Editor’s note: The letter below was penned in response to another letter titled “Philosophers Should Not Be Sanctioned Over Their Positions on Sex and Gender” that appeared in Inside Higher Education on July 22, 2019. On July 30, IHE published a response titled “Taking Trans Lives Seriously” and declined to publish the following letter. The signatories are concerned that the climate in a field of study is being mischaracterized and important voices have been left out of the discussion. As with all posts by contributing authors published on the APA Blog, the views and opinions do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the APA, the APA Blog, or our editors.
A recent letter in Inside Higher Education argues that philosophers who debate the nature of sex and gender cannot advocate certain positions, for example, skepticism about the concept of gender identity, or they risk being censured. But debates about sex and gender needn’t be conducted in an exclusionary way. Indeed, they usually are not. We are responding here specifically to clarify a potential misperception about the academic climate when it comes to discussions of sex and gender and to highlight the value of academic responsibility as an important aspect of academic freedom.
The nature of sex and gender and the relationship between them are not forbidden topics of philosophical discussion. Many feminists holding significantly different philosophical views have been respectfully debating them for decades. One easy way to see a quick overview of these different positions is by reading the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on “Feminist Metaphysics” or the entry on “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender.”
As feminist philosophers who have, variously, argued for, researched, engaged with, and taught these views, we are well-positioned to claim that there is no established orthodoxy about gender in academic philosophy. There continues to be much lively disagreement on matters of gender without accusations of transphobia. We do, however, think it is important, when exercising our academic freedom, that we consider how our views may impact others. Academic responsibility requires us to consider differences of power and vulnerability in speaking of and to others and the effects of our words in reinforcing structures of oppression. There are many diverse, contentious views about gender and gender identity that can be–and are–engaged with in ways that do not call into question the integrity and sincerity of trans people nor the validity of their own understanding of who they are. We should conduct our research freely and responsibly, without treating other people’s lives as though they are abstract thought experiments.
Signed,
Linda Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy, CUNY
Ásta, Professor of Philosophy, San Francisco State University
Saray Ayala-López, Assistant Professor, Sacramento State University
Nancy Bauer, Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University
Talia Mae Bettcher, Professor of Philosophy, CalState Los Angeles
Samantha Brennan, Professor of Philosophy, University of Guelph
R.A. Briggs, Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
Susan Brison, Eunice and Julian Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values, Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College
Shannon Dea, Professor of Philosophy, University of Waterloo
Esa Díaz-León, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Barcelona
Ann Garry, Professor Emerita of Philosophy, CalState Los Angeles
Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, Wesleyan University
Kim Q. Hall, Professor of Philosophy, Appalachian State University
Sally Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies, MIT
Jules Holroyd, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in Philosophy, University of Sheffield
Katharine Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Nottingham
Karen Jones, Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne
Serene J. Khader, Associate Professor of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center and Jay Newman, Chair in Philosophy of Culture, Brooklyn College
Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University
Kate Manne, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University
Jennifer McKitrick, Professor of Philosophy, Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Mari Mikkola, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford
Andrea J. Pitts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Camisha Russell, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Oregon
Jennifer Saul, Professor of Philosophy, University of Sheffield
Naomi Scheman, Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota
Natalie Stoljar, Associate Professor and Interim Director, Institute for Health and Social Policy, McGill University
Alessandra Tanesini, Professor of Philosophy, Cardiff University
Yannik Thiem, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University & Associate Professor, Department of Religion, Columbia University
Charlotte Witt, Professor of Philosophy, University of New Hampshire
Audrey Yap, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Victoria
Rocío Zambrana, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Oregon
Perry Zurn, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, American University, Washington DC
Note: We had originally sent this letter as a direct response to Inside Higher Education. They declined to publish it on the grounds that they had already accepted a response piece, which has since appeared here. We are not taking issue with that piece or its arguments. But our response makes a distinct contribution to the discussion, and importantly is written and signed by specialists who regularly research and teach issues of sex and gender. It strikes us as bad editorial practice on the part of Inside Higher Education to publish the original piece about the state of a philosophical field written primarily by non-specialists, but refuse to publish corrective remarks by those who actively work in it.
