentioned above said and did (follow the links, it's all public evidence) by declaring it to be "lies" and "smears" (at least they didn’t call the actual news “fake news”).  (Addendum:  A reader sent a link in which one of the Twitter Red Guard zealots compared Stock, Lawford-Smith et al. to Milo Yannopoulos!)

Statement in defense of the academic freedom of philosophers to discuss sex and gender

Kudos to philosophers Ned Hall (Harvard) and John Schwenkler (Florida State) for drafting the initial statement, and to those philosophers who have joined them: Jose Bermudez (Texas A&M0, Clare Chambers (Cambridge), Cordelia Fine (Melbourne), Benj Hellie (Toronto), Thomas Kelly (Princeton), Jeff McMahan (Oxford), Francesca Minerva (Ghent), Peter Singer (Princeton & Melbourne), Nicole Vincent (Technology Sydney), and Jessica Wilson (Toronto).   From the statement:

• We affirm the right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse, and we welcome them enthusiastically as fellow participants in the profession of philosophy.
• We reject calls for censuring or deplatforming any of our colleagues on the basis of their philosophical arguments about sex and gender identity, or their social and political advocacy for sex-based rights.
• We condemn the too frequently cruel and abusive rhetoric, including accusations of hatred or transphobia, directed at these philosophers in response to their arguments and advocacy.
• We urge that the philosophical discussion of sex, gender and related social and political issues be carried out in a collegial and mutually respectful manner, reflecting the full range of interests at stake and presuming the good faith of all parties.

I strongly agree with this statement, and I am hopeful the majority of philosophers also agree.  (Professors Hall and Schwenkler shared an early draft with me, but we agreed that since I have been out front longer and louder than anyone else defending gender critical feminist philosophers from harassment and vilification I should not add my name.)

UPDATE:  In keeping with the freak show that is Twitter, the overwhelming response from many of the culprits this statement is meant to target has been denial, ridicule, and disbelief.  (In the real world, everyone agrees, and is puzzled the statement was needed.)  Several readers, who have not been following the misconduct on social media, did ask whom the statement is referring to with this:  "We condemn the too frequently cruel and abusive rhetoric, including accusations of hatred or transphobia, directed at these philosophers."  Among the philosophers, faculty and graduate students (the latter marked with an *), who have been guilty of such rhetoric, and sometimes worse, directed not only at gender critical feminists but anyone perceived as supporting them (or even just supporting their right to express their views) are B.R. George (Carnegie-Mellon), Jonathan Ichikawa (British Columbia), Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown), Eugene Marshall (Florida International), Rachel McKinney (Suffolk), Rachel McKinnon (Charleston), Garret Merriam (Cal State-Sacramento), *Nathan Oseroff (King's College, London), *Christa Peterson (Southern California), *Keyvan Shaifiei (Georgetown), *Joshua Stein (Calgary), and Matt Weiner (Vermont), and that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, but these are the worst offenders (some are really sick puppies, like Shaifiei and Stein).   Professor Stock has documented many other instances of attacks on the academic freedom and free speech of gender critical feminists, mostly by non-philosophers.

Earlier this summer philosopher Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) called out the hypocritical nonsense of Christa "Fuck Brian Leiter" Peterson, one of the worst offenders for "cruel and abusive rhetoric":

Ms. Peterson has been leading the Twitter charge against Gender Critical feminist philosophers for the last year, dishing out insults, mockery, lies, half-truths, and more, and then playing the victim when anyone calls her on it.  (Her capacity to misread and thus misrepresent what she cites is also breathtaking; I suppose she counts on most of her Twitter followers not bothering to actually check.)  We first encountered Ms. Peterson more than a year ago denouncing an essay by radical activist and feminist Robert Jensen (UT Austin) as "dumb as shit."  She also denounces as "shit" this post by feminist philosophers Sophie Allen, Holly Lawford-Smith and others, refers repeatedly to philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) as "a noted bigot" and mocks her continuously, calls the views of Leslie Green (the Professor of the Philosophy of Law at Oxford University) "repulsive and deeply unserious," and on and on and on, to the order of hundreds if not thousands of tweets full of sneering mockery, misrepresentation, and abuse of philosophers.

Like another bad actor, Nathan Oseroff (who did finally apologize for his misconduct), Ms. Peterson is an adult in her late 20s.  She is free to be as rude and abusive as she wants, but she can't complain when others comment on it.  She can be held to account for what she says in public, just like anyone else.  As someone in Twitter-land once observed:

 

 

'Complete and utter dickhead' watch: social media edition (UPDATED)

There's nothing like rational discussion of the gender self-ID law in the U.K. to bring the crazies out of the woodworks on social media.   The talk below by philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) was offered by some pseudonymous person on twitter to me as evidence of her "hatefulness."  Watch it to see the disconnect from reality with such people (UPDATE:  some folks on twitter tell me that the person who sent this to me was being sarcastic and is a supporter of Prof. Stock; that doesn't change the fact that plenty of people, including some of the folks mentioned below, have been calling her hateful, bigoted and worse--so watch the talk, and decide for yourself):

In this same round of social media insanity, Nathan Oseroff (KCL) libeled philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex), and when she responded with appropriate indignation, he made his account, and the libel, private.  (Amusingly, some philosophers on twitter are so ignorant that they don't realize "academic freedom" is not a defense to unlawful speech, such as libel.)  I learned subsequently that Mr. Oseroff is involved with the APA blog.  Given his on-line misconduct, he should be removed from involvement with an  organization that purports to represent all members of the profession.  Meanwhile, Joshua Stein (Calgary) joined in smearing Professor Stock because she actually objected to Oseroff's libelous stupidity.  At least Mr. Stein aptly describes himself as a "troll."  (What is it with some folks at Calgary acting like asses on social media?) 

Annals of twitter hypocrisy: the case of "condescension from below"

This past Saturday morning, I woke up early and had some time to kill, and so when I checked twitter, instead of blocking the usual jerks and knuckleheads there, I actually engaged some of them.  Before I get into the delicious details of what ensued, a reminder about a long-standing meme here, the idea of "condescension from below."  I owe the brilliant phrase to Stephen Stich.  We were both attending a conference where a philosopher (who shall remain nameless, except to note that no one would consider him a major figure) delivered what he took to be a devastating critique of Quine.   But the paper was not simply critical--that would hardly make it notable, this being philosophy after all--it was remarkably condescending in tone and substance--hence Stich's quip to me, "Condescension from below":  this philosopher was feigning an air of superiority towards a philosopher he was plainly inferior to.

"Condescension from below" is a staple of twitter, and for the obvious reasons:  the lack of barriers, group polarization effects, and the limits of the medium are all conducive to it.   And now for Saturday morning's amusement: