In my field (science, not philosophy) I'm an editorial manager for one journal and on the editorial board of 2 others, and from that perspective the behavior of the Hypatia editors looks just breathtakingly unprofessional.
Editorial retraction is reserved for papers that are shown to have seriously breached the accepted standards of the field. In my area that would be fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. I don't know what the standard is in philosophy, but it certainly must be something more than "people disagree with the arguments".
The editors looked at this manuscript and apparently found it acceptable, as did 2 outside referees. Now they retract it in what looks to be an attempt to direct the ire of a social media mob away from themselves and onto the author. "Hit her, not us!"
Maybe there's another reading of this, but to me it looks like just pathetic, cowardly behavior on the editors' part.
Oh man. I recently became friends with some people on Facebook who did in fact unleash mega-vitriol over this. I hadn't given it much thought myself.
We live in a post-fact world. Nobody cares about what actually happened, they care about force-fitting a few fact-like details into a pre-existing narrative. I recently had a big FB argument with a friend over Trayvon Martin in which she did exactly this. I'm still kind of pissed about it.
Speaking of force-fitting facts into a pre-existing narrative, I'm assuming transracialism is limited to a few people that have some kinds of personal issues and a large mass of people who want to discomfit liberals over transsexual issues. So I'm going to ignore it and somebody can tell me what the philosophical reasons are later.
4 strikes me as accurate -- this sounds awfully terrible and thin-skinned, and I suspect it is awfully terrible and thin-skinned, but I'm going to go all tu quoque and note that the people who seem most worked up about this and the free spirit of scientific philosophical inquiry are a bunch of assholes. (Lookin' at you, Brian Leiter.)
I recently became friends with some people on Facebook who did in fact unleash mega-vitriol over this.
Just curious: pro or con?
Well, it certainly seems like there's a lot going on here!
Things that I do not care for about the paper and the supportive response:
Sure looks like there's a lot of white dudes jumping in to be shocked, shocked that a nice white young woman scholar should be attacked for writing a...well, really what seems, on a cursory reading of it, mostly to be a tacky and disingenuous paper, but still, certain types of white male philosophers seem to be most interested in defending nice young white women who get into arguments with older women, women of color, trans women, etc, almost as if there's some kind of "I can't be anti-feminist, look at me defending a woman!!!!" thing going on, or a "defend the women if they are the kind of women I would like to date" thing, or a "cannily choose women to defend who are basically kinda conservative, so I can look feminist but never be challenged on my beliefs" thing.
Also, the linked article occludes the fact that the article is written to support "racial transition". You can't get around that. She does a lot of language stuff that's like "if you believe in trans people for these reasons [which to which I say, as a transish person, "gee, thanks"], you have to use these reasons to believe in "racial transition", I'm just sayin'" but it's difficult to see why one would write this paper if not to stan for "racial transition".
I'm struck by how poorly this type of philosophizing does this type of social issue. It's like if you want to open a window and you think "okay, I have this hammer, I will hammer the window open!" Like, there are certainly a lot of questions about how we understand gender and transness ("transness" being a word that one can substitute for 'transgenderism", unless one wants to say - like a transphobe - that being trans is totally ideological). There are a lot of questions about how we understand race. There are a lot of incoherencies in how we understand gender and race, and there are contradictory lines thought among different trans people about transness and among different people of color about racial identity. But I've definitely noticed a tendency for people with race problems and trans-people problems to make this kind of argument, where you sort of separate out the inconsistencies from the world and history as if that really helps to understand them.
NY Mag has a history of publishing articles about trans people that are ostensibly written from a "neutral" or friendly standpoint but that have an underlying "transness is maybe real for a tiny percentage of people, but most 'trans' people are ideologues who are trying to convert the baybeez" approach. Their account of the article seems, based on a cursory reading, as misleading as anything that they claim others have said about it - if you're at all familiar with scholarship about trans people or racial justice, there are many little tells in tone and language that show you where its priorities lie.
I must say that I am totally, totally uncomfortable with the way that trans issues are used by mainstream publications as a sort of proxy for other political debates and as clickbait. No one was interested in trans people a few years ago; now, they're breathlessly covering a political debate that would never have made it off tumblr in 2013. If you want to know what is creepy and objectifying, it is this intense and sudden fascination (not interest, but fascination) with transness (note that I do not say 'transgenderism') by a bunch of cis people who didn't care a few years ago. It feels really fetishy.
I think that Hypatia should, however, have the courage of their convictions. They published an article which is written from an unappealing standpoint, but that's not a crime, and while the standpoint is unappealing and IMO disingenuous, it's not like they published The Bell Curve. They don't need to stand up and say "this is the best article ever, we are all behind it 100%", but why not let people fight it out in the letters, or do a special section of responses? It seems like when you have an article which is unappealing but more self-centered than actually hateful, the best thing you can do is to explore the many subtle and overt ways that it's bad, rather than take it down totally.
And of course, left and feminist scholars should not be sending each other death threats on the internet, etc. There's definitely a slippage problem in all strongly ideologized communities (I thought this did not happen on the right, but post-election I've realized that it does - whew!) where we lose the ability to distinguish between the small percentage of really terrible things which should be no-platformed and the much larger percentage of things that are merely bad. I think this is a tension that can only be dealt with on a case-by-case basis with as much probity as one can manage.
In short, I think this paper is an ugly paper more because of its approach than because of its content. It's a dumb way to write about race, is all I'm sayin'.
4: That's my understanding.
I wouldn't even say a few people, there might be just one single person, not counting the stereotypical white people who like smoking pot and rasta music. In addition to claiming to be black when she's mostly of Czech, German, and Swedish descent, she's also claimed that someone she met in her late 20s or early 30s was her father, claimed to be a professor when no college or university has used that title to describe her, sold a plagiarized painting, and filed lots of police reports and accused lots of people of crimes when there's absolutely no evidence besides her word. (I hesitate to include that because I know lots of actual crimes get ignored for bad reasons, but that doesn't mean every claim is genuine either. And I'm leaving out more personal family stuff.) She has issues besides the "yeah, but are you actually black or not?" issue.
There's also Tropic Thunder, which is very informative on the topic. Or at least really funny.
I don't know enough about this to have a proper opinion; I think philosophy would be better for people being willing to say occasionally, "I don't know a lot about this -- what do you think?"
That would make for a short paper. The abstract would just be '?'.
8.third to last: Yeah. My response to this is mainly from the standpoint of how someone editing a scholarly journal should behave. Maybe philosophy has unique standards, but in every field I'm familiar with, editorially retracting a paper is a Big Deal. It amounts to accusing the author of some kind of serious ethical breach wrt the standards of publication in the field. Not "this is a shoddy argument" or "this paper is in poor taste" or "any member of group X would find this insulting". Letters to the editor or articles or blog posts or tweets criticizing - or flat out condemning if that's how you feel - the original paper is for things like that.
Retraction is for things like "this data is fake" or "this whole section is plagiarized" or "this statement is provably libelous of specific individual X".
It really looks like the editors aren't prepared to own their decision to publish this and are throwing the author under a bus to avoid taking any heat themselves.
As for 6, I don't think that "Brian Leiter is against X" is a sufficient reason for me to be for X. I realize that's not what you meant, but I think it's worth noting that just because some people always complain that leftists behave badly that doesn't mean that leftists don't sometimes actually behave badly
I'm just sayin'" but it's difficult to see why one would write this paper if not to stan for "racial transition".
I'd like to see the actual article, but I'm not going to pay to do so. If the abstract is any guide, the author seems to be engaged in a really unfortunate bit of reasoning:
Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism.
No they don't.
I had never seen the word "stan" before, and assumed it was some kind of typo. But no, I'm just really old and out of it.
As for 6, I don't think that "Brian Leiter is against X" is a sufficient reason for me to be for X.
Sure, but for us non-academics, it's a useful heuristic.
Weirdly enough, I don't have free access to the article. There's a link for it, but it doesn't work. Anyway, never let it be said that I didn't try half-assedly to do a very small favor for you.
15.last - Sure, but thankfully the "Brian Leiter is angry about something but there's no reason I should have an opinion about it" option remains blessedly available to me. It certainly sounds like people are behaving badly, but I'm under no obligation to educate myself on this issue, so, like Jonathan Chait (who has Opinions! he wants the world to hear), I won't. It bears even less relevance to my life or my expertise than the pressing "should you punch a Nazi" debates of March that divided a nation.
That one is easy. You should punch a Nazi if you can get away with it.
It's really just a question of conditioning.
I haven't actually read any of the linked materials, but my understanding is that "transracialism" isn't that rare historically in the U.S. it just usually goes the other way.
In defense of the Hypatia editors, they probably just realized that the article violated the Analogy Ban.
Further to something I was trying to get at in 8:
It's not, like, against the rules to be a white cisgender person who is all "shall we inquire into whether people can decide they've changed race, using arguments about transness to prop this up, just in sort of an idle abstract way". And indeed, we all have speculative thoughts and conversations about Important Stuff About Identities We Do Not Have.
But at the same time, this article illustrates just why it's often a bad idea to hold yourself up as enough of an expert to be published. There's all kinds of embedded/textural/historical/experiential stuff that gives meaning to racial and gender identities and to the lines of thought about them, and if you don't have any of those experiences personally (or have some other long-standing and subtle connection to trans communities, communities of color, etc) your work often has an oblivious and shallow quality, and you often end up being all "wow this is so deep and so, like, complex" about stuff that, for instance, trans people and POC and trans POC have had to think about all the time.
Cis people in general should not use transness as a metaphor or a rhetorical prop - partly for ethics reasons, but mostly because they very, very rarely have any kind of grasp of how difficult and complicated it is to transition. Cis people, IME, often talk about transitioning as if it's just "I went down to the government center and filled out a simple form and dropped it in the box, and then everyone treated me as my correct gender!" They rarely say this, because in general they don't consciously think it, but when they use transness as metaphor or prop, as in this article, it becomes clear that they think transitioning is very straightforward.
Also, a thought: it's true that deadnaming Caitlyn Jenner is not the same as deadnaming a person in private life, but if you are a cis person writing what you cannot help but know will be a sensitive paper about gender and race, leading off with deadnaming does not signal "I am familiar with the conventions of scholarship on these issues". Again, not against the rules, but not a good approach and not one that will win you friends.
I though about that, but decided it wasn't really transracialism if it was done to avoid being enslaved/discriminated against/not allowed to vote/etc.
24: And this is why "transracialism" is a stupid way to approach the problem. The historical construction of race is such that there is no blanket category "transracialism".
but it's difficult to see why one would write this paper if not to stan for "racial transition".
The possibility that comes to mind for me is that the writer looked at the Rachel Dolezal story, identified it as obviously problematic like everyone does, and then started nitpicking at the question of exactly why it's problematic. Obviously, it is, but individual nitpicky arguments can be made that there are specific ways in which it's hard to distinguish from transness. At which point to call it Dozeal's behavior a problem, you have to either successfully make that distinction, despite it being hard, or find some aspect that doesn't resemble transness at all, which is where the real problem lies.
This isn't something that seems like a useful or necessary project in dealing with Dolezal in the real world, where the intuitive reaction that she is doing something awful for bad reasons seems solid enough to rely on. But picking at the basis for things, even when it's practically unimportant, does seem like a thing that philosophers do.
(I have no real opinion about the rights and wrongs of any of this. I read the linked article, but not the original paper or the original criticisms.)
It costs $6 to read the original paper, even if you have university access. I'm starting to wonder if the editors didn't retract the paper for the controversy so they could get the Benjamins.
Except the publisher gets the Benajmins. Maybe this will get the cites?
23: I understood "deadnaming" to mean "referring to a person by their former name" and not "mentioning that a person had a prior name, and here's what that name was."
So (according to the distinction I want to draw) referring to Caitlyn Jenner as "Bruce" is one thing, but acknowledging that Caitlyn Jenner previously used a different name is another thing.
From the abstract:
Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity.
So I'm wondering: Is the distinction I'm making sensible? Or does the abstract constitute the deprecated practice of deadnaming?
Or is there something else in the text of the article itself that constitutes objectionable deadnaming?
This isn't something that seems like a useful or necessary project... But picking at the basis for things, even when it's practically unimportant, does seem like a thing that philosophers do.
My reaction pretty much in a nutshell. Also 22.2.
I kind of wish critics would just say "cis people aren't allowed to write philosophy papers about trans issues, period" rather than the kind of criticisms that I've read that try to dig into the details of the paper but often do so in really weird ways which I find a lot less sympathetic than just sticking with "for this particular issue, it's not ok to write in the provocative thought-experiment fashion that philosophers like to write." Our lives aren't fodder for your philosophical mental masturbation is a perfectly sensible position.
The editorial response is indeed bizarre and not ok, regardless of the merits of the paper.
27: It's worth reading - for some values of "worth" - the actual article. The NYMag article does not adequately convey the article's approach. I was prepared to be in sympathy with the author (I mean, I've been around the cultural left) until I actually clicked on through.
30: And this is kind of why one should not set oneself up as a big old expert in Hypatia, because it's situational/tonal. Let's assume that you must directly explain rather than imply that Caitlyn Jenner is trans. A way to do that is to refer to her by some variant of "Caitlyn Jenner, who is trans", "trans woman Caitlyn Jenner", "trans celebrity Caitlyn Jenner", "Caitlyn Jenner, who came out as a woman in 2014", etc.
When you write, as she does, "Caitlyn (formerly Bruce)", you're actually implying that she was a man and now she's a woman, and that this is how to understand trans people, not as people who are born a gender but need some kind of social/medical/etc alignment process to be able to be socially understood as that gender.
(Note: "born an X, became a Y" is not how trans people generally prefer to be understood; even if you know one trans person who is all "when I was a little boy, before I became a girl", do not assume that this is how all or even most trans people understand themselves. Talking about lives pre-transition is really tricky and sensitive.)
It's just also sorta...off-sounding, especially in this age of google, to make a big deal out of her old name. Jenner can do as she likes when talking about herself, but when the rest of us talk about her, we should follow the practices deemed to be polite in general.
Basically, it's tacky. Anyone who reads scholarship on trans lives and encounters that framing, especially right at the start of the article, is going to be discomfited. It's a clear signal that she doesn't pay attention to what trans people say about how they prefer to be named.
Also, the linked article occludes the fact that the article is written to support "racial transition". You can't get around that. She does a lot of language stuff that's like "if you believe in trans people for these reasons [which to which I say, as a transish person, "gee, thanks"], you have to use these reasons to believe in "racial transition", I'm just sayin'" but it's difficult to see why one would write this paper if not to stan for "racial transition".
Yes, it is difficult to see why one would write a paper called "in defense of transracialism" if not to mount a defense of transracialism. What of it? The idea that arguments in favor of trans identities (I mean specifically in favor of that, not just a a naïve Millian "experiments in living / do your thing" attitude) can also be applied to changing racial identities is, apparently, of long standing (this paper was recommended to me on fb as a decent overview, and also doesn't believe the implication holds), and the most damning criticism of the paper I've seen is that it's mostly unwittingly regurgitating philosophical folklore rather than actually mounting a novel argument, which is a big failing on Tuvel's part and a huge failing on the part of Hypatia and its refereeing process. (Specifically: "What I'm hearing among trans analytic philosophers, by the way, is that the territory the paper covers is trans-analytic-philosopher-poc-cocktail-party-talk level discussion of this topic, which classic trans-analytic-philosopher-poc-cocktail-party-talk material, and the outrage is (to quote a friend) 'what the article making it to print, in this state, in a premier feminist philosophy journal says about the state of the field and how much the relative power players in this business care about trans and black perspectives.'") Which is interesting, since I don't think you'd ever get that idea from popular discourse, where my impression is much more like the impression I get from, well, Frowner's comment—that it's just an offensive thing to talk about.
(I wish the article had not been about Dolezal, who is hardly the first person to claim and pass as having a racial identity different from the one had growing up.)
Presumably the editor who handled this paper did not do a good job picking referees. The Jenner thing is right in the abstract (where you don't get any context or nuance), and it seems really weird that they managed to find two referees who were experts on these topics and yet didn't suggest that it would be better to handle that a different way in the abstract. But it's hard to know how much of that is just that the refereeing process is horribly broken in general (due to too many papers being written, due to administrations emphasizing metrics) versus this particular editor screwing up.