“Academic responsibility requires us to consider differences of power and vulnerability in speaking of and to others and the effects of our words in reinforcing structures of oppression.“
Would this imply that academic responsibility presupposes A: agreement on the existence of structures of oppression, and B: agreement on the nature of those structures such that we could reliably tell whether or not our words were reinforcing them?
If so, that’s worrisome from the perspective of academic freedom and viewpoint diversity. It seems to promote a sort of orthodoxy within a letter denying the existence of an orthodoxy.
I hope that, in considering differences of power, biological realities (including physical strength and the fact that mtf transgender individuals commit violent and sex crimes at least at the same rates of men) are acknowledged.
To propose that invalidating feelings is harm on par with physically violent tendencies would be quite a sin in a feminist environment.
You claim that it is a “fact that mtf transgender individuals commit violent and sex crimes at least at the same rates of men.” Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? Many just take male violence statistics and assume that trans women are part of that group, but your claim is more specific. You seem to imply that trans women might in fact be more violent than cis men which I have never seen any reason to believe. Care to elaborate?
I’m a 60 year old trans-woman. I have never committed a single act of violence in my life. The, admittedly few, other transwomen that I know are the absolute opposite of “violent”. You need to present some valid, independently verified, impirical evidence before you make such a reckless claim…
I think your autocorrect substituted “fact” for “myth” there.
Is it a common practice of “specialists who regularly research and teach issues of sex and gender” to insist on their views being published despite failing to engage with the criticisms of their field in the piece they are responding to simply because their self-proclaimed expertise entitles them to participate in the conversation? Because if that’s true, then that’s a pretty significant indictment of the field. I’m disappointed to see several of the philosophers on this list elected to sign on to it, as I would have expected they would know better than this sort of elitist nonsense based on their previous work.
I have a question about the following claim: “There are many diverse, contentious views about gender and gender identity that can be–and are–engaged with in ways that do not call into question the integrity and sincerity of trans people nor the validity of their own understanding of who they are.” If I had reason to believe that a person had a mistaken “understanding of who they are” would I not, as a scholar, be at liberty (or even obligated) to question the validity of said person’s self-understanding? Isn’t self misunderstanding what Freud attributed to us all? How can free inquiry proceed if we are not at liberty to reasonably debate particular individuals’ or particular groups’ understanding of who they are? Am I no longer at liberty to question the purportedly duty-bound Nazi’s understanding of who she is? The supposed benevolent billionaire philanthropist’s understanding of who he is? Etc. And if I am at liberty (or obligated) to question the former, then what is amiss when I question a trans person’s understanding of who they are? I ask this in all sincerity and welcome replies.
Hey all. Just thought I would try and reply to some of the questions/concerns raised here from my own perspective, as just one of the people involved in getting this letter out. Others might certainly disagree with me on some of these points!
There is no single view of sex or gender (or of the relationship between the two) that the feminist philosophers who have signed this letter share. In that sense, there is no orthodox view. (More on this later)
But there is a shared commitment to academic responsibility, and consequently I think a shared view that when we write about systems of oppression, we should do so with an eye to how various systems interact. I expect that we don’t need to agree on how exactly those details work, but I think it would be very difficult for us to work out our differences if, say, one of us denied that racism was a way in which people might experience oppression. So we probably need at least some agreement about systems of oppression.
It seems inevitable that philosophy will at least to some extent challenge our views about the world and ourselves. But I think we should take people’s views about themselves seriously. People can be wrong about themselves, and question things like their gender identity and sexual orientation. Lots of us do! Still, I think there are certain things, which when sincerely reported, our default epistemic stance should be belief. So if someone sincerely says they’re afraid of snakes, or believes in God, or is a man, we should take them seriously. (Note: I don’t take these things to be equivalent in any way, except that our default position should be to believe the person who says them) I mean, maybe reading a theory of gender could get me to realise certain things about my gender identity. But if a theory implies that lots of people must be lying or fundamentally mistaken when they sincerely report their gender identity, that seems like a problem for the theory, because it disrespects their experience in a way that seems really irresponsible. What is gender, really, such that people say such varied things about what their gender might be? I don’t know! But I personally think that our starting point about theorizing it should be taking very seriously what different people actually say about their gender.
