Prof Stock is wrong (with a side of It Never Happens)…

[NitroNine]

Someone obviously got your one a thesaurus for his birthday. And apparently his reviewers didn’t see fit to point out that Big Words don’t actually impress anyone &/or make you sound clever. Perhaps he felt a need to overcompensate as a lecturer in Law writing an article about Philosophy that mostly reads as if Prof Stock nabbed a sandwich he was after at a conference one time & he’s exacting his petty revenge with swipes at her for, eg, identifying herself as a Professor of Philosophy on social media & when writing for non-academic publications.

A joy & a delight having yet another man tell us that trans women must have unfettered access to all women’s spaces & they are very exactly just like women. I don’t think I’d heard that they absolutely don’t experience male socialisation before now though…

It really worries me that someone who is in a position of power over young people considers that even if some trans women (or men pretending to be TW) use women’s spaces to assault biological women that’s no justification for excluding TW. That he considers somehow their exclusion would be more harmful, without being able to make a cogent argument for this; & without addressing an entire tranche of the GC position.

It’s a thoroughly tiresome retread of some very tired arguments, but it’s likely to impress some people because it has Links To Studies. And an academic wrote it. It has a veneer of… respectability? As in, it’s not simply shouty-ranty; & it gives an initial appearance of going beyond the whine of “just be kiiinnnddddd”. But it’s “just be kiiinnnddddd” swaggering around in cap & gown & trying to knock down GC arguments - & instead simply showing up the TRA agenda as all sorts of disturbing, misogynistic & frankly lacking in logic.

If I were marking this paper, I’g give it 25/100. It’s poorly written, full of sound bites with no evidence to support them, heavily biased towards the author’s own beliefs and basically a load of tosh.

@WeeBisom

By talking about discourse and unmediated realities, he is signalling that he agrees with postmodernism. But Kathleen Stock is an analytic philosopher, and the basis of analytic philosophy is that reality exists. So they are completely talking at odds. If he doesn’t believe in objective reality of course he is going to disagree with her, but that’s just like an atheist disagreeing with a Christian. It’s just odd that he says stock hasn’t considered these postmodernist theories when she has already stated she doesn’t believe in them, and doesn’t use them as the basis for her philosophy! What he really needs to do is persuade Stock and gender critical feminists that their theory of reality (ie it being real and not just a text) is wrong.

Yup....critical theory/PoMo.

I don't believe in it either, hardly anyone does except academics and those in the managerial classes who love to spend their time schooling the normies in their luxury beliefs and berating them for not agreeing.

Unfortunately for us lessers their ideology has captured almost all our institutions and workplaces and thus we find ourselves where we are.

I don't give a flying fuck through a rolling donut about any of their arsewash, it just needs to be forcefully rejected wherever it poses a threat to the rights of women and girls.

"Resist do not comply"

That is fascinating @WeeBisom thank you for explaining it so clearly.

The TRA theory is that choosing to follow the science disclosure, that there are two biological sexes, is oppressive because it leaves trans women out of the category of woman which they would like to be a part of and also leads to oppression of trans women. It would be a more just, fairer world if we instead adopted the discourse that trans women really are women, and women is a social construct, so we should abandon the scientific view.

But even in a postmodernist view, isn't it necessary to describe what is meant by the category of 'woman' that transwomen want to be included in? Otherwise aren't the statements 'transwomen are women' and 'transwomen are men' identical because the categories of men and women are simply empty categories that mean whatever someone wants them to mean? So the statement 'men are women' could also be true?

How can postmodernists describe anything if they refuse to define any terms at all?

Ah, the bullshit of the gyre.

I could equally argue that my decision to recognise the existence of Mr Zanghellini is a political choice in which I accept there are other human beings in existence other than myself.

I could also equally choose to not recognise that he exists, for, as he argues, my decision to choose to recognise him is dependent on "biological realities" that are mediated upon by discourse structured by political values, which are, in this case, that homo sapiens other than myself actually exist on a material level, and are not hallucinations of my own mind.

Therefore I can choose to reject those values and that discourse, and Mr Zanghellini should then disappear in a puff of smoke.

There are fascinating implications to this. Is Mr Zanghellini real or not? Under the terms of his argument, we cannot say. So therefore he inhabits a space in-between the structures of the dialectic. He is both "real" and "not real" at the same time; in this way, he is somewhat like a zombie in that a zombie occupies two states in the same moment -- that of having characteristics of being alive but also of being dead.

Indeed, it is another "political" decision as to whether we recognise zombies as being "alive" or being "dead", for, politically, we must decide whether ambulatory movement is a stronger characteristic of being "alive" than, say, a viable heart beat or functional organs.

And I could go on for a very long time with this Derridean bollocks, which essentially is what all this is about: who says what is what.

And I would probably win to Mr Zanghellini's detriment, for once I had argued that he was, in fact, a hallucination, I would feel it my duty to write to his utility providers and inform them that his house has no need for electricity or a water supply.

@Packingsoapandwater

Ah, the bullshit of the gyre.

I could equally argue that my decision to recognise the existence of Mr Zanghellini is a political choice in which I accept there are other human beings in existence other than myself.

I could also equally choose to not recognise that he exists, for, as he argues, my decision to choose to recognise him is dependent on "biological realities" that are mediated upon by discourse structured by political values, which are, in this case, that homo sapiens other than myself actually exist on a material level, and are not hallucinations of my own mind.