Anonymous refereeing is pretty problematic because it means the author is left standing alone against this kind of criticism, when really the referees are at least as much at fault as the author (since they're probably more senior and powerful and should have known better).
I'm a referee and I'm very anti-senior and unpowerful. I'm not taking that kind of responsibility for no money.
34, last: Oh, but don't we totally buy the author's contention that it's not about Dolezal? Surely we can all bracket Dolezal, just as we bracket the real lives of trans people to use transness as a rhetorical prop!
34, first: To me, it's a disingenuous paper because she does all this "but if you believe these reasons for being trans, then you are just forced - forced!!! - to believe in racial transition" stuff, whereas her framing strongly suggests that she is pro this concept of "racial transition" as some kind of trans (as it were) historical category.
By "don't set yourself up as an expert", I kind of meant "this is the sort of dumb half-sloshed conversation that people have". Part of the problem with the paper is that it's blog-chat level, but it's published in a venue and in such a way that it will inevitably be cited against both trans people and POC. (Probably by radical feminists on one side and vaguely racist queer people on the other.)
But fundamentally I just think it's a dumb way to look at race and transness - trying to pull the social and the historical out of the matter, as if our reasoning about transness and race can be clarified that way.
Is there a free link to the paper anyplace, or is the only way to get it to pay the six bucks or whatever it is.
Anyway, the editors were spineless, but authors are supposed to stand alone against criticism. That's why books, which tend to have way more review, usually have a statement at the front where the author thanks people for their assistance and comments but doesn't blame them for errors.
Explicitly reserve all blame to themselves, in fact.
38: I am not sure how we trade sensitive and fancy contact information on this here website, but I can send people PDFs if we figure out how you can convey your email to me. Also, I bet Neb has people's emails and PDF-access.
I'm still trying to figure out why I don't have access. Did you get your copy earlier and they disabled the link?
Some scientific journals now require a footnote where it is explained who did what. "X synthesized the molecule, Y performed the spectroscopic measurements, Y and Z wrote the paper" & etc.
Now I'm tempted to put "X performed the experiments, Y wrote the manuscript and Z is to blame for any errors" in my next paper and see if anyone catches it.
For the best test, make Z somebody who isn't an author.
41: Elizardb at hotmail dot com gets to me. And thanks!
"Dolezal" has legally changed her name.
Somewhere in this thread is a joke about how, ironically, identifying as, or claiming to be, a Nazi was not enough for the NSDAP.
(Moby, let's just leave the "Pretty sure you had to have one ball/a stupid moustache" to the amateurs, shall we?)
Oh, huh. Now that I've read the article, it does seem pretty dumb -- that is, it definitely explicitly says that the arguments for 'transgenderism' compel Dolzeal-style transracialism.
I mean, I still think the journal threw her under a bus, but I would have no trouble believing that they could reasonably think of publishing the paper as a bad decision even in the absence of an angry reaction.
I was going to make a nutshell-scrotum-castration joke, but I decided it was in poor taste.
Also, one thing that really, really frosts me about this kind of paper is that it makes it very, very difficult to talk about how we constitute racial and trans identities, because people quite understandably become suspicious of the motives and capabilities of the writers of papers on such topics. Dumb papers drive out smart.
The paper that nosflow links is much more interesting. I surmise that it would have provoked some controversy if published now, but not the sort under discussion here and it pretty certainly would not have made NYMag.
Moby, if you're supposed to have access, email your library if they have a clear way to report problems. The library should get everything they're paying for and in my experience librarians get to these problems quickly. On the other hand, you might not want to reveal your reading habits.
Oh wow, this elegant argument is the core of her first book, so she's probably having a pretty hard time of it.
Throughout my research, I have considered several ways in which animals, women and racially subordinated groups are oppressed, how this oppression often overlaps and how it serves to maintain erroneous and harmful conceptions of humanity. Uniting these lines of research is an underlying concern to theorize justice for oppressed groups.
I am actually shuddering after reading those two sentences. Not to go all Joan-Didion-princess-complex*, but I didn't expect such visceral repulsion.
* ctrl-F for "princess" if you don't know the line by heart
Is it unusual in philosophy to have your first book not be based on your thesis? (I thought in book writing disciplines your thesis was usually your first book, but I'm not sure what role books play in philosophy.) Her advisor isn't one of the people thanked for this article.
Okay and holy shit, two of Tuvel's (six!?) dissertation committee members apparently signed the letter calling for the retraction of her paper. That is pretty extraordinary. (And yeah, usually your first book is your diss, for efficiency reasons and to console yourself that the diss was not an utter waste of time. Some very productive people might shoehorn an entire second manuscript into the first three years of TT asst proffing, though.)
I'm torn between thinking that maybe the committee members had some reason to be surprised by the turn her thought had taken in preparing this paper and sincere reasons for wanting to explicitly distance themselves, and that they're backstabbing kissing-up/kicking-down weathervanes who didn't read any of the chapters she sent them. But not that torn.
As someone who spends lots of time on an elite college campus that has lots of annoying leftists who frequently engage in witch hunt-type behavior, I was also ready to believe that this could be a witch hunt, but I agree with Frowner and lk that this research is all kinds of messed up in a pretty insidious way.
Making equivalence arguments that completely ignore context are at best oblivious and at worst nefarious, and TBH anyone who can't take into account power relations shouldn't really be doing real world ethics. Also, um, please do not compare women and POC to animals, regardless of what you're trying to do with that. (And please read Hugh Raffles's Insectopedia if you want to think about how to talk about trans-species stuff in a provocative but not totally offensive way.)
Race and gender are social constructs and performances in all sorts of interesting ways, but yeah, this is not how you further conversation.
I do agree with 1 that regardless of how messed up this article is, the journal is cowardly and wrong and is hanging an author out to dry in an unprofessional way. The article hasn't changed in content, and if they're not willing to stand behind it, they never should have published it in the first place.
I dunno -- I'm pretty much out of tune with most of the comments here. I don't know anything about the issues at hand, but -- it's the job of philosophers to think about things. This is that. Perhaps it's bad philosophy, I don't know; it probably is, since most things are mediocre. But, you can't have a standard that "if such-and-such is to be thought about, the only permissible work is excellent'.
I think that the question of how we think about and deal with identity today is an interesting one. I also can't read the original paper, but from the NY Mag article, it sounds as if that's what this author is doing. If the piece in question is really so horrific, it says a lot more about Hypatia than it does her. I find it easier to believe that the editors there are cowardly than incompetent.
I wanted to add, because I didn't say it very well in 37, that there is a difference in tone between saying "In exploring these two lines of reasoning, I argue that because they rely on the same kinds of premises, if you support one you should also support the other" and "I support this line of reasoning; moreover, if you support this other line of reasoning which is similar, you should support my line of reasoning".
If someone says "I notice that certain reasoning about gender transitions should also be applied to race if we accept certain commonly held beliefs; what should we think about that?" it's a different political project from saying "I think people should be able to declare, a la Rachel Dolezal, they they are trans-racial, and I think that you won't be able to deny this premise if you support trans people's right to transition".
My sense of the article is that she's trying to come across like she's doing the former while really (and this is born out by her faculty page) doing the latter.
I dunno, I would still rather see all this foolery argued down by conventional scholarly methods rather than retracted.
Further to 57 and partly in answer to Nick S: I think that the Heyes article (PDF) that nosflow linked is a very illuminating article about how to argue about socially constructed identities. I think that if you found this article to touch upon significant matters, you will find the other one both accessible and full of intriguing stuff.
If anyone wants to read the original paper, it can be accessed here (under a bit of commentary):
http://dailynous.com/2017/05/01/philosophers-article-transracialism-sparks-controversy/
My apologies, you can't actually access the article there -- all you'll get are a lot more comments about it . . .
59 makes sense to me. One thing I know I complain about a lot (and that I'm not going to complain about well because my brain is fluff right now) is when articles about identity are written as if there's no way the audience could possibly include a person with that background. It's the implied "we" that is often a tipoff that things are really wrong with this argument and its focus. That doesn't mean no one should ever write about things that don't concern them or pertain to them, but fucking think about it a little bit.
