Suppose that one cuts off the wings of a hawk. The hawk can no longer fly. One has not thereby made it more similar to a cheetah, even though cheetahs cannot fly either. Cutting the wings off a hawk creates one similarity between it and a cheetah, but it creates many differences too. In particular, a hawk that cannot fly is severely disabled, while a cheetah that cannot fly is not. Left to its own devices, the hawk will soon die; the cheetah is in no special danger. Before its wings were cut off, the hawk was like the cheetah in being able to move quickly and hunt prey. Now, it can do neither.
The example reflects a central insight of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Similar biological functions and abilities are realized differently in animals of different species. Even though the ways in which healthy animals are able to eat, move, learn and reproduce differ across species, healthy animals of different species are crucially similar in being able to eat, move, learn and reproduce. Dolphins and bats learn about their environments by echolocation; cats and dogs do not, but they have other forms of perception which enable them similarly to learn about their environments. Penguins’ wings do not help them fly, but they do help them move through the water. Consequently, the fact that two organisms of different species both lack some specific physical feature or ability does not entail that there is much functional similarity between them. Mice that cannot internally regulate their body temperature are in disastrously bad shape; crocodiles that cannot internally regulate their body temperature are not. When reasoning about similarities and differences between organisms of different species, the level of generality at which one operates matters. And to insist on one level of generality, when another is clearly relevant, can be to engage in wanton theoretical obstructionism.
Similar lessons apply to animals of different sexes. Among bilaterian animals, males have testes, whereas females have ovaries. That males have testes and females have ovaries is, of course, a difference between the sexes. At a more abstract level, however, testes and ovaries share a fundamental evolutionary function: both gonads enable reproduction. Thus, damaging the testes of a male is not a way to make it more like a female. Although a male without functioning testes may be like a female in that very respect, it is crucially unlike a healthy female in lacking a functioning gonad. Similarly, damaging the ovaries of a female is not a way to make it more like a male. Although a female without functioning ovaries may be like a male in that very respect, it is crucially unlike a healthy male in lacking a functioning gonad. Generalizing: Just as animals that lack the means characteristic of their species to move, eat or learn are only like animals of other species by an artificial and myopic standard, one which elides crucial functional differences, animals of either sex that lack the means characteristic of their sex to reproduce are only like animals of the other sex by the same artificial and myopic standard.
**
Last month, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6–3 that banning medical interventions on minors that disrupt their normal sexual development does not constitute invidious discrimination. More specifically, the majority opinion held that a Tennessee state law (SB1), which outlaws the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapy and related medical interventions to treat gender dysphoria in minors, does not “classify” on the basis of sex, and a fortiori does not constitute sex-based discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, according to which legislation must treat “similarly situated” individuals alike. As countries including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark have done, American states are free to restrict doctors from putting psychologically distressed children on a path to sterility and anorgasmia.
Why would anyone think that such a ban classified, let alone discriminated, on the basis of sex in the first place? Though the court majority was unpersuaded, the claim that SB1 engages in sex-based discrimination was widely endorsed. Notably, as well as being accepted by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissenting judgment (joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan), it was developed in the “Amici Curiae Brief of Yale philosophers”, signed by 21 members of the Yale philosophy department: David Charles, Timothy Clarke, Stephen Darwall, Robin Dembroff, Keith DeRose, Claudia Dumitru, Paul Franks, Robin Gooding-Williams, Verity Harte, Lily Hu, Brad Inwood, Shelly Kagan, Joshua Knobe, Jacob McNulty, Laurie Paul, Thomas Pogge, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Szabó, Timothy Williamson, Kenneth Winkler and Gideon Yaffe. With such an illustrious roster of signatories, one might have hoped the philosophers’ brief would be careful and rigorous in its arguments. Unfortunately, it largely serves to make remarkably vivid the reductionism underlying opposition to SB1.
In particular, the philosophers object to SB1 as implicitly classifying on the basis of sex, given that the law will result in children of different sexes being able to access different medical treatments. For instance, it permits pubescent boys to have breast growth checked but not pubescent girls, or treatment to arrest the growth of facial hair in a teenage girl but not a teenage boy. Building on this point, in the key passage of their brief, the philosophers contrast two characterizations of the content of SB1:
Tennessee attempts to obscure this embedded classification by sex by arguing that the statute should be considered at a high level of abstraction, asserting that the following characterization of its law is most appropriate:
Characterization 1 (Tennessee’s): Minors may not have any “sex-inconsistent” treatments, regardless of the minor’s sex. See Br. in Opp. 22.