Therefore I can choose to reject those values and that discourse, and Mr Zanghellini should then disappear in a puff of smoke.

There are fascinating implications to this. Is Mr Zanghellini real or not? Under the terms of his argument, we cannot say. So therefore he inhabits a space in-between the structures of the dialectic. He is both "real" and "not real" at the same time; in this way, he is somewhat like a zombie in that a zombie occupies two states in the same moment -- that of having characteristics of being alive but also of being dead.

Indeed, it is another "political" decision as to whether we recognise zombies as being "alive" or being "dead", for, politically, we must decide whether ambulatory movement is a stronger characteristic of being "alive" than, say, a viable heart beat or functional organs.

And I could go on for a very long time with this Derridean bollocks, which essentially is what all this is about: who says what is what.

And I would probably win to Mr Zanghellini's detriment, for once I had argued that he was, in fact, a hallucination, I would feel it my duty to write to his utility providers and inform them that his house has no need for electricity or a water supply.

@WeeBisom

"This is just bullshit, isn't it?"

It is bullshit. In order to believe it you have to subscribe to a quite complex theory. Postmodernism isn't something which I would say is obvious or intuitive. So the theory is that you don't have direct access to reality, what the world is really like. The world ONLY makes sense to us through 'discourse', which is writing, talking, using language to discuss reality. Reality is always filtered through language.

There is no such thing as objective 'truth'. Rather, there are just competing discourses --competing theories about the way the world is. None of these theories actually has a claim to describing reality as it really is, because we simply don't have access to that. And these discourses compete based on power. Dominant discourses are the most powerful. you might think that science is true, because it get things right about the world (we have planes, medicine, covid vaccines) but in fact science is just one discourse among many. And it's a powerful one because it's so widely accepted. But that doesn't make it true.

What this means is that the decision about what disclosure to follow is always a political choice based on power. Believing in science is just as political as believing in Christianity. This means we can choose what discourses to follow, much like we can choose what political party to vote for. The TRA theory is that choosing to follow the science disclosure, that there are two biological sexes, is oppressive because it leaves trans women out of the category of woman which they would like to be a part of and also leads to oppression of trans women. It would be a more just, fairer world if we instead adopted the discourse that trans women really are women, and women is a social construct, so we should abandon the scientific view. Stock's error, according to these guys, is thinking that science reflects reality when in fact believing in science is a political choice much like believing in the Tory party.

There are obviously massive errors with this. It's pretty hard to swallow that science, the field that has given us technology and improved our lives immeasurably, is just another 'discourse' among many others like creationism, flat earth theory etc, and that it doesn't actually reflect anything real or true about the world. Quite simply, science works. Believing in crystals and woo doesn't.

Secondly, postmodernism is committed to the idea that there is no objective morality. There is nothing but discourses butting against each other and competing for power. There is no such thing as a 'good' discourse compared to an 'evil' one. So it is difficult to know what exactly they are getting at when they talk about making a political choice to accept trans women as women in the name of justice. What is 'just' or 'morally right' is nothing more than another discourse. There is no objective reason to prefer the 'Trans women are women' model over the 'science' model because you can't point to one discourse being objectively more moral than another. This is to import something objective and real into postmodernism, which postmodernists deny. Note that Butler , the dominant postmodern theorist around today, really struggles to expunge references to morality from her theory. She seems to think the invasion of Gaza is objectively bad and not just a matter of opinion or taste.

It's all bollocks.

Awesome ! Thank you.

Gender-critical feminists tend to draw a sharp distinction between sex, as a biological reality, and gender, as the social construction of sex. In response, feminist critics of gender-critical feminism insist that we have no unmediated access to biological realities: they too become cognitively significant to us through discourse, including the discourse of biology, which is itself (like any other discursive domain) structured by political values. Thus, defining the concepts of “women” or “females” (as gender-critical feminists do) by reference to biological sex is itself a political choice, rather than one that can claim to neutrally reflect what the world is “really” like.“

The writer says that feminist critics of gender critical feminists say that as we have no unmediated access to biology therefore defining women biologically is political.

1. Is it true that there are feminists criticising gender critical feminists for classing women by biology?

1. If all biology and all scientific or other understanding of the world is something we never have ‘unmediated access to’ why would that mean that when we do attempt to describe them we are being ‘political’ by default?

1. If all knowledge doesn’t count because we never have unmediated access to it, and nothing is ‘true’ but only political even stating that would be ‘political.

In practice though life doesn’t work like that.
All the understanding a doctor might have of the heart, for example, is at least true enough for some lives to be saved. Biology is not just political obviously.

@ KimikosNightmare
thank you. I should have read the full thread. You have explained everything so well.

@ StonewalledNameChange
Thank you too.

I meant thank you @Packingsoapandwater whose answer stonewalled reposted.

In response, critics insist that we have no unmediated access to realities

Anyone fancy dropping a rock on one of those critics toes?

As an alternative thought experiment, shut them in a room with a screamingly hungry baby and have them explain to the baby that it has no unmediated access to reality...

In terms of sex versus gender, a girl's first period will happen whether or not she assigns any cognitive value to it, or whether she's even cognitively aware of periods until the event. Reality is the primary event, discourse is the secondary effect.

@ScrollingLeaves

@ KimikosNightmare thank you. I should have read the full thread. You have explained everything so well.

I didn't explain it ! It was WeeBisom

@MrsWooster

I stopped taking him seriously when he referenced Hines.

Same for me.