The paper nosflow linked is indeed pretty interesting and seems to make sense without being trollish. Is it a coincidence that the author is Canadian?
"Dolezal" has legally changed her name.
So has Blackwater.
And I'm very grateful for Frowner's take on all of this. I haven't done the reading to keep up with the primary discussion (see fluff, above) but these are good comments. Thanks!
I'm pretty sure the author of the paper in the OP is Canadian. At least McGill.
That no sentence.
She went to McGill.
Frowner, above, says something I agree with very strongly: "I dunno, I would still rather see all this foolery argued down by conventional scholarly methods rather than retracted."
I think that the response to this is highly discreditable to Hypatia -- like I said above, if this article violates a standard in a way that really does call for an Internet mob, that makes their decision to publish it mystifying. For this reason, I think it would be better to respond to it normally. The Internet Pile-On is something that I don't particularly care for in modern life, and it seems to me to be something that academics should resist indulging in. It's not going to be used for them more than it will be used against them.
At the same time, I think that the objections to this piece seem overall to be rather silly (look at the examination of some of these in the link above), but that's a separate issue.
There's no way I'm reading the article, but this seems like a case in which there are no good guys. The author has written something deeply dumb, her critics have taken the (probably unintended, are we thinking?) bait and over-reacted unproductively, the journal has exposed itself as unprofessional, and now we all have the smarmy voices of a million conservative assholes in our heads goading us about liberal thought policing. Thanks, everybody involved.
Throughout my research, I have considered several ways in which animals, women and racially subordinated groups are oppressed, how this oppression often overlaps and how it serves to maintain erroneous and harmful conceptions of humanity. Uniting these lines of research is an underlying concern to theorize justice for oppressed groups.
There is a theoretical Grand Unified Theory uniting animals, women, and racially subordinated groups, and it's really grand, but the margins of this journal are too hostile to contain it.
58.1: It seems odd to me that you think you are out of tune with the thread.
I reckon that the thread's consensus looks like this: the bit from the abstract that I quote in 16 (and LB and Frowner verify is representative of the paper) is screwed up for the reason that peep describes in 22.2, among other things.
Further, the reactions of the academics and the journal were wrongheaded.
What's to disagree with? Certainly nothing in 58 contradicts any of that.
73 before reading the subsequent discussion.
Seconding 66. 59.3 is very fair and approximately where I'm at, although I didn't read the original article so my views are doubly useless. And thanks to nosflow for the link; slowly digesting that article.
64/67: I've been given the very likely faulty impression that Canadians, or at least those in academia, are somewhat more likely to discuss these sorts of identity issues than Americans. Something something explicitly multicultural nation.
Kids today will never understand "A Boy Named Sue" the way our generation can.
74: No, but she later changed her name to Goodman and managed a Cinnabon in Omaha.
Apparently this paper, or some version of it, was selected for an oral presentation at the APA meeting a few months back, which is not an honor extended to every submitted abstract.
If the paper really is egregiously dumb, then the actions of the APA meeting organizers and Hypatia (which seems to be a reputable journal, at least until now) suggest that large swaths of the field have a massive blind spot around these issues.
Very likely that's true, but I still think that making this particular author the designated scapegoat for the field's blind spot and then having a good old social media pile-on is a pretty shitty way to address the problem.
58
I agree that the bulk of the fault lies with Hypatia: they were the gatekeepers, and they failed at upholding their standards.
I also think in general it's important to think provocatively, and I have a lot of problems with current leftist orthodox positions on race and gender, which IMO often end up reifying the categories they claim to critique. (And also, there's a sort of left wing theory which I find ridiculously ethnocentric which seeks to impose American categories of race on the rest of the world, to make a certain political point.) But at the same time, that doesn't mean that the value necessarily lies in provocativeness per se, nor that writing stuff that is sort of offensively oblivious in really obvious ways shouldn't be called out on it.
There's also a genre (and I don't think this article is this, but it brushes up against it in an uncomfortable way), of "provocative" articles that are really just repacking regressive ideas as somehow interesting or groundbreaking. (So, you have all sorts of thought pieces like, "what if black people *are* racially inferior?" "what if poor people really *are* shiftless?" "what if Jews really *do* control the world?", etc.)
There are only two Cinnabon locations in Omaha. That might be outing people.
I might have read them incorrectly -- I gathered there was a fairly strong objection to the article being written in the first place. I might be giving too much credit to the defenses of it that I've seen, but it doesn't seem that problematic. I accept the interpretation that she is looking at how we think about identity with regards to gender and race, and poking around at some dissimilarities with them. I don't think that her analysis is about transgender at all, in a real sense, but how about what our thought about it says about us.
But this is my opinion on the facts of the article, which I don't know jack about -- what I am certain of is that Hypatia has screwed up royally.
I was also ready to believe that this could be a witch hunt, but I agree with Frowner and lk that this research is all kinds of messed up in a pretty insidious way.
These aren't mutually exclusive. I see a lot of collective failure here (her own fucking committee members!) with the pile-on and the emergency suspension of professional norms. Is it going to change anything within philosophy, scholarship, editorial judgment, etc.? The problems sure aren't limited to her, but this response is. The petition looks to include a lot of people lining up to wash their hands.
Now let me think a minute about whether I am also personally responsible for these collective problems. Maybe? I never got much higher than "peon." I also can't imagine what would possess anyone to write a paper like this.
"what if Jews really *do* control the world?
Just in case, I complain more to Jewish people than other people I know.
I also can't imagine what would possess anyone to write a paper like this.
People have done much shittier things in the quest for tenure.
And not to get all Oxbow Incident on this thread, but has anyone here actually read the paper?
But, if it's not clear, I agree with everyone in that that "calling out" should be done through proper scholarly channels in normal (even if heated) ways. Internet flame wars, death threats, and shunning should not be part of scholarly argument. So basically, I agree with 70.
if this article violates a standard in a way that really does call for an Internet mob,
I wish I could have this statement's seeming confidence that Internet mobs are ever something that can be tactically deployed or held back.
The tricky part is that one tends to end up at "arguments that I think are absolutely horrifying should be no-platformed, but arguments that you think are absolutely horrifying should be argued out in a mature manner". Which raises the specter of "what if this argument really is extremely horrifying and I just don't have the experience/context and therefore I should not be supporting arguing it out".
And then bouncing back to "but civil society! all ideas must have a platform wherever their proponents so desire!" gets you to Milo Yiannopoulous outing trans students on campus. (If you want to read something to give you the cold chills, I recommend the letter from the student who dropped out after being targeted - she actually attended his talk, but because she was further along with hormones, she looked different enough that no one recognized her. So she not only sat there listening to all his garbage about her but she sat there thinking that if she were recognized, she might be beaten to a pulp. There is a woman with intestinal fortitude.)
So where do you draw the line, and how?
Obviously, no interpretation of civil society requires Hypatia to publish this thing, but I do think that the calls for retraction raise the question of whether people in this part of the left think that Hypatia should be able to publish it.
It seems like something that can only be decided on a case-by-case, venue by venue basis, and probably in part by orgs and journals formally deciding if there are particular approaches they simply don't publish.
IME, philosophers are generally all assholes. So yeah, this woman is probably an asshole, and as a young powerless woman, she's also being hung out to dry by more powerful people who have failed her in various ways (so, maybe even bigger assholes).
I agree that the biggest issue is not necessarily that this woman wrote a really stupid paper, but that it was considered totally acceptable by people who should know better. Peer review failed, probably because philosophy is the most sexist, racist discipline out there, and then this junior scholar is getting pilloried for mistakes that should have been caught along the way.
(I read the paper. LB read the paper. If anyone desperately wants to read the paper, I can send it to you if you have a throwaway email to post here. I will say that I went from "this sounds like activist overreaction" to "not sure I am into the retraction thing but this is a bad paper" when I read it.)
I'm reminded of a CT post from about 5-10 years ago noting that philosophy had the lowest percentage of female faculty and grad students, below even math and the hard sciences. The comments were filled with philosophers claiming that was because little lady brains couldn't think rigorously enough to handle the intellectual demands of philosophy. Sigh.
And not to get all Oxbow Incident on this thread, but has anyone here actually read the paper?
