‘Philosophical problems with the GC feminist argument against trans inclusion’

[AgentK]

A friend pointed me in the direction of this journal and I don’t really understand what it is trying to say. Can anyone paraphrase and/or critique it please?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244020927029

Sure: tosspot has an intellectual wank.

Nope.

The relentless nature of 'here's where you are wrong ladies' on here at the moment is pathetic.

Plus "philosophical" be damned.

Women are pointing out practical problems arising from males claiming to be women

14 pages of Mansplaining that an average reader of this board could dismantle whilst making lunches for 3 kids and working full time.

From the first paragraph “In general, gender-criti- cal feminism advocates reserving women’s spaces for cis women.” conveniently and typically forgetting that the GC case includes Transmen, and also understands why sex segregated spaces exist in the first place.

Just a few minutes looking at it have rather irritated me. I'm out of academia now, so feel a little wary saying this, but... it seems to lack rigour , evident not least in the shameless employment of a range of - to the informed reader - rather obviously subversive devices...

Under the sub-heading "Philosophical Scrutiny of Gender-Critical Arguments", we have the emotive reference to "anti-trans tactics of some feminist activists" immediately imposing an ethical judgment on these tactics without citing them or defining anti-trans. It doesn't inspire confidence in the promised interrogation of complex philosophical issues. Not does the rather petty observation that Stock sometimes retains the title "professor" while writing for laypeople. Again, the author's issue with this doesn't appear to be explicitly stated or explored, building on the impression given by the previous example or reliance on an emotive sub-text that condemns GC feminists - whether the "moderate" Stock or so-called anti-trans Tweeters as in some way ethically dubious. I'd actually call this approach to academic analysis ethically dubious...

Towards the end of the same paragraph, these issues become even clearer in the undefined reference to "[Stock’s support of] gender identity conversion therapy". Not only will the author be well aware of the damning historical associations of that phrase, but it seems rather likely to me that they've elected to use it precisely because of these connotations of prejudice and violence. This is because "conversion therapy" as a phrase, used in this context is, to my understanding, a misrepresentation of the exploratory therapy that Stock and many like her support. And a shameless one, at that. Nowhere have I seen Stock argue for the "conversion" - "the process of changing from one form to another" - "trans individuals". Rather, as I understand it, she supports methodologies that seek a better understanding of their needs, which will, the statistics show, often mean enabling the realisation that their dysphoria may be temporary or be being over-shadowed by other clinical issues.

All in all, the few paragraphs I read felt manipulative as heck.

Thankfully, no time for more right now.

Further problems are:

he doesn’t compare Serrano’s definition with that used by Stock. They are not the same

He uses Stock as ‘the best in gender-critical feminism” which I would reject, she offers a coherent but ultimately mollifying account.

Basically every paragraph is fundamentally wrong.

Anyone can learn to use the jargon I guess.

PS

I can see the next para. goes into the conversion therapy issue in more depth, & it's ages since I read any of "Material Girls", so I may be wrong myself. The whole point is, this debate requires really close thinking and reading. Has your friend read the article themselves, or just produced something promising-sounding from a quick Google. Have they read "Material Girls"? If they're asking you to read 14 pages of small-print, I think you can justifiably send them a few powerful extracts from Stock's writing in return.

I made it to the end of the introduction which concluded with, to paraphrase 'its not fair that GC women use social media to voice their opinions' and couldn't face going any further. How dare women speak, just how bloody dare they!

Just a quick scan shows that this is a hollow opinion piece.

The "paper" identifies three areas where GC feminism "fails" but there are rigorous and solid foundations supporting our arguments in each of these cases, the paper does no serious work to rebut them.

The paper mis-states the aims of GC criticisms of the update and also mis-states the reality of the current legislative landscape, its implementation in real life and the nature and extent of the proposed amendments.

It cites Butler's opinion that gender is merely performative with no further interrogation, indeed it cites many other "social sciences" papers (other opinion pieces) this way.