Ok so what about Nazis, I guess, is the next point. I’m going to interpret this question as asking generally whether we have an obligation to get people to question their self-understanding in some situations. Maybe! (Although most of the trans folks I know have done a lot more thinking about gender than most of the cis folks I know. So the thinking about it part doesn’t seem to be the problem.) If we take the example of someone who does really awful things but sincerely thinks of themselves as a good person, I think we get more interesting philosophical lines of inquiry if we take seriously the fact that they think of themselves as a good person. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are good, assuming our theory of what makes a good person involves having a positive impact on others, but has interesting implications for theories of identity, especially narrative identity.
So fine, I guess people might still get the impression that there’s some kind of orthodoxy/conspiracy/whatever. I think there’s a commitment to some shared principles, like taking trans people’s testimony (and lives!) seriously. But some shared background and methodology is inevitable in pretty much any area of inquiry.
None of what I have said (or others here have said) yet implies anything about policy decisions. But it does suggest some ways that we might frame those questions. For instance, I think there is lots of scholarship on trans women in sports from a range of different disciplines. But we might think that a relevant question in sport is, given the ranges of natural variation among humans, what are the best ways to divide up categories so they’re fair? I mean, if really what we want is fairness in sport, then let’s make that the central question. Whether gender, hormones, chromosomes, gametes, have anything to do with fairness in sport, are then just ways of considering the main issue.
Thank you so much for the generous and thorough response. If I may respond on the point that I believe was addressed to my question:
“I expect that we don’t need to agree on how exactly those details work, but I think it would be very difficult for us to work out our differences if, say, one of us denied that racism was a way in which people might experience oppression. So we probably need at least some agreement about systems of oppression.”
As a right-leaning graduate student, I think you can imagine why I might find this response unsatisfying. To say “there is no orthodoxy” at the beginning of the letter, but then to define “responsible” scholarship in such a way as to rule out the salient opinions at hand in this dispute (whether one can question or deny someone’s gender indentification), feels a bit… slippery, I suppose. And I say this as someone who, despite my political identification, likely agrees with you on the substance of this debate, and in other areas of the trans rights debate.
While there is doubtless a range of views that you would consider acceptable to express within the realm of scholarship that you would deem responsible, and to this extent there is no “orthodoxy”, it seems like this isn’t really responsive to the accusations of orthodoxy made by your opponents in this debate. It reminds me of my left-wing Canadian friends who, when I point out how relatively weak the political right is in their country, and how this could be a problem for ideological diversity, they respond “Yes, but we have a range of diverse views we can express. There’s a center-left party and a socialist party and a radical left party” and so on. This is doubtlessly true, but it isn’t really responding to the original criticism.
Just as my Canadian friend and I are using “diversity” in different registers, I think you and your opponents in this debate are using “orthodoxy” in different registers, and based on your elaboration of the position it seems like your opponents are correct that there is an orthodoxy of the sort that they are criticizing. Writing this off with the (accurate) statement that “some shared background and methodology is inevitable in pretty much any area of inquiry” seems to confirm their point, not disconfirm it.
Hi Alex – I think I can see why you wouldn’t find this super satisfying from your perspective, but your explanation is quite helpful for me in understanding some other responses I’ve gotten, so thanks! Oh, and I’m quite a left-wing Canadian over here, so maybe that helps understand where I’m coming from too!
I guess maybe where you’re the talking-past-each-other-ness of it, is that when I say that there’s no orthodoxy, we mean that there’s no single view of sex or gender that everyone has to accept. But you’re right that that doesn’t mean something like, all consistent views of sex or gender are on the table for consideration. (And one might be looking for something much more like the latter, if ideological diversity is an important concern for you. But that’s probably a conversation for another time!)