What does a bunch of drunk people in the 1950s mistakening great horned owls for alien invaders have to do with anything?
"And not to get all Oxbow Incident on this thread, but has anyone here actually read the paper?"
It is $6 to rent it for 48 hours. so, no.
Can any give me the nickel summary of why "transgenderism" is deprecated?
92: There's a thread about liberals, the left, and free speech going on over at Crooked Timber right now that's absolutely delightful in its thoroughgoing Crooked Timberyness.
IME, philosophers are generally all assholes.
Popcorn, anyone? But this is a special case because this genre of philosophical work falls in the uncanny valley between the latter-day Anglo-American philosophical world of ornate thought experiments and the latter-day critical theory hazy-gazy world of, uh, less controlled thought experiments. It's bad in two ways that overlap and amplify each other.
And yes, Nick, I have a copy of the paper. "In this article, I argue that considerations that support transgenderism extend to transracialism. Given this parity, since we should accept transgender individuals' decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals' decisions to change races. I entertain and reject four objections that suggest a society should not accept an individual's decision to change races. I then turn to Sally Haslanger [yikes, not the authority I would pick -ed] to argue for an account of race that allows for racial membership on the basis of social treatment, and, I will add, self-identification. I conclude that if some individuals genuinely feel like or identify as a member of a race other than the one assigned to them at birth--so strongly to the point of seeking a transition to the other race--we should accept their decision to change races."
95: Summarizing the reading I've done in the couple of hours since I found out it was deprecated, it seems to come down to (a) it sounds kind of like a medical disorder with the 'ism', and (b) mostly the people who use it are explicitly anti-trans in some regard. But the discussions I've found about what's wrong with it all seem to have at least some people who are genuinely surprised that it's offensive, so while I wouldn't use it I wouldn't feel bad about not having already known not to.
95: In my neck of the woods, "transgenderism" is deprecated because it suggests that being trans is an ideological decision* that people take after reflecting on the options. My perception is that it's also used with about the same kind intent that people use when refering to "Islamism" - sticking an "ism" on the end to make it sound fanatical and sketchy.
I think there's also a way in which it medicalizes wrong. The ways in which transness is considered "medical" are complicated and have a difficult history. Using a formation that is like "hirsuitism"or "hypothyroidism" gives the suggestion that transness is a...syndrome or a disease or a malfunction, and trans people, especially trans women, are already figured in reactionary culture as sick or broken.
Also, it's dated and a term that is not currently used by trans people in general - rather as if you walked up to your lesbian friend and proclaimed, "Gee, you Sapphists really have quite a social justice movement!"
It's not something where I would be upset with an otherwise friendly person who used it, personally, but I would probably mention that it's a term which is a bit distracting and dated.
*In a complicated way, it sort of is, but not in the "I woke up this morning and decided that I wanted to be a special snowflake so I would make everyone use ze/zir pronouns" way that most people mean. Again, because we have a lot of dumb and hostile conversations about whether or not being trans is a "choice", we do not have much cultural space for more complicated conversations. Dumb drives out smart.
Yeah, I have to think that the conversations about how gender works are going to be a lot more interesting and less tense in a decade or so, once there's been some time for transness to have settled in as something that most of the country accepts as an ordinary thing. Not that I know exactly when to date that from (probably something to do with Caitlyn Jenner), but a decade or so from then. Until then, the thing for anyone who's not intimately involved with trans issues themselves to do is probably to focus on not being an asshole about it.
95. It implies "transgender" is part of an ideology "transgenderism".
I'm so tempted to post the list of references here. It doesn't seem like a serious engagement to me. It's long and written (at the sentence/paragraph level) with care, so it doesn't literally read like an undergraduate paper. But, I mean, her authority on the biology of gender identity is Sabrina Erdély, who wrote the discredited and retracted UVa rape article in Rolling Stone... writing in Rolling Stone.
Erdely, Sabrina Rubin. 2014. The science of transgender: Understanding the causes of being transgender. Rolling Stone, July 30. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-science-of-transgender-20140730 (accessed October 17, 2016).
And yes, that in particular is cherry-picking, but the whole thing has the feel of a casual drive-by, with the most earnest of intentions (is that a gendered/racialized adjective in this context?).
Further to 57 and partly in answer to Nick S: I think that the Heyes article (PDF) that nosflow linked is a very illuminating article about how to argue about socially constructed identities.
Thanks. I've just read the first couple of pages, but it looks interesting (it also reminds me that I liked American Plastic -- though it isn't a great book, it's the only one that I've read about the role of plastic surgery in American society, and it's an interesting topic).
92: There's a thread about liberals, the left, and free speech going on over at Crooked Timber right now that's absolutely delightful in its thoroughgoing Crooked Timberyness.
I was thinking recently about why it is that unfogged and crooked timber are two blogs at which I frequently read the comments, even though CT is sort of awful. I realized that, for me, CT comments are a useful inoculation against and warning about the dangers of becoming too convinced of one's own intelligence or the obviousness of one's own beliefs.
This is just a general recollection, which I think shows how fast this area is changing. In the mid-1990s, I was a graduate student (sciences) at a university that had one of the cutting-edge English departments, a hotbed of theory, etc. My room-mate and best friend was a grad student there; one day she had a class and a discussion on (sorry) transgenderism, which was probably called trans-sexualism or something like that. Anyway, she asked me what I thought; I had never thought about it before, and said that I guessed it was basically a cosmetic issue -- someone is getting cosmetic surgery, but their genetic identity isn't changed. She brought this up in class.
Anyway, the point is, this was a cutting-edge department, committed to supporting all manner of theory and transgression -- and only 20 years ago, she wasn't shouted down for saying this, and some other students thought that it was insightful (humanities people often give too much credit to science). Today, she would be, and rightfully so -- it's an irrelevant point. The appropriate view here is changing VERY fast; which is a long-winded way of saying that I'm actually in the position of some jerk Republican who thinks about their past and reflects that it's not that they were a RACIST, per se, they just did what everyone else was and it would be unfair to hold it against them.
Basically, it's a sign of progress . . .
you Sapphists really have quite a social justice movemen
Oh man, lesbians dodged a bullet there. To think they might have got stuck with a dated reference!
(In honor of the glorious past of Unfogged, I will note that I just figured out that we had a Nick, as well as NickS, posting on this thread. At this point in time, I'm not going to harangue anyone to change their pseud, but that's why I hate people using ordinary names. Too confusing.)
What's so difficult? One is singular and one is plural.
One is a single nick. The other is many nicks, who have been courteous enough to highlight their plurality by capitalizing the S.
Look, Canada defends its own . . . (note, this is a real newspaper, but one that kind of fulfills the National Review niche up here).
I apologize for any confusion about using 'Nick', and also for commenting so much on this thread -- I think it's an interesting subject, and didn't originally intend to join in quite this much.
One is a single nick. The other is many nicks, who have been courteous enough to highlight their plurality by capitalizing the S.
Yup, just a set of small cuts with non-standard capitalization.
109: No, no, comment lots! I just have a longstanding, shall we say, issue with confusable pseudonyms. (Ask me about how I felt about the short period of time when we had a guy posting as DaveL who was not the guy we'd known for years as DaveL. They're distinct now, but I was cross.)
I read the first couple pages of the article, and then couldn't keep going because it just didn't seem very interesting, and I kind of hate philosophy anyway. I kinda skimmed the rest, but not really.
112: For shame. Who will uphold the age old tradition of you yelling at people?
re: 99/100
For me there's an eternal tension between the philosophy-asshole thing -- I wrote my doctoral thesis on medical norms, social construction, etc. -- and the desire to be respectful of people's lives and their way of understanding those lives.
Because, some discourse that comes from _some_ trans writers about gender seems, to me, to make certain philosophical claims that I struggle with. Along the lines of the 'reification' mentioned by Buttercup in 80.
But it doesn't seem like there's any reasonable way to have that discussion.
Substantially because of the things Frowner and others have already mentioned in this thread. That is, the danger of crude, ignorant hob-nailed boots coming crashing into conversations that are of deep personal importance to the people involved.* Combined with the -- absolutely real -- tendency to go for the quick, glib, and controversial in a certain kind of philosophical writing.**
* important enough that people endure discrimination, violence and assault, ostracism, rape, and all kinds ignorance because of how deeply it matters to them.