But Tennessee’s law could be rewritten in the following way while keeping the same substance:
Characterization 2: Female minors may not access medical interventions to masculinize their features, even though male minors can use those same treatments. Male minors may not access medical interventions to feminize their features, even though female minors can use those same treatments.
This second characterization highlights that what medical procedures a minor can access depends on that minor’s sex.
We can call the strategy for revealing the true content of SB1 on display in this passage the decompositional strategy, since it consists in breaking down some general norm into more fine-grained norms which apply in specific cases. The philosophers’ brief relies heavily on the assumption that the decompositional strategy reveals the true content of SB1. As they see it, Characterization 2 is the perspicuous formulation of SB1; Characterization 1 obscures its sex-specific consequences.
The trouble is that the decompositional strategy is not in general revelatory of the underlying structure or content of a norm. In their brief, the philosophers provide some analogous cases – concerning laws related to race and religion – in which the strategy seems to bring out the discriminatory effects of the law in question. But they fail to acknowledge a wide range of cases in which applying the strategy to a norm has an obviously distortionary effect. For example, consider this rule:
No Killing Don’t kill anyone else!
Taken at face value, No Killing imposes the same burden on everyone: that they not kill anyone else. But we can apply the decompositional strategy to unmask No Killing as in fact imposing different requirements on each person. For in whatever sense Characterization 1 is equivalent to Characterization 2, No Killing is equivalent to No Killing*:
No Killing* Don’t kill anyone who is not Person A if you are Person A, anyone who is not Person B if you are Person B, anyone who is not Person C if you are Person C, … !
Similarly, consider this rule:
No Incest Don’t sleep with your relatives!
Again, in whatever sense Characterization 1 is equivalent to Characterization 2, No Incest is equivalent to No Incest*:
No Incest* Don’t sleep with Person A’s relatives if you are Person A, Person B’s relatives if you are Person B, Person C’s relatives if you are Person C, … !
Yet the fact that it is possible to apply the decompositional strategy to No Incest to get No Incest* in no way shows that No Incest really consists in a long list of person-specific requirements. Correspondingly, it would be manifestly misguided to object to incest laws on the basis that legislation should not require things of members of one family that it does not require of members of any other family.
Here is a third example illustrating the failure of the decompositional strategy to provide a good general guide to the true content or nature of a norm:
Pet Safety Don’t do things that risk your pet’s health!
Naturally understood, Pet Safety doesn’t discriminate between owners of different pets. Of course, given that cats are different from dogs, complying with Pet Safety if you’re a cat-owner will look different from complying with Pet Safety if you’re a dog-owner. For instance, to comply with it, dog-owners will have to take care not to leave food around that their dogs can’t eat, given that dogs tend to eat whatever is lying around. By contrast, to comply with Pet Safety, cat-owners won’t have to take that precaution, though they may need to watch out for predators that dog-owners can ignore. However, such points should not lead to any loss of confidence in the judgement that Pet Safety imposes the same requirement on cat-owners and dog-owners.
Returning to a variant on the original case, consider now this principle, which proponents of laws like SB1 typically take to provide their underlying motivation:
Do No Harm Doctors may not prevent the normal sexual development of children.
By the decompositional strategy, Do No Harm can be recharacterized as follows:
Do No Harm* Doctors may not prevent female children from going through the processes typical of female puberty or male children from going through the processes typical of male puberty.
Exploiting the fact that puberty takes a different form in female children than it does in male children to argue that the normative claim Do No Harm is not as unified or sex-neutral as it seems would be invidious. The plausibility of Do No Harm simply does not depend on the assumption that different things are good for boys and girls. But the reason that Characterization 1 can be decomposed along the lines of Characterization 2 is the same as the reason that Do No Harm can be decomposed along the lines of Do No Harm*: it is that normal sexual development is realized differently in male children and in female children. That suggests that if you think that the application of the decompositional strategy to SB1 reveals the law’s hidden sexist agenda, you should also think that a belief in the value to children of developing normally is sexist too.
