Philosopher responds to Jane Clare Jones et al

[thatdamnwoman]

I'm pretty sure that over the past week or two I've read an article by GC women philosophers pointing out the fallacious arguments that fellow philosophers use when trying to promote a pro-trans agenda. I've looked for it but can't find it. I anyone can point me to it I'd be grateful.

A contact of mine, someone who is a senior paediatrician, has posted this article which I think is a response to the original GC feminist one.

majesticequality.wordpress.com/2019/07/25/dear-philosophers-you-can-trust-the-feminist-consensus-gender-critical-radical-feminism-is-bogus/

My contact – someone who is in a position to be very influential in her hospital and area – says she's read it and it makes sense to her and she wants those of us who are circulating anti-trans articles to read it. She's already getting lots of likes and people saying yes, they agree, from loads of people, some of whom I recognise as being in the NHS.

I've given the article a cursory read but it's long and tortuous and I am so infuriated by the toxic tone that I can't be analytical. This is rubbish philosophical writing.

I see that Kathleen Stock has responded but I'm so shaken that someone I mistook for an intelligent, sensible woman has swallowed this shit and that other women are agreeing with her that I can't absorb Stock's response.

Is there anyone out there capable of boiling down both his argument and her response in plain English so that I can intervene with some sanity on FB?

That article is shit, I can't imagine an academic philosopher writing anything like that. Even ones I think are dumb-asses. It was so poorly written, and shows such a lack of knowledge of basic argumentation, it's really almost unreadable.

But as far as the women on FB, I would ask them, what is it about this that you really find compelling, and then talk about what they are seeing. I would not say anything about handmaidens, it's patronising to tell people they only agree with something because they are too biased toward men to think for themselves, and it's no different from telling feminists they are biased by hating men. In any case, if they are biased, it's as likely toward progressive politics.

Goodness me, he’s a bit waffly, isn’t he? Is he a real philosopher? The reason it’s so long-winded is that it is basically tautology after tautology, which is the one thing I remember being slammed for doing when I took an introductory philosophy module at Uni. Can’t back up your reasoning? Just make the same point in different words over and over and over again instead.

Good grief. He’s just proved the old saying about monkeys and typewriters hasn’t he?

Except that it ain't Shakespeare .

The Lara Adams Miller article NotAtMyAge cites is very good. And she can write.

I read a spot on "corrected it for you" of this article on twitter yesterday, but I'll be damned if I can find it now.

Why not ask them which bits in particular they found persuasive? As you found it very difficult to pick out any meaning from the waffle.

In part one he says that transitioning is nothing to do with stereotypes. In part two he talks about 'transitioning socially'. Isn't 'social transition' all about stereotypes?

Yes, thank you to all who have suggested I ask what they found so persuasive, perhaps that's the way to go. I've calmed down now. I'm not the sharpest tool in the academic box but just the poisonous tone of the piece had me wanting to scream.

I'm not sure how much I want to / can afford to get into analysing the text with them. I'm not sure how much 'We need to be positive and supportive and inclusive' I can take (because I think being nice and inclusive is their libfem default mode) but I can give it a go and respond to them with the resources mentioned here. I've calmed down a bit now.

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.

One of my "friends" who is an academic has posted it too. I didn't click on it. She also seems to be pushing the why are feminists being so horrible line on this. She's led a fairly charmed life so it pisses me off as someone who has experienced years of male abuse, the effects I will never recover from, that she's trying to take away my safe spaces. Anyway I'm pleased to hear the article is a load of shit!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.......

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

That is a beautiful summary, OldCrone
Thank you!

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...)

'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?

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.

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.

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.