If it helps, I think my own view on the matter is very much like Rebecca Kukla’s below, where people’s sincere claims about who they take themselves to be, and how they experience themselves, are data. Not infallible, and, like all data, theory-laden. But I take many feminist philosophers’ views about the nature of gender to be ways to explain that data (in ways that don’t presuppose that people, cis or trans, are generally lying or wrong). Maybe that’s why I don’t see it so much as orthodoxy in a dogmatic sense, but as a consequence of a particular methodological commitment. And perhaps I don’t really see a way to do responsible scholarship about gender without making that commitment.
It seems likely that some of the gender critical folks I disagree with are making different methodological commitments that affect how we take people’s self-reports to be data. But I tend to think of these things in kind of phil sci-ish ways, and for me it seems like trans-inclusive theories typically do a much better job of explaining how people experience themselves as gendered in this messy social world.
So maybe then we’re making some progress in understanding what’s going on at least, where we’re each using, if not different individual theories, different clusters of theories, or theories that are based on really different kinds of background commitments. In which case, I would think that if we really wanted to progress the discussion, we would need to talk about what kinds of background commitments we could mutually accept in order to reach any kind of common ground.
Continuing Audrey’s response:
No one is infallible about anything. But here’s how I like to think about it. Respect for trans folks as humans requires taking their avowals of their experienced identity as data about what gender is, while we all (cis and trans together) try to figure out how to understand a vexed thing like gender. In contrast, some people seem to want to figure out what gender is a priori, or take only cis binary people’s experiences as the starting point, and THEN try to figure out if trans people ‘pass the bar’ for having the gender they say they have, or whether they are ‘wrong’. But that’s disrespectful and bad methodology.
Since gender is a complicated and socially fraught category anyhow, we should begin from the data we have about people’s gender identities, and build our concept from there, not the reverse.
Generally, we should assume people are right about their sincere and deeply held beliefs about themselves. Could someone be wrong about fact X about themself, for any X? Yeah sure. No one believes in certainty any more do they? But if a large and growing group of people insist that they have thought a lot about and strongly believe fact X about themselves, at great social and material cost, we should strongly (though defeasibly) presume they are generally right and build our theories accordingly.
Taking people’s experience of themselves as valid and taking them to be sincere doesn’t mean taking every single thing they say to be literally true as stated. It means beginning from this presumption that their avowed experience is an important and respect-worthy contribution to the data about what gender is.
Of course, I do not speak for the group of signatories and my hot take is my responsibility alone 🙂
I agree that scholarship should be respectful. I would add that people need to be open to new ways of being and need to try to understand them before coming up with theories that affect real people. All that said, I think it’s important, in thinking about issues about gender, to read people who fall outside the “respectable” scholarly feminist literature, because I think there’s too much groupthink in this literature. People make the same arguments over and over again, and nobody thinks to challenge them because certain familiar arguments have become authoritative (prematurely).
For example, arguments about how intersex conditions get in the way of there being two “real” sexes are repeated over and over again, to the point that they are orthodoxy. You actually need to escape the “bubble” of feminist philosophers talking to each other to find people making compelling arguments that intersex conditions don’t at all stand in the way of their being two sexes. Alex Byrne is helpful on this point, as is Kathleen Stock. Both good to read, even if not kosher.
Another issue is that there’s a huge emphasis in the most recent literature on finding concepts that are advantageous from the point of view of trans “liberation” (so to speak). A worthy goal! But that tends to eclipse issues about what is emancipatory for cis women. We are not permitted to think there could be a conflict between trans interests and cis interests–it’s become sort of an article of faith that there isn’t any conflict. In that context, it’s helpful for a Kathleen Stock to come along and say “Wait, are there really no conflicts of interest?” It’s true that the company she keeps is sometimes downright transphobic, but she’s asking questions that have been excluded from the official conversation. We need her precisely because that conversation has become restrictive.