Perhaps because they are aware their case against SB1 over-generalizes in an easily detectable way, the Yale philosophers try to provide some further, more targeted reasons to think that Tennessee’s law illicitly, but unavoidably, classifies on the basis of sex. One reason they give concerns the way the new law would have to be implemented. Tennessee’s lawmakers, the philosophers argue, make crucial use of the notion of “sex-inconsistent” medical interventions: those treatments, that is, that cannot now be given to Tennessee’s minors to alleviate gender dysphoria, but may sometimes be given to children for different, legitimate, medical purposes, such as to treat precocious puberty or female hirsutism. The philosophers’ key point is that “given that the prohibited purposes are defined by reference to a minor’s sex, one cannot determine whether a minor is seeking a prohibited medical procedure without Tennessee first classifying the minor by sex.” That those abiding by the new law would have to first know the sex of the relevant patients before they are in a position to comply with the law is taken to demonstrate that sex classification permeates SB1 at a fundamental level.
Justice Sotomayor seems to concur. Developing the philosophers’ point (she explicitly cites their brief in her dissent), she writes:
Consider the mother who contacts a Tennessee doctor, concerned that her adolescent child has begun growing unwanted facial hair. This hair growth, the mother reports, has spurred significant distress because it makes her child look unduly masculine. The doctor’s next step depends on the adolescent’s sex. If the patient was identified as female at birth, SB1 allows the physician to alleviate her distress with testosterone suppressants… What if the adolescent was identified male at birth, however? SB1 precludes the patient from receiving the same medicine.
This, Justice Sotomayor takes it, shows that SB1 “plainly classifies on the basis of sex”.
However, it is by no means clear that SB1 illicitly trades on prior classification of patients according to their sex. Doctors do, of course, typically know the sex of the patient in front of them. But such knowledge does not seem to be crucial to whether they are in a position to comply with SB1. All a law-abiding doctor needs to know is whether the intervention they are being asked to provide is being sought to alleviate gender dysphoria. Thus, for example, should a male child, for some eccentric reason, want masculinising interventions, and claim a diagnosis of gender dysphoria as his reason, SB1 would prevent him from receiving them too.
That no prior sex classification is needed, even at a practical level, is particularly clear when it comes to the class of drugs known as puberty blockers, where the very same family of GnRH analogues are used in the case of males and females to inhibit the secretion of sex hormones: in this case, it is the very same pharmaceutical interventions, even at a fine-grained level of description, that the law withholds from both boys and girls. Insofar as it makes sense to call such interventions “sex inconsistent” it is because one thing that is inconsistent with the normal sexual development of healthy boys and healthy girls is to arrest the onset of puberty.
A further cycle of the Yale philosophers’ argument attempts to destabilize this functional way of looking at things. The very distinction between interventions that are functional and those that are dysfunctional, when it comes to a child’s emerging biological capacities, is one they attempt to render problematic. This distinction too is said to rely on a covert, and excessively normative, account of what distinguishes the sexes. (“Anatomical features of human bodies, in and of themselves, do not dictate ‘consistent’ ways of life. Anatomy is simply anatomy.”) In particular, that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is an unlawful ground for a child to receive certain medical interventions is taken by the philosophers as evidence that “Tennessee admits that its law targets minors based on their nonconformity with the stereotypes that attend their specific sex classification”. A similar line of thought seems to animate Justice Sotomayor’s hypothetical example, in which the imagined distress of, say, a boy suffering from precocious puberty and a girl with gender dysphoria are treated as relevantly similar in kind. The idea that both forms of distress are similar enough to be treated as a unified phenomenon may be based on the idea that both involve a clash between the child’s attitude to their own body and some emerging physiological feature of it. If there is this underlying unity to both cases, what, the philosophers ask, could motivate differential treatment of them, other than an invidious “stereotype” about which kind of developmental trajectory is right for girls and which right for boys?