** I recognise this in myself. I basically believed that the position I had in my thesis was right*** but it was certainly attractive at the time that there were a few counter-intuitive conclusions that came out at the end.
*** about norms in general, I wasn't primarily focusing on trans issues.
On the "there's probably no reasonable way to have that discussion" front, someone want to explain to me: "promoting the harmful transmisogynistic ideology that trans women have (at some point had) male privilege."
Again I will jump in with the dumb outsidery version of what's going on, wait for Frowner or someone for a more indepth version, and more correct version than the one I'm going to give if there's a square disagreement. But the issue is that some people want to draw a sharp distinction between cis women and trans women because cis women were treated as girls and women while growing up, while trans women were for some period of their lives treated as boys or men. If you think of this historical difference between the experiences of cis and trans women as very important, you think of trans women as fundamentally different from cis women in a way that comes across as very hostile to trans women.
The quoted phrasing looks to me to be referencing that issue.
From what I just read, Germaine Greer seems to be a concrete example of 117:
http://induecourse.ca/how-can-we-accept-the-transgendered-but-not-the-transracial/
"I've been thinking about this issue lately, because I'm teaching Germaine Greer in the fall (The Female Eunuch), and several colleagues that I've mentioned this to have responded by saying (roughly) "OMG she's transphobic!" It's largely because of the argument that Greer has made, that it is "unfair" for men like Bruce Jenner to grow up, enjoying all the benefits of the patriarchy, and then decide later in life to become women (or that they have been women "all along"). Being Germaine Greer, of course, she puts it in a somewhat pithier way: "If you're a 50-year-old truck driver who's had four children with a wife and you've decided the whole time you've been a woman, I think you're probably wrong" (here, and for an even more blunt expression of her view, here).
Anyone who understands what she meant by the phrase "female eunuch" would, of course, be unsurprised that this is her view of that matter. She is simply being consistent. Her more straightforward argument, however, is that the Caitlyn Jenners of the world are acting out a form of male privilege, by choosing to become women, and then demanding that everyone honour that choice without question. (As far as I know, Greer only has a problem with men deciding to become women, I haven't come across her complaining about women becoming men, "third gender," etc.) In any case, what I found striking is that Greer's view on the transgendered is basically identical to Oluo's take on Diallo. Oluo thinks that a women like Diallo "deciding" to become black is just a manifestation of white privilege (and not at all the same thing as black women who "pass," or identify as, white). Here I just don't see any difference between Oluo's view on race and Greer's on gender."
I confess, in arguments like this, I see justice on both sides, and I find it hard to decisively convince myself that one is correct.
I lived in Thailand for many years, were people all through society are broadly accepting of and permissive towards transgender people and gay men, and yet they largely avoid having these fraught conversations about rights or identity. I'm not sure why, it might have to do with the fact that no one in Thailand really has any clear rights at all, and identity is controlled by the government.
116: There's a lot going on there, and I don't want to get into all of it, but part of the context is that TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) argue that one of the reasons feminists (especially lesbians) should reject trans women is that they continue to act in stereotypically masculine ways related to prior male privilege (e.g., interrupting other women in conversation). Also, that they're "really" men.
I read the Oluo article, and while this may be an example of these arguement are right here but wrong there, I couldn't avoid thinking: these are basically all TERF arguments against trans-women.
From what I just read, Germaine Greer seems to be a concrete example of 117:
I'm not that familiar with Greer, but this makes the "Greer is transphobic" case fairly convincingly.
Germaine Greer is perhaps the best-known advocate of this position, or a version of it. She famously described male-to-female transsexuals as 'pantomime dames', had to resign as a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge more or less as a consequence (after opposing the appointment of transgender Rachel Padman to a fellowship), and is now the object of a no-platform campaign. 'What they are saying,' Greer responded when the issue arose again in November 2015, 'is that because I don't think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere.' She is being disingenuous. This is Greer in 1989 (the quotation courtesy of Paris Lees, one of the most vocal trans activists in the UK today):On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. 'Thank you so much for all you've done for us girls!' I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy, beringed paw that clutched it ... Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women's liberation emblem. I should have said: 'You're a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.' The transvestite held me in a rapist's grip.
116: I'm not an expert either, but two thoughts. 1) was covered by the last few comments about TERFs, I see on preview. 2) The male privilege a trans woman is granted by society is a ruse, not based on who she is, but based on coercing her to conform to gender type: costly enough not to be much of a privilege at all. Mentioning someone's "past male privilege" in a casual or dismissive way, as part of some from-the-outside-uncomplicated gender identity that then is complicated by transitioning, reenacts that coercion and isn't compassionate or... even especially meaningful, I'd say.
"My perception is that it's also used with about the same kind intent that people use when refering to "Islamism" - sticking an "ism" on the end to make it sound fanatical and sketchy."
This is a side issue, but that really isn't what "Islamism" means. It doesn't just mean "Islam with a scary ending". It means political Islam - political groups whose activities are aimed at achieving political power for "Islamic" objectives. It's perfectly possible to be a Muslim politician and not an Islamist politician. To confuse matters, a lot of Islamists dislike the term because they think of themselves as just Muslims, doing what all Muslims ought to be doing.
In addition to what everyone else has said, one of the ways patriarchy harms men (or transwomen who are not out) is by brutally enforcing norms of masculinity as if not more harshly than norms of femininity. Growing up as a feminine boy (trans or not) can mean being vulnerable to enormous psychological and physical harms, including actual death. Rad fems have such a simplified, black and white view of "the patriarchy" which does enormous disservice to the way patriarchy actually affects people as actual people with multifaceted identities.
124: It's a word with a distinct meaning, but that meaning is intended as pejorative. Political Christianity is so common in the US that there is barely any political alternative to it -- but you only hear about Christianism when people want to insult that tendency.
Similarly, Islamism came into vogue not because political Islam suddenly existed in the world, but because people wanted a pejorative to describe it.
Again, I don't have an opinion on this issue, but I'm interested in commenting on it. One of the logical implications of Buttercup's view just above (that the patriarchy harms transwomen), is that it has the effect of making women responsible for healing this (by accepting transwomen as women).
I can see why some feminists object to this, and also why many others don't.
117: But isn't that exactly the (definitional) difference between trans women and cis women? Is the point just that "yes that's the difference, but making too big a deal of that difference is harmful" or is the claim that it's not the difference?
but you only hear about Christianism when people want to insult that tendency.
The word I hear more is Dominionism rather than Christianism.
126: no, I don't think that is accurate at all. Either part.
128: I described a difference between cis and trans women in terms of their life experiences, that is pretty much definitional. Referring to the prior experiences of trans women as a matter of male privilege is where it gets fraught and hostile, and where it is much less a matter of inarguable fact.
Also, analogy ban. The place of Christianity in US politics is not comparable at all to that of Islam in, say, Turkish politics.
Somewhat pwnd!
Here is my personal opinion as a trans person but not a trans woman (transmasculine people often get positioned as "authorities" on all trans experience for a variety of reasons; I am not an authority on the lives of trans women.). This is based on some reading and some observations:
1. Trans women and transfeminine people don't grow up with "male privilege" because feminine/gender non-conforming AMAB ("assigned male at birth") people tend to face extraordinary social violence from peers, teachers, strangers, etc. Lots of people are sort of weird and/or gender failures, but the degree of violence and alienation visited upon transfeminine people is far, far more than what is visited upon even fairly weird cisnormative people. Trans girls experience sexual violence, for instance, far more often than cis boys, and have less recourse than many cis girls do. Trans girls are often seen to deserve whatever social violence happens to them. This is particularly true for trans girls of color.
Trans girls usually don't have access to narratives about growing up as women and living happy lives. This is changing very slightly, but the only narratives that trans girls often have about trans girls/trans women are generally sexualized and doomed and scary. Trans boys/transmasculine people don't have, like, a lot of super positive narratives about transness, but there is a lot of validation of being a tomboy, women who have lived as men, etc, and this mitigates things somewhat.
2. Also, if you're a trans girl, or at any rate have identified that you are not a boy, your experience of being treated as a boy is not validating. The "best little boy in the world" emotional stuff that gay men talk about seems a little bit related, in that even if everyone assumes that you are a cis straight boy, not being one inside is very difficult and destructive.