It also discusses the concept of "gender identity" without scrutiny. A confection that has no proof of its existence.

Please don't give it any more time.

Anytime I see an article where there is a distinction apparently made between genuine transwomen and men impersonating transwomen, I switch off. The whole mantra of TWAW is that if you say you're a woman, you are one. There are no impersonators.

Of course, it's jolly convenient for there now to be the get out clause that Isla Bryson or Barbie Kardashian or Karen White are impersonators.

Because we now have two circular arguments that taken at face value can't be denied. TWAW, it is what it is. Those TWAW who cause damage are impersonators. It is what it is.

A circular system of (il)logic that is impenetrable, and self defining, and self regulating.

Whereas the whole of civilised society depends upon observable phenomena and testable theses. This one area, absolutely critical to the smooth order of society is going to have a hidden "code", a so called "self evident" thesis that isn't evident, or self evident in any way.

Whatever you think of religion, and I've taken a turn because of all this to reinvestigate spiritual aspects to what it means to be human, we cannot dispense with organised religion and supernatural facets of life to replace it with another set of untestable and frankly unsustainable tenets.

That's what we're all being asked to do. Order civic society at the behest of the invisible and untestable whims of a group of suffering and saintly individuals, where the reordering is to be made according to their feelings of authentic self.

This is not even the religion we are all aware of, this is going back to the second century AD, and a return to Gnosticism and people's frailty and absolute fear of their natural environment, laced with good old fashioned Pagan mindsets.

We're in a very dangerous place indeed.

I think the article 'succeeds' (if you can call it that) by deliberately mischaracterising and taking a very narrow look at what the author sees gender critical feminism to be. So in a sense he's setting up a straw (wo)man. I'm a bit concerned that the reviewers and editors thought this was adequate. Looking at his university web page he seems to have a number of influential roles, so his more feminist oriented students have my sympathy. A sort of academic Owen Jones.

Yup, I've skimmed a bit more (couldn't resist; gah, should be working!) & it really is looking either deliberately disingenuous or missing the point. A lot of time spent rationalising Stock's arguments in a way that takes a lot of words to show a rather superficial, reductive understanding of them (the verbosity obscuring this), before creating a strawman counter-argument that, so far as I can tell, was already implicitly addressed in Stock's original. May be wrong. Reading very quickly - & guiltily. But don't think so.

Well for a start the section that is supposed to argue that it is a a
fallacy being used to exclude male people from female spaces is ignoring the evidence that exists in the conviction statistics. And the huge anecdotal evidence bank of males with trans identities threatening violence and sex offences, and the photos of male people with erections in single sex spaces and the porn category where they are masturbating in female single sex spaces.

That seems to indicate that they have not searched for evidence or they are only interested in peer reviewed studies so that they can ignore the rest. Themselves indulging in fallacy.

Mind you, the journal is 'Sage open' which is a bit of a bottom-feeder pay-to-publish affair.

The fundamental flaw, which invalidates the whole paper, is that humans cannot change sex.

’Gender identity’ is a recently invented concept, a personal belief with no more factual backing than astrology. Therefore there is no justifiable reason for women to make any of the concessions that are demanded of us in its name.

It is currently being enforced by intimidation, which should make its fundamental wrongness even more obvious!

It seems to be arguing that we are ignoring all the “progress” that’s been made in pushing the idea that some men are women and that we are being mean in not accepting that men who claim they are women need to use women’s spaces for their safety.

He keeps quoting Sally Hines, who writes transactivist word salad and periodically embarrasses herself on Twitter by what many suspect are inebriated, incoherent rants.

According to one of his sources, we have a moral obligation to show solidarity towards men who claim they are women.

There’s criticism of Kathleen Stock for writing in non-academic journals, while simultaneously stating her academic credentials.