In fact, I think it’s become more restrictive over the years. 5-10 years ago you could have someone like Christine Overall writing that being a woman, for a trans woman, is “aspirational” and not “factual.’ I don’t think that’s one of the allowed positions any more. In fact, what’s required of an inclusive view keeps getting strengthened. We must say trans women are women (with a little wiggle room about what the duty to say comes from–from truth or from ethics?), but that’s not enough. Now we have people (several on the list of signers) assuming they are not just factually women, but paradigm cases of factual women. It doesn’t seem one is allowed to have an honest reaction to this. There’s a mandatory reaction (yes, paradigm cases!), and if I just don’t have that reaction, then I’ve got to go find intellectual fellows elsewhere.
And then there’s the business about how we must say trans women are not just women gender-wise, but also sex-wise. The proper view now seems to be that they are not male-bodied in any sense. They were “assigned male at birth” and that’s all. These things weren’t necessary commitments in the literature of just 5-10 years ago. There are and were trans authors who speak of having a biological sex at odds with their gender identity (Julia Serrano and Sophie Grace Chappell) but I think in the feminist gender literature that seems to have become a prohibited thought. So, again, people who want to think about these issues independently and freely are driven in the direction of people like Stock and Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, who are saying what a lot of people (not just cis but trans) find plausible: biological sex is not just an “assignment” and does matter for some things.
The people on this list do disagree about some things, but that’s a bit like saying Trump-supporters disagree about some things, or Warren-supporters disagree about some things. Sure. It’s not as if everyone’s been forced into total conformity. But there’s so much convergence at this point that if you really want to do some critical thinking about gender, you’d better step outside the feminist scholarly literature for some of your intellectual diet.
Audrey Yap: Does your argument apply to immortal souls? Is it one of the “certain things”? If not, how do we determine the certain things?
“ … there are certain things, which when sincerely reported, our default epistemic stance should be belief. So if someone sincerely says [they’ve got an immortal soul], we should take them seriously.”
[Absolutely. But “take seriously” and “accept as true” are not at all the same.]
“But if a theory implies that lots of people must be lying or fundamentally mistaken when they sincerely report the [immortality of their soul], that seems like a problem for the theory, because it disrespects their experience in a way that seems really irresponsible.
“What is [soul], really, such that people say such varied things about what their [soul] might be? I don’t know! But I personally think that our starting point about theorizing it should be taking very seriously what different people actually say about their soul.”
Certainly not going to speak for my coauthors or signatories here. But if philosophy of religion was my area (it’s really not!) and I was writing about religious experiences, it would feel really irresponsible of me not to take people’s sense of themselves as having (or not having) immortal souls into account. I mean, if I was giving a theory of souls that made really implausible assumptions about people and the extent to which they experience themselves as having a soul (like that lots of people lie about it for some unnamed reason), someone should ask me to fix up my theory!
To reiterate my point, taking someone’s beliefs “into account” (like “taking them seriously”) is very different to accepting someone’s assertions as true. You reply seems to have missed this point.
Also, to say that someone is incorrect is very different to saying they are lying. There is, obviously, another possibility: the possibility that they are mistaken.
I can respect someone, take them seriously, believe they are sincere AND think they are wrong.
You don’t need to specialise in the philosophy of religion to understand my example.
If you do not believe in the immortality of the souls, surely you would be entitled to (respectfully, seriously) argue that people are mistaken (not lying) when they assert that they have an immortal soul?
My question gets to the heart of the matter; Why do you even care how I, or anyone else, presents ourselves to society?
What is your “skin in the game”? SMH 😪
I have gained great piece of mind by simply minding my own business. 😍😘😇
I have written a response to this letter at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
You can find my response here: https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2019/08/10/are-some-trans-people-disabled-are-some-disabled-people-trans/
I want to thank Audrey and Rebecca for helping to clarify their respective positions — and to reiterate that mine is very much the attempt of someone not sufficiently immersed in the relevant feminist literature to understand the terms of the debate, which nonetheless seem to this outsider unnecessarily politically charged on social media. (Perhaps this will prompt a modest proposal that Twitter and Facebook are not viable fora for philosophy?) The fact that I’m both sincere in my questioning and proceed only with some trepidation to pose those questions is an indication, I think, of the chilling effect that has set in.