3. Male privilege itself is, IMO, a term that is always so modulated by race, class, successful performance of "masculinity", disability/non-disability, etc that it is tricky to talk about except either as a population-level thing ("in general, men are taken more seriously as writers") or as a very concrete way, like "men's pants always have sufficient pockets" or "I notice that I am taken more seriously as a writer than this woman with similar background and expertise".
3.5. I am not sure, in any case, how much "male privilege" could survive the horrible ways that trans women are often treated when they come out and as they transition. Hearing social narratives about how you are basically not worthwhile and maybe freakish/gross/disposable eats away at a person.
3.75. How accountable are people to be for very early socialization that they don't control? Feminists talk about white privilege a lot, including its roots in childhood, but the general perception is that white people can work on themselves and, like, mostly not be assholes just through trying to be self aware. People who are down on trans women for "male privilege" always basically take the line that trans women can never get rid of male privilege, that it is such a horrible contagion that they will just always be tainted by it. Feminists do not generally hold themselves to this standard in matters of race, citizenship or class.
4. I have never encountered a plausible example of a trans woman being terrible because of her experience of "male privilege" so I am very skeptical about this whole line of reasoning. First, I have observed that trans-excluding radical feminists (TERFS, the people who usually tend to beat this drum) tend to ignore when cis women are strident, take up a lot of space or are kind of assholes, but if a trans woman is kind of an asshole, it's because of her "male privilege". Second, I have observed TERFs who basically perceive anything but absolute silence and deference from trans women as showing "male privilege" - like, I have observed one to say this about someone who was very silent, very shy, very polite and mild, to the point of being the least chatty, least obtrusive person in the group.
(To digress - trans women get treated really badly in a lot of settings! I have seen some really shockingly bad behavior!)
There are some really complicated conversations to be had about how trans people experience gender in childhood. Those conversations are not had with cis people or in cis fora generally because they immediately get derailed into "aha, you DO have male privilege" or "you're not really trans", etc. I would love to have a trusting space where I could talk through some of this stuff. I do not.
I guess what I would say is that I don't think "male privilege" is a very good description of how trans girls experience being read as and treated as boys, and the only people I have met who are into this line of reasoning use it as a weapon against trans women.
102 - Could be worse, for instance if it were getting its framework on racial identity from the Rolling Stones. (See "Brown Sugar", passim.)
One of the logical implications of Buttercup's view just above (that the patriarchy harms transwomen), is that it has the effect of making women responsible for healing this (by accepting transwomen as women).
I saw a good statement of this (which I don't entirely agree with) recently.
[Q:] You say that men are women's responsibility but not their problem. What do you mean?
...
[A:] Men are women's responsibility because women are roughly 100 years ahead of men in terms of questioning gender and going along with the project of androgyny and getting in touch with the masculine side of themselves, which men have not done. They've not explored androgyny outside of the queer communities. They haven't developed feminine values. They've not done the writing, the research, or the work.
So men are our responsibility because we're so far ahead of them on this path. We can't drag them into becoming better humans -- that's their job. But we also can't meddle with or get in the way of it, and I think they're are responsibility in that sense.
In almost all situations the argument that "I don't feel white/male privilege because I'm poor/rural/ugly/nerdy" is one that I consider a very bad argument that misses the entire point. What makes this different?
127
Though, it also makes people who are victims of the system also answerable for it. To tell someone who gets beaten up everyday for being effeminate that they benefit from a male privilege they can't identify with (because they do not feel male) feels profoundly insulting.*
*I mean, clearly it's complicated, but I think like ttaM says, there's not really a great way to talk in the abstract about a lot of these issues without doing real harm to vulnerable people.
"Feminist" s/b "white femininsts" !!!! (Too much thinking about TERFs, who are most often white.)
136 was to 131 and not 133, which I hadn't read.
making women responsible for healing this (by accepting transwomen as women).
It's not women specifically who are responsible for accepting the transgendered. Why isn't everybody responsible for not being an asshole? Germaine Greer can fuck right off.
Why isn't everybody responsible for not being an asshole?
I put my finger on my nose and called "Not it" first.
136: "I didn't experience male privilege because I was actually a girl" doesn't seem different from those more intersectional rather than directly contradictory things? Seems really different to me.
Those conversations are not had with cis people or in cis fora generally because they immediately get derailed into "aha, you DO have male privilege" or "you're not really trans", etc.
Would this include, by happenstance, those long conversations where multitudinous cis people jump in to say "me too, me too! Me too exactly! But I'm not trans, so... what's the thing that makes you different again?" (But I am genuinely sorry you don't have a welcoming space for that discussion. Spiraling disappointment in humanity keeps spiraling.)
Thinking about 133, perhaps some of my confusion comes from Caitlyn Jenner being such a prominent example, but also a very unrepresentative one and particularly unrepresentative on exactly the question of male privilege. (And it's not her fault that as a celebrity she was suddenly on TV a lot before having much time to work through a lifetime of being an asshole.) Also my trans-women acquaintances are also pretty unrepresentative due to trans-women nerds (and often neuroatypical) often being a bit different, in a way that results in the first point not really applying the same way.
140: Accepting trans women as women is not "being responsible for healing someone". It's not a chore. It's not a big deal. It doesn't involve giving up a kidney or changing bedpans. You just, I dunno, treat people as women, use she/her pronouns, call people by their names, don't obsess about the people who are using the same bathroom as you, etc etc.
I think that what often happens is that a person doesn't actually meet a lot of out trans people and doesn't talk or think about trans issues much, so they encounter all the "change the pronouns I use for someone and call them a different name????!!!" stuff and find it difficult at first, and then have a big fit about how it's just so hard and impossible and this is because trans women aren't real, etc.
It can take a while to get used to gendering someone correctly if you've always known them as a different gender. It can take a while to get used to a new name. That's okay. It's not a sign that something terrible is happening or their gender isn't real. One time maybe two years after someone I knew had transitioned and I had actually consciously forgotten their deadname, I was reminiscing about something from when we'd first met and accidentally used the wrong name. Totally unconscious! I felt bad and apologized, they were nice. But the point is, the lived experience of gender transition is complicated, and people of bad will use this complication to argue that therefore it is unreal, bad, wrong, etc.
143: See, I find that an interesting question - what is it about my gender discomfort that leads me to feel like I want to change my body, name, and way I am perceived but leads Theoretical Cis Person to just feel vague discomfort or to do something else, gender-performance wise? If we both start from the position of "gender is complicated and confining but also some people are trans", we can get somewhere.
The thing about these conversations IMO is that they require a lot of mutual trust and community, and everyone has to want to have those conversations. If what I need is to talk through my particular concerns about transmasculinity, it can feel super awful to have someone jump and be like "I feel the same way but I'm not trans", but if we're having a conversation whose general approach is "gender is weird, let's compare experiences and try to figure some stuff out", it can work fine.
Once again "don't be an asshole, or at least try to avoid being one" is a guiding principle.
Wow, this paper is so bad. Lil' Kim is not white-passing or even white-identified because she lightened her skin, what on earth? And we can admit that Dolezal lied about being a target of racist hate crimes at the beginning where it's convenient to do so but then they pop up again as a defense against the argument from black social/political commentators (including an online friend of mine) that she hasn't experienced the racism that's the core feature of being black in the US? Even beyond the transgender stuff, its patronizing, stupid, and not even internally consistent.
145's last paragraphs are so important. It's really hard to fing that space, and I'm someone with less pressing needs to process this stuff but SOME and a lot of interest in how other people do.
I'm also not even going to get into what the stupid paper says about transracial adoption and racial identification unless anyone specifically wants to talk about it, but she did a spectacular job avoiding both informed theorists and people with lived experience there.
(As I write this, I'm reminded that the fourth grader next door mis-raced me a few weeks ago and it felt super awkward in a way that it never has the times I've been called "sir." White people who see her without her family would assume she's white with her curly blonde hair and golden skin tone. And she acknowledged that and added "but people like you and me are still really black and just not everyone can tell." I had to say nope, actually it's only people like her and I'm actually white. She was a little confused, clearly, though she knows we're an adoptive family. A lot of Nia's and Mara's black classmates only put that together for sure after they meet one or both of the other girls with me. One dark-skinned child could be an aberration but three black girls and a white mom tips their read to what's really going on. This stuff is complicated in reality and none of that seep through to the dumb paper.)
it felt super awkward in a way that it never has the times I've been called "sir."