Tempting though it has proven to be for some people to slur over the contrasts between these two kinds of case, their differences are manifest. First, though, it merits mentioning that the idea that any stereotype underpinning Tennessee’s law must be “sex-specific” is a gratuitous interpolation on the part of Yale’s philosophers. Here, for instance, is another stereotype, also naturally available in the case: healthy young adults are capable of producing offspring. Why not think of Tennessee’s lawmakers as concerned to see that children fit that sex-neutral stereotype? The young girl hoping to sterilize herself with cross-sex hormones is on a trajectory that departs from that functional stereotype; the girl trying to check the spread of facial hirsutism is not.
In any case, some relevant differences between the two cases are these. First, only the minor seeking treatment for gender dysphoria is likely to be made a lifelong medical patient by being indulged in her request for treatment. Second, only the former’s psychological distress is based on a kind of error. Her distress at evidence of her emerging sexed characteristics derives from a clash between evidence of her sexed-identity and her pretence of a cross-sexed identity; a girl having facial hirsutism remedied experiences a distressing clash between evidence of this unusual physiological development and knowledge of her sexed-identity. Only in the first case is a serious mistake being indulged. Oddly, the Yale philosophers do not explicitly consider the possibility that medical interventions that might be beneficial to the health of some can be destructive to the health of others, and that the law might have an interest in proscribing the latter but not the former. To the contrary, they are so committed to ignoring relevant normative-functional considerations as to claim that “Tennessee’s determination that some procedures present a different risk-benefit calculus than others depends entirely on its judgments that minors should conform to sex-specific stereotypes”. When the word “normal” finally appears in the brief, on nearly the last page, it is in scare-quotes: “ideas of a ’normal’ male or female body”.
It is worth remarking at this point on the obtuseness of an interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause on which it renders unconstitutional any state medical policy that can in principle be presented as differentiating between the sexes. (Although the Supreme Court case officially concerned whether SB1 is appropriately subject to the demanding legal standard of heightened scrutiny, the Yale philosophers assert that “[t]o the extent that Tennessee’s arguments that the statute passes heightened scrutiny are identical with its arguments that the statute does not warrant heightened scrutiny, those arguments are likewise flawed”; later, they explicitly state that the “statute must face heightened scrutiny”.) Given the prevalence of medically relevant differences between the sexes, surely such an interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause reads it too liberally? The majority opinion makes just that point: “This Court has never suggested that mere reference to sex is sufficient to trigger heightened scrutiny… Such an approach, moreover, would be especially inappropriate in the medical context. Some medical treatments and procedures are uniquely bound up in sex.” More generally, as the majority judgement also notes, the command of the Fourteenth Amendment that no State shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” must be handled with a degree of practical restraint: all legislation “classifies for one purpose or another”, after all.
Viewed in totality, what makes the Yale philosophers’ intervention discreditable is not so much that it is mistaken, but that the criticism it rains on SB1 is ad hoc. It amounts to a highly selective application of philosophical expertise. Good philosophers are sensitive to ways in which a complex, disunified rule can be misleadingly presented under a simple and unified guise. But they are also sensitive to ways in which a simple, unified rule can be misleadingly presented under a complex and disunified guise. To modify an example that the philosophers themselves mention, “odd number” can be given a natural definition as a “number not divisible by 2”. It can also be given a gerrymandered definition as “number that is either less than 3 and equal to 1 or at least as great as 3 and not divisible by 2”. The fact that the definition of “odd number” can be repackaged as a disjunction of conjunctions merely serves to obscure the unity of the category “odd number”; its availability does not somehow illustrate that “odd number” builds in an arbitrary distinction between numbers less than 3 and numbers at least as great as 3. For the same reason, the fact that SB1 can be repackaged as a combination of sex-specific proscriptions does not illustrate that it builds in an invidious distinction between the sexes.
Philosophy equips one to look for and notice such problematic extensions of a given form of argument. In their brief, the Yale philosophers advertise themselves as professionals “trained to identify flaws in arguments” who are attempting to “assist the Court in analyzing the logical structure of Tennessee’s arguments”. Their considered verdict is that the arguments of those defending SB1 are “riddled with flaws”. Yet within their professional work, philosophers are used to checking whether their mode of argument over-generalizes. The failure to apply that methodological standard to their own Amici Curiae brief invites an obvious charge of laundering their philosophical expertise for political purposes, rather than applying it in a principled way.