So, with the expectation that y’all should simply send me off to read some articles, here are two questions I have in response to the clarifications provided. First, it is precisely in those contexts in which one suspects instruments of oppression to be exerting their force that, I would think, a good methodological stance would be to proceed with epistemic caution about taking the sincere avowals of the oppressed at face value. As data? Sure. But as objects with respect to which one’s default epistemic stance is belief? That stance seems to me to run counter to evidence about phenomena such as malformed preferences under oppressive contexts (for example). I would have thought a more skeptical stance — which is compatible with a respectful stance — would be warranted.
Second, it seems to me that any investigation of gender identity needs to be clear fairly early on to what one intends “gender identity” to refer. Were someone interested in knowing my gender identity, one question I might initially want answered is: What do you mean by ‘gender identity’? Don’t we need to answer that question before setting about determining how particular individuals think about their gender identity? My past experience has suggested that this is a point at which those more well versed in the debate ask us novices if we are familiar with “genderbread” person. I LOVE genderbread person but their information that ‘gender identity’ refers to “how you, in your head, think about yourself” etc. seems to me to completely evade the issue of whether how I think of myself is unduly influenced by oppressive societal norms that we have reason to question. For example: If those societal norms are such that they pressure those born with male genitalia toward one self-conception (crudely: males don’t cry, males are aggressive, males … what have you) and those born with female genitalia toward an opposed self-conception (crudely: females are emotional and expressive, females are docile, females are objects for the male gaze, … and what have you) then, I would want to know of someone born with identifiably female genitalia who reports thinking of themself as a man whether by that they meant to reject this oppressive stereotype given to those born with identifiably female genitalia. Alternatively, I would want to know of someone who reports thinking of themself as a woman whether by that they meant to reject the oppressive stereotype given to those born with identifiably male genitalia. And if the answer were yes, I would be left wondering why said person does not set about challenging the stereotype rather than taking other measures (e.g., changing their genitalia). If the answer were, instead, that they feel alienated from their genitalia, then it seems to me that we are no longer discussing gender but something else. Since she has not been hesitant to court publicity, it is not — I assume — unfair to consider the case of Caitlyn Jenner in this context. For some of us, Caitlyn presents herself as a cheerleader for stereotypes that we worry contribute to the oppression of those who identify as women. To be sure, those of us who oppose this hyper-sexualized pose of women as objects oppose it whether the perpetrator is trans or cis. But the fact that a person born with male genitalia — and who could thereby easily resist such an oppressive stereotype — would not only embrace but champion norms under which those born with identifiably female genitalia have been oppressed calls out for questioning. If such questioning is regarded as somehow inherently disrespectful or inherently trans-phobic, then it seems to me that some of the most philosophically important questions that arise in this debate risk being silenced.
Of course it is truthful to not call into question the hard-won self-understanding of people who are oppressed, including with lethal violence. A person who calls into question the hard-won self-understanding of people who are oppressed isn’t truthful. They are bullies or privileged people who are obtuse.
Truthfulness is always a matter of relationships. To separate out theory from relationships is be, a priori, untruthful. That means it’s vicious.
What this debate shows is how messed up academic philosophy can be when it cleaves to theory and forgets relationships. If it wanted to actually seek wisdom, it would start with relationships and try to be truthful.
What is missing from some of the contentious parts of the debate is an understanding of how things would proceed if people were truthful. They wouldn’t call into question the hard-won self-understanding of people surviving oppression, because to do so is a horrible thing to do in almost every relationship. Instead, they would work to create the conditions of relationship in which people can begin to explore the issues that are painful and dangerous all around. That would not involve symmetrical “liberty.” It would involve relational autonomy. People would have to earn trust first and move from inquisition to wonder. People would build trustworthy practices and reform institutions – or create new ones likewise.
And yes, online tweeting and the like contributes to the opposite of that. But so too does S.O.P. in academic philosophy with its bullying and obtuse theory-first practices, its skepticism, doubt, and purported intellectual neutrality. These are all vices from the standpoint of truthfulness. They hide questions behind theory before earning good relationships.