Philosopher responds to Jane Clare Jones et al

I think I'd be inclined to ask her what key points convinced her of the strength of his argument.

I think someone has read RMcKs thesis “Reasonable Assertions: On Norms of Assertion and Why You Don't Need to Know What You're Talking About”

If this man had something worth saying he'd be able to say it succinctly in plain English. Dressing it up in ten thousand waffle words simply demonstrates he has nothing of value to say. Those applauding his nothingness have fallen for the Emperor's New Clothes and lack the sense of a small child.

I particularly enjoy the bit where he witters about mass, charge and spin. Smacks of physics envy.

Ask her why she thinks a man understands feminism and women's rights better than a group of feminist women.

I stopped reading after the fifth "dear philosophers". Sneering and smug.

Oh, and badly written and argued.
I'd only share that for the lolz.

Some fool on Twitter posted it as a gotcha to me the other day. Where do you even start with it? Nearly 11k words of inane, ignorant word salad.

OP, I wonder if you could shift the debate amongst your contacts by posting something about the health impacts of the drugs and surgery used in transition. I came across this article recently: gdworkinggroup.org/2019/08/09/key-issues-in-decision-making-for-gender-transition-treatment-questions-and-answers/
This may not influence the philosopher who wrote that piece, but would give your friends something else to consider.

*misogynistic twatbadger

I am a philosopher and have met this man's ilk too many times to count. Pompous smug twatbadger.

I don't mean to offend anyone, but I've come to the conclusion that "highly educated" =/= "common sense" or even "basic aptitude in areas other than your speciality". When I was at medical school a significant number of the graduate cohort - not even teenagers, but actual adults with previous degrees - needed training in basic grammar. They could tell you everything about how to treat X, Y, Z but they couldn't use basic punctuation. One of our lecturers organised the training because she said so many of the emails she received were unreadable. Another med student friend very seriously believes in ghosts, fortune tellers, and faith healers - she's now a GP. I also know a solicitor working for a magic circle law firm who, until I corrected her, didn't understand the difference between gluten and glutton. She thought the deadly sin of "gluttony" was about eating too much gluten. My old flat mate got a first in a hard science from Cambridge and now has a phD but he can't even follow the instructions on flat pack furniture. I have another friend who works as a banker who I had to teach how to boil an egg.

Soooooo.... don't take it too hard that your highly educated friends have swallowed this crock.

Makes me truly grateful that I chose to do a science degree and was encouraged to write concisely and accurately. That article is one of the most awful long winded pile of shite that I have read in a long time. How did he manage to write so many words without really saying anything.

More carefully put, modern panpsychism is the idea that some incredibly simple version of our own conscious experience is one of the fundamental properties of our universe’s matter, just like mass, charge, and spin, and that human beings inherit our complex consciousness from the intricately-related consciousness of our many material parts.

Cool story, bro.

'A lot of my work has been about panpsychism, the idea that (roughly) everything is conscious. More carefully put, modern panpsychism is the idea that some incredibly simple version of our own conscious experience is one of the fundamental properties of our universe’s matter, just like mass, charge, and spin, and that human beings inherit our complex consciousness from the intricately-related consciousness of our many material parts.'*
Wot, you 're conscious cos your electrons are? What a load of utter bilge and no wonder they believe gender nonsense as well.
Have they never heard of the Higgs BTW?

Fermats
This is excellent
Oh, and that good old appeal to female socialisation: we must accept TWAW because not to do so would have terrible, awful consequences (and fuck the terrible awful consequences for women in prison, women's sports, women who want freedom of association, women who want a female HCP to perform intimate exams, women who want to know that when they go into an open-plan, single sex changing room, it actually is single sex...)

That is a beautiful summary, OldCrone
Thank you!

...plus a total mis-understanding of what being gender critical actually means......

on the one side, the ‘gender-critical’ feminists, who say there are important conflicts of interest between trans and non-trans women; on the other side, a less cohesive but much larger group of feminists insisting that these conflicts are invented as a pretext for hate against trans people

Honest to God. Actual women are now relegated to be 'non- trans women'.

I have lost all faith, in recent times, that education and degrees actually mean anything. People can surely think for themselves, they do not need to be told what to think.......