In the course of spelling out their position, they allege, for instance, that Tennessee’s defense of SB1 commits what “in philosophical analysis … is called question-begging”. They explain that “[b]egging the question occurs when an argument assumes the truth of its conclusion”. However, the philosophers do not explain that the long track record “in philosophical analysis” of attempts to make the fallacy of question-begging precise has been poor; natural definitions of the fallacy notoriously imply that all deductively valid arguments are question-begging. That is not to say that it is always wrong to accuse an opponent of begging the question; often, that is a useful diagnosis. Rather, it is again to emphasize that the philosophers have made a selective use of their expertise.
All academic philosophers will have encountered skeptical interlocutors of more and less philosophically self-conscious kinds: students, perhaps, who, getting the feel for the skeptical strategy, begin impugning any valid argument from known premises as problematically circular. Good teachers will try to make vivid to students who exhibit this tendency how regressive it can be. Weakening one’s premises until they become acceptable even to the skeptic is often just a route to losing knowledge oneself. Helping students out of this skeptical rut involves showing them that the fact that an argument with known premises can be impugned as circular by someone who rejects those premises is not a good reason to abandon either the argument or the knowledge it relies on. This dynamic is prevalent outside of the classroom too; non-philosophers as much as philosophers are liable to have their beliefs at least temporarily destabilized by skeptical challenges. Perhaps the Yale philosophers should have also written a brief against the danger of dismissing valid arguments with known premises as “question-begging”?
**
Has the politics of the trans movement damaged academia? In conversation with academics, it is common to be told that the importance of trans issues has been blown out of proportion. That insouciant analysis is often badly undermined by the fact that the kind of academic who is inclined to provide it will then audibly struggle to give straight answers to basic questions, such as ”Are there any male women?”.
We can attest to the fact that not allowing such academics to hedge and prevaricate in such conversations can be somewhat amusing, as well as an interesting exercise in academic anthropology. Some of the most macho, straight-shooting, take-no-prisoners analytic philosophers out there are easily left tongue-tied if asked to venture an opinion as to whether there are any male women. Biologists who have just spent half an hour explaining their research on sex-differences in plants respond with blank stares.
Among those who can overcome the trauma of having the issue raised, one favored gambit is to act as if it is an unreasonable expectation for academics to know whether or not there are male women. Relatedly, the idea that the academy generally might be held to account in some way for the things that it says – or more likely, fails to say – about the various trans-related controversies that have taken up so much bandwidth in recent political debate is treated as unfair: a political distraction, or perhaps a trap designed to lure sophisticated thinkers onto an unseemly political battlefield. Isn’t it just irrelevant what academics think? is one way that these academics sometimes try to defer answering the question, in the spirit of reticence to which they have spontaneously converted. If that doesn’t work, they might point out how many more important issues there are besides “trans”, as if the sheer number of questions competing for their attention means they simply haven’t got around to deciding whether there are male women yet.
Over the last few years, the suggestion that it doesn’t matter whether adult human males who claim to be women really are women has come to look increasingly desperate. The ongoing political salience of “gender-affirming care” for minors is a case in point. A decade or so ago, when presented with the question whether self-identifying as a women is sufficient for being one it was common for liberals to brush off concerns about an affirmative answer by pretending that the rights at stake reduced to who got to use which bathroom. Taking that flippantly reductive view for granted allowed them to rhetorically discredit their opponents as peculiarly obsessed with the politics of public toilets. Of course, the view that embracing trans activists’ demands had no important political ramifications was one that had to be handled with care by complacent liberals even then, not least because in the next breath they were so often disposed to insist that accepting trans activists’ demands was very important indeed, at least as concerned the lives of trans people themselves.
In any case, flippant reductionism is hardly the right tone to strike when presented with the information that at least 6,000 teenage girls – a large proportion of whom have comorbid mental health conditions like autism and ADHD – were given double mastectomies as a form of “gender-affirming care” in the United States from 2017 to 2023. Consequently, the average academic is likelier to react to it by affecting a kind of hard-minded utilitarianism: 6,000 girls – only 1,000 a year, in a nation of 340 million people! – still isn’t that many, they observe. Needless to say, few would have dared to downplay in similar fashion the importance of, for instance, police killings of unarmed black men in the US, on the basis of the small absolute number of instances – only about 10 a year! – or, indeed, to downplay the importance of protecting “trans rights” on the same statistical basis. Perhaps more importantly, the fact that the number of cases of minors being subjected to such medical interventions remains relatively low is in large part because of the very public opposition that makes so many academics uncomfortable.
