I came across this excellent article written by two philosophers criticising fellow academics for their behaviour in recent years with regards to Genderism and criticising the failure to recognise the dangers to both society and academia resulting from academics wholeheartedly espousing this belief.
Link and excerpts:
^https://philosophersmag.com/philosophical-malpractice/^
…The costs of this strategy of non-intervention have been routinely underestimated. The public at large have noticed that the question of whether there are male women has an easily known answer. They have noticed that it is worth caring about. They are also in a position to notice the apparent mixture of feigned (or sincere?) confusion, reticence and cowardice preventing academics from themselves noticing what the public at large notices. Most lay people do not have access to all the good work done within philosophy or academia generally; it is thus quite unsurprising for them to treat academics’ failure to get the right answers to what are registered as easy questions as evidence of a more systematic failure. That may be a mistake, but the expectation of some much more subtle and charitable method of assessment – which gives due consideration to all of the excuses academics tell themselves for why they haven’t spoken out – is just naïve. Sometimes, for better or worse, making even a single obvious error that one refuses to acknowledge is enough to shred one’s credibility.
In politics proper, right-wingers like Donald Trump have recently been able to leverage progressives’ sex anti-realism to devastating effect in electoral campaigns. Again, by something like a use of the take-the-best heuristic (or the related availability heuristic), voters seem willing to write off a candidate who professes not to know that there are no male women on the grounds that if they are wrong about that, there is no telling what else they may be wrong about. In politics, it turns out that the fact that a question is easy can sometimes make it important. Progressives are currently having to reckon with just how they could have made such a serious political error. One danger is that in philosophy, with its less exigent pressures to rethink dysfunctional institutional policy and collective norms, that reckoning will be much slower to come.
…In recent years, the response of an intelligent academic with intellectual integrity should have been to exercise his existing sex-based knowledge, rather than to suspend or overturn it. That it was possible to respond this way is evidenced by the fact that a small number of outspoken individuals – like Kathleen Stock and Holly Lawford-Smith in philosophy, and JK Rowling outside of it – in fact did this, while many others knew that they should. It just never ceased being obvious that there are no male women. Trans activists’ central philosophical arguments were always underpowered by ordinary methodological standards; their widespread acceptance involved clear violations of academic norms that continued to be nominally paid lip service to; their popularization was aided and abetted by special pleading, political bullying and plain old cowardice. Sanctimonious instructions to acquaint oneself with the voluminous literature “establishing” that there are male women were, and always have been, a bluff.
It is true enough that, in mounting little opposition to the excesses of trans activism, philosophers and other academics have acquitted themselves little worse than society at large. The academy is unexceptional. Yet there may still be grounds for feeling a more targeted disappointment in philosophers when they make stupid mistakes. It is worse – more of a dereliction of duty, and more avoidable – when clever people disgrace themselves intellectually. It is embarrassing to discover, in a discipline whose public self-image incorporates a socratic ideal of intellectual fearlessness, a conspicuous absence of truth-tellers. And, at the level of the university, it is disappointing to find that mechanisms like tenure, whose ostensible purpose is to liberate academics to speak their minds with impunity, turn out to be ineffective to the point of redundancy. In any case, the fact that others have also revealed themselves to be severely wanting in integrity hardly immunizes academics from the critique.