OldCrone excellent, thank you for putting yourself through that for us!

Short version for anyone who can't be bothered with the word salad.

Intro.
I am a man. I'm here to tell you women how to do feminism properly. There are two types of feminists. Those who centre men, and vile witches who hate men. I'm here to tell you why the witches are wrong about trans people. Did I tell you I'm a man? Obviously I know better than you because I'm a man.

Part 1: Do Trans People Reinforce Gender Stereotypes? (No)
The witches demand to know what 'gender identity' means. I can't tell you because I haven't got a clue either, but I know that it is something that is clear and uncontroversial. They say that people are trans because ‘they want to conform to stereotypes’, or ‘they’re deluded’ or ‘it’s a sexual thing’ or something even worse. They are wrong, but I can't explain why because I don't know.

Part 2: Are People Being Pressured to Transition? (No)
I want people to live the lives they want to without surgery. The witches are telling trans people that they won't be a real man/woman until they've had surgery. Children aren't being pushed into transitioning, and taking cross-sex hormones is no different to having a natural puberty due to their own hormones.

Part 3: Does Admitting Trans Women Make Women’s Spaces Less Safe? (No)
If you try to keep bathrooms single sex, you might accidentally throw out a masculine-presenting woman. The only solution to this is to have bathrooms segregated by gender identity.

Conclusion
I apologize to readers for the length of this post. I needed all those words to tell you how bad the witches are, and why you shouldn't believe anything they say. I wanted to push past the smokescreen of tricky questions like ‘what is gender?’ and ‘how do you stop sexual predators from lying about their identity?’ because I can't answer them.

10,131 words based on the false premise that feminism is a monolith that - as a whole, across all cultures and countries - embraces or rejects individual aspects of feminist thought and thereby validates or invalidates them.

I haven't read beyond the first few paragraphs, but that struck me immediately.

Lots of different schools of feminist theory, a multitude of movements and ideologies.

Liberal Feminism
Marxist and Socialist Feminisms
Radical Feminism
Black Feminism
Cultural Feminism
Eco-Feminism
Transnational or Global Feminism
Lesbian Feminism
Matri-centric Feminism
Visionary Feminism
Libertarian
Anarchy-Feminism
French Feminism
Multi-racial Feminism
Post-colonial and Third World Feminism
Standpoint Feminism
Postmodern and Poststructuralist Feminism

Whether these are mainstream or extreme fringe, some of these agree on some issues and disagree on many others. I don't know if all of these feminist movements have ever agreed on anything other than that they want to improve women's lives. The notion therefore that our rejection of transgender ideology as harmful to the female sex class and our rights has in turn been wholly rejected by all other strands of feminism is ludicrous.

I'm a few paragraphs in and fuck me, looks like an attempt to queer the debate itself.

This is a well-argued article by philosopher Sophie Allen:

medium.com/@s.r.allen/if-transwomen-are-women-what-is-a-woman-d36121bdd926

But all these clever, influential people with their science-based degrees and they can't get round to simple things like defining woman, defining gender, defining sex.

Indeed. This whole stuff works by obfuscation. A trained philosopher, given the time and space, can argue that black is white, that the earth isn't round, that the moon is made of cheese - basically any nonsensical proposition you care to come up with.

The gc position, by contrast, is pretty simple. There are two sexes. It isn't possible to change sex. Biological sex has an impact on people's lives. In some circumstances, we segregate the sexes, for good reason. Men who claim to be women are not only lying, they are often doing so because they want to harm women.

None of that is hard to understand. Arguably, its very simplicity is what enrages people like this philosopher chap.

In part two he totally misrepresents the GC position.

"The GCRF position presents itself as a form of radical acceptance: as the image says, “you are both fine just the way you are.” But in practice it doesn’t want people to transition – or if they do, they should at least have the decency to have surgery, not just declare themselves a woman/man."

But he also says: "If you worry about people getting surgery they don’t really want, step 1 should be emphatically defending their ability to live the life they want socially without any surgery. "

Well, yes. You should be able to live as you want, regardless of whether you are male or female. He must think there are things that men and women are barred from doing because of their sex. He doesn't say what those things are though.

I also get the impression from what he says about children going through "the puberty associated with their chosen gender" that he thinks people can actually change sex.