If your average academic interlocutor hasn’t managed to effect some grand moralistic exit from the conversation by the time you’ve mentioned all of the above, another effective way to reduce him to panic and temporary deafness is to mention a second egregious consequence of trans activism: namely, the treatment of male sex offenders as women. It is customary at this point for one’s nervous interlocutor to protest that most trans-identified males are not sex offenders. True. Nevertheless, some are. And trans ideology implies that even such men are women. Thus, there have been well-publicized cases of men who have raped or murdered multiple women being housed in women’s spaces. (In California, as of February 2022, about 100 male sex offenders had petitioned to transfer to the female estate.) In other cases, female rape victims have been compelled to use female pronouns in describing their attacker. Of course, as before, the tactic of denigrating the absolute number of cases is available. And, once again, the same rebuttals to those responses are available. In particular, as before, that the number of male sexual offenders housed in the female estate remains relatively low is in large part because of behind-the-scenes due diligence about which applications are granted.
It is an irony that the kind of environment in which complacent liberals can more comfortably dismiss the importance of questioning trans activism’s political agenda is one in which others are not so squeamish about treating such questions as important. Many academic philosophers, the kind of people who lecture their students about questioning assumptions and not being in thrall to groupthink, have in effect behaved like intellectual free-riders on the activities of a small number of braver thinkers in the academy, journalism and politics.
Of course, it is not feasible or desirable for every individual to take an active interest in every question at every moment. Academia has thrived partly because of the division of labour it executes in which different people can attend to different questions and make progress on them. A good number of intelligent academic philosophers have behaved in a way that suggests they hope to treat trans activism as somebody else’s problem, while they affect a studied neutrality about the questions the ideology raises.
The problem with this way of evading intellectual responsibility, however, is that whether one is dismissing trans-related questions as unimportant simpliciter, or peripheral because statistically marginal, or potentially important but just somebody else’s problem, the awkward fact remains that the question whether there are male women remains easy to answer. It does not require much expertise or intellectual effort. It is, in fact, the kind of question that most young children can answer reliably, or could until recently. A question’s being politically unimportant is not the same thing as its being difficult to answer. Indeed, were philosophers temperamentally disinclined to explore the possible answers to politically unimportant questions, a good number of them would be quickly out of a job. Academics simply have no good excuse for punting on questions about whether there are male women, or whether children uncomfortable in their bodies should have their sexual development arrested. Even if, as is unlikely these days, the questions had genuinely never occurred to them, it is not at all unreasonable to expect them to be able to come up with an answer on the spot. Academic philosophers are used to improvising to at least that degree. In this case, the answers “no” and “no” spring to mind.
Why do you care so much? is one seething question you might encounter at this stage. Why do you feel compelled to pursue awkward questions about this statistically marginal, and moreover vulnerable, community? Why do you insist on categorizing people, and putting them in boxes?, your interlocutor may press, turning aggressor, at the same moment categorizing you as a person-who-likes-to-put-people-in-boxes.
Escaping to this level of commentary on the first-order debate is yet another mere method of deflection. Knowing, and claiming to know, the answer to easy questions, such as whether there are male women, or whether mentally ill children should be gratuitously harmed, is not good evidence that one cares about the answer to any unusual extent. You could simply know the answer, without caring about it. Lots of knowledge is like that. Of course, in an environment where everyone else is feigning ignorance about obvious truths, one does often come to care more about such banal truths. But that is a psychologically normal response to a pathological environment. It is one’s interlocutor who is in the odder position: insisting that he doesn’t care about the answer to easy questions enough to know the answer to them, while manifestly caring that the questions not be decisively settled in your mooted way. He is also at risk of setting the bar for caring about a political issue in an awkwardly high place: if the chemical castration of troubled children and the willfully-blind indulgence of sexual criminals are not enough to arouse his moral emotions, then it is not immediately obvious what will.