The only appropriate response to this is "don't call me sir, maggot, I work for a living".
79:
"If the paper really is egregiously dumb, then the actions of the APA meeting organizers and Hypatia (which seems to be a reputable journal, at least until now) suggest that large swaths of the field have a massive blind spot around these issues."
No shit. At the San Francisco APA a year ago, I walked out of a talk after 10 mins where the speaker was arguing that gender was biological sex. Before I walked out, the arguments he'd presented were:
1) the OED presents them as synonymous
2) biology papers tend to use them interchangeably
3) Simon de Beauvoir says a woman is not born but made, but this is trivially true because women are adults
4) John Money has [some definition] of gender which is incoherent*
Apparently later in the talk he also referenced autogynephilia and such. Other people I know walked out at this point.
To add insult to injury, my partner and I had submitted a paper on the definition of gender, which was up to date on trans issues and CITED RECENT LITERATURE, but which was rejected for the same APA.
This Tuvel paper is small potatoes by comparison, though publishing does present a much higher barrier than simply being accepted at a conference.
*Money was one of the first medical practitioners to investigate transgender people and science has come a long way since then.
146: My rule of thumb from 4 and 19 pays off again!
1) the OED presents them as synonymous
2) biology papers tend to use them interchangeably
Holy shit. I would expect that philosophers would understand that it is often helpful to be able to make distinctions more precisely and more carefully than the standard, folk, use of language.
151
Never underestimate the power of shoddy scholarship in the name of assuaging the powers that be. Cough *evolutionary psychology* cough.
Otherwise known as speaking power to truth.
149: Ugh, I'm sorry to hear that. Even for a discipline with a serious commitment to shooting itself in the foot, that's particularly foolish.
Yeah, I'll keep beating the "collective failure" drum in a vicious, cherry-picking manner (mmmmmm, cherries, are they in season yet?): here is a deep thought from another paper in this issue of Hypatia, by one of the advisors of Dr. Tuvel who signed the petition condemning her article:
In many ways Mr. Graham is right. White people in a culture of anti-black racism cannot understand the burden of racism. And if white people can't understand Black people, what hope is there to understand a chimpanzee in entertainment, a dairy cow, or a lab rat? Perhaps entangled empathy [her theory] is simply too optimistic to think any sort of meaningful moral perception is possible.
Always nice to watch ethicists push their students in front of the trolley.
That is, the drum is hanging above my head and I'm swatting at it angrily with a cherry picker while staying clear of the trolley tracks. Do try to keep up.
I saw sour cherries at the FM last weekend.
Updated trolley problem! There is a trolley hurtling down a track, and you cannot stop it. On one side, you have 12 philosophy PhD candidates with stupid and offensive dissertations. On the other side you have their thesis advisor who has just been charged with sexual harassment. So, who do you invite to present at the APA?
Can I just put a quiet hand in the air for "Not all philosophers are wankers"?
||
Fyre latest: they may not have been stealing money, but they were certainly recklessly misusing it - models, jets, yachts.
|>
I once went to the wedding of a philosopher. He was very nice.
Not as nice as his cheese-seller wife, but very nice fit a philosopher.
159: Both hands, please. No no, if the field had no redeeming values I wouldn't be as randomly, unexpectedly angry about this particular shitshow.
(BTW, you can still pass along recommendations for things to play on a 1933 Selmer tenor guitar. I haven't tried it yet...)
I think I must have had another positive interaction with a philosopher. I'm like halfway through my forties and been around universities nearly constantly since I reached adulthood.
I've routinely experienced much worse in philosophy of physics, so I'm actually not as angry about this shitshow as I have been about all the stuff I've observed.
Great, now I'm imagining some "Schroedinger's Cat and Rachel Dolezal" paper to maximize both our worst expectations. But I'm sorry.
136: a woman I know, who you may also know because our world is small, describes it as "yes, I had male privilege but at the very high cost of being painfully closeted."
re: 164
You listened to much Tiny Grimes? He was, I guess, the big tenor guitar guy from that period. Played with Art Tatum and Slam Stewart, with Coleman Hawkins, on some of the early bebop stuff, and did a load of jump blues and proto rock'n'roll stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p51MT5OMw-I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR1sM8xqH50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-7R8E0Kih0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzVRc_ObYwk
I know it was I who forwarded the subtle and nuanced hypothesis, "all philosophers are assholes," but now I must confess that my college boyfriend is a philosopher, and he is actually a very nice person.
168: Uneffortful male privilege has its advantages.
Thanks everybody (but especially Frowner, and Lurid for the 'uncanny valley', haha perfect) -- this is so much better and more illuminating than my FB feed right now.
Though I will note that the claim all philosophers are assholes is a violation and silencing of my lived experience. Well, except for that first job where everybody was trying to kill each other.
For the record, my aunt is a philosopher, and she is objectively lovely.
Edna! I wondered if you'd show up at various points, particularly the special-pleading-for-Canadian-cultural-assumptions turn in the thread. I also wonder if you have enough specialized knowledge to be able to identify an antidote for this paper, of which I ingested a toxic amount this afternoon. (I haven't tried ttaM's links, which might work.)
Hi Lurid, no useful recs here -- unfortunately I know very little about current feminist philosophy or indeed philosophy of race, apart from an under-examined impression that Charles Mills is very smart and right about most things. (And fwiw my sense is that a key bit of the anti-Tuvel case is that she really just sidesteps some arguments of his which are in fact conclusive. But it seems to me unfair to treat 'Charles Mills has a sophisticated and compelling argument that P' as equivalent to 'Only a moral monster would argue that not-P'.)
Now, Canadian privilege I DO know something about, and yes a lot clicked into place when I saw that article. Viz.:
- the culture wars have been so much less toxic and all-consuming in Canada, I can totally see Tuvel having no idea what she was getting into. (Not an exculpating consideration -- more that I can imagine her thinking Oh but edgy is good!)
- it's a small country in a lot of ways, dollars to doughnuts the author of the article went to the prom with her or at least did debating with her brother.
My comparative blitheness about the discipline is probably a combination of Canadianness, ten other kinds of personal luck, snd being in a politically disengaged historical subfield.
Has this bibliography already been linked? Here's a bibliography.
Thanks. I've confirmed that I finally traded away my copy of Mills' Racial Contract after years of intending to read it, but that can be remedied.
Thanks to neb too for the bibliography.
...and especially for the Tiny Grimes links, particularly the third one. Good-night, internet.
161 reminds me of the joke about the sailor who's asked what he did with his money and replied "most of it I spent on liquor, women and gambling. The rest I just wasted."
The paper nosflow linked above is now a 404.
181: Wasn't it George Best who said that?
I thought it was from a Fyre Festival organizer.
183 - and also George Raft, Stan Bowles, and a baseball player with the splendid name of Tug McGraw.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/19/gambling-women/
Tug's son is a country music singer.
"I knowingly gave thousands of dollars to this convicted white-collar felon and he ripped me off and spent it all on flying private jets full of models to the Bahamas!" is not a complaint that attracts much sympathy. I mean, really, what else did you think was going to happen? This is the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party all over again.
I'm frankly disappointed in their spendthrift ways. Was there no cocaine budget?
Is this about David Brooks's wedding registry again?
FWIW, in addition to my knee-jerk anti-Leiter bias, I finally dug up the reason Singal's name made alarm bells ring dimly on this article:
Jesse Singal seems like a very nice person. I like Jesse. He's fun to chat with. I hope to have fun discussions with him about anything except this. I don't believe, as I saw one blog post say, he wants trans people to simply not exist. I do believe that he doesn't truly understand trans people, and maybe took on a topic just a bit too far outside his areas of expertise.
Just want to say I really liked and learned from the Frowner and lurid k contributions on this thread.
There is a guest post on CT about the scandal-- which is not entirely tone-deaf, but somewhat fascinating as a very much inside-Philosophy perspective: http://crookedtimber.org/2017/05/06/thoughts-on-the-hypatia-affair/