There seems to be objection over Stock’s claim that a therapist failing to affirm that a young woman who is sexually attracted to women is a lesbian (because of her claim to be a boy) “looks like conversion by omission” is incorrect because there has been no attempt to change who she is sexually attracted to.

I suspect, though I’m not completely au fait with Stock’s work, that the problem here might arise from Stock’s acceptance that a young lesbian can actually be “trans and heterosexual” rather than confused or delusional, which is what she would have been seen as before.

Then moving on to whether men who claim they are women should be in women’s spaces, he starts with the observation that those men are already doing this, this self-ID is already effectively in place. He describes this as the “pre reform system” ignoring the fact that women never agreed to this reform in the first place and that it was achieved largely by stealth.

I think he then wanders into a discussion over whether it’s morally right to exclude men from women’s spaces as that might not provide the optimal solution for society (women shouldn’t get special treatment, we need to look at what’s best for everyone, I think, but I have to go out now. Presumably someone who understands all the specific philosophical theories scattered throughout might make a better hand of it anyway, but I will read the rest later.

Why don’t you tell us the sections you are struggling with OP rather than posting it without your thoughts? Because right at this moment this thread has started in a slightly different but all too similar approach as many others which start of with an article that supposedly is a ‘gotcha’ about how poor feminist arguments are or something to prod feminists with from posters with new user names.

Regular posters are right to wary of these threads particularly ones asking to evaluate a very long paper that is ideologically driven from the start. And particularly from new posters.

I too laughed at quoting Hines. And this author expects people to consider their work well reasoned? Fuck that.

Is it yet more "angels dancing on the head of a pin" elitist bs to justify the wants of the men who demand that we call them women?

I'm not interested.

I won't JADE - Justify/Argue/Defend/Explain.

It's really simple. Men are not women. You can't change sex. We're saying no and we want our stuff back.

Maya Forstater has already picked this (paid for) article apart.

I skimmed 2-3 pages. Skipping over the guff, it promises to make the case that GC is bad philosophy therefore it’s ok to deplatform GC feminists. It does a bit of “well if you assume TWAW then GC philosophy is incoherent, also women have moral obligations to include us.” (If you assume TWAW all philosophy is incoherent. That’s what happens when you assume a contradiction. To the “moral obligation” part, I will only say “fuck off.”)

then it does a close reading of one of Kathleen Stock’s arguments. The crux of the triumphant “refutation” of Stock’s argument is that if you convert a lesbian woman to a “straight trans man“ with medical treatment it’s not “conversion therapy” because she still fancies women. Also the lesbian might really be a man.

then I stopped reading because it was much too stupid to continue. How can a TRA argue with a straight face that you haven’t done conversion therapy if you convert a gay person to identifying as straight? Is “identity” the be-all and end-all, or is it not?

There’s also a long section on how preventing abuse is very difficult and impractical and you can’t do it without being mean to men so really why are women even bothering, it’s an awful faff. Frankly it smacks of motivated reasoning.

And then there is this, which is self-refuting to anyone who reads this board. It made me check the date on the article. It was published in 2020. I really wonder if any TRA would have the effrontery to write the same thing in 2023.

Stock (2018b) argues, “The problem here is male violence . . . [We] have no evidence that self-declared trans women deviate from male statistical norms in relevant ways.” Something true of natal males as a class (their proneness to violence against women) is here assumed to be true of trans women as a (sub)class, on the basis of an absence of evi- dence. The effect of the argument is to treat as evidence of sameness an absence of evidence of difference, despite the fact that the reasonable assumption to make is just the oppo- site—namely, that there should be a difference in behavioral patterns between natal males as a class (the vast majority of whom are cis men), and trans women as a class.

Because we now have two circular arguments that taken at face value can't be denied. TWAW, it is what it is. Those TWAW who cause damage are impersonators. It is what it is.

If you concede that some people are really trans but others are just pretending to be trans, then self-ID must be off the table, we can all agree on that, right?