What if our academic accepts that the answers to these banal questions are easy, and worth caring about, but justifies his policy of non-cooperation with the conversation on the grounds that indulging even legitimate concerns about the transgender movement gives succour to the political right? Something like this allegation was made in an open letter condemning philosopher Alex Byrne for “collaborating” with the Trump administration by working on the Department of Health and Human Services Review of treatments for pediatric gender dysphoria, as well as by Justin Weinberg and a vocal minority of commenters at the Daily Nous, an influential philosophical blog. (The Daily Nous also hosted a discussion of the amici brief at the time it came out, with several commenters identifying broadly the same problems we did above.) One problem with such paranoid accountancy of the alleged costs of political collaboration is that over-attending to them can conceal the equally real costs of being seen to stifle the expression of obvious or important truths. The conscious strategy of some academics in their silence over easy political questions seems to be to weather out the storm: hoping that unseemly political battles will sort themselves out without academia sustaining any damage in the process.
The costs of this strategy of non-intervention have been routinely underestimated. The public at large have noticed that the question of whether there are male women has an easily known answer. They have noticed that it is worth caring about. They are also in a position to notice the apparent mixture of feigned (or sincere?) confusion, reticence and cowardice preventing academics from themselves noticing what the public at large notices. Most lay people do not have access to all the good work done within philosophy or academia generally; it is thus quite unsurprising for them to treat academics’ failure to get the right answers to what are registered as easy questions as evidence of a more systematic failure. That may be a mistake, but the expectation of some much more subtle and charitable method of assessment – which gives due consideration to all of the excuses academics tell themselves for why they haven’t spoken out – is just naïve. Sometimes, for better or worse, making even a single obvious error that one refuses to acknowledge is enough to shred one’s credibility.
In politics proper, right-wingers like Donald Trump have recently been able to leverage progressives’ sex anti-realism to devastating effect in electoral campaigns. Again, by something like a use of the take-the-best heuristic (or the related availability heuristic), voters seem willing to write off a candidate who professes not to know that there are no male women on the grounds that if they are wrong about that, there is no telling what else they may be wrong about. In politics, it turns out that the fact that a question is easy can sometimes make it important. Progressives are currently having to reckon with just how they could have made such a serious political error. One danger is that in philosophy, with its less exigent pressures to rethink dysfunctional institutional policy and collective norms, that reckoning will be much slower to come.
Though it may be painful to admit it, even many people smart enough to become academic philosophers seem to lack the kind of intellectual-cum-aesthetic judgment that consists in finding the right things obvious. It is obvious that there are no male women. It is obvious that you shouldn’t do things that will harm mentally unwell children, even when they are asking you to. It is obvious that creating an environment in which those truths cannot openly be expressed is a sinister and destructive thing to do.
If it finally dawns on the collective in academia that the profession has been party to serious errors, it will be tempting to come up with some kind of theory of error as to how this happened. If such a theory says that indulging trans activism’s claims was the rational thing to do, it will imply that those few academic rebels who persisted in asserting their sex-realist beliefs were in possession of what epistemologists sometimes refer to as “unreasonable knowledge”: a belief which, although it is in fact justified in exactly the way that makes for knowledge, problematically manifests a disposition to stick to one’s guns in the face of large amounts of apparent counter-evidence. In this case – we’re imagining – philosophers might try to tell themselves that even though it led them to lose knowledge, it was the manifestation of an admirable epistemic disposition on their part that they suspended their belief that there are no male women when trans-activist ideas were at their political apogee. What else was an epistemically responsible agent to do?
Unfortunately, we think these self-flattering rationalizations just aren’t available, though we would admire the audacity of any philosopher who attempted to acquit himself of his errors about trans on the grounds that he was too epistemically virtuous not to have made the mistakes in question. It is not so easy for such philosophers to let themselves off the hook.
Our claim is not that unreasonable knowledge is impossible. We trust that it is possible. It is simply that the last decade or so, in which trans-activist politics achieved rapid uncritical acceptance within the academy, does not fit that model well. In recent years, the response of an intelligent academic with intellectual integrity should have been to exercise his existing sex-based knowledge, rather than to suspend or overturn it. That it was possible to respond this way is evidenced by the fact that a small number of outspoken individuals – like Kathleen Stock and Holly Lawford-Smith in philosophy, and JK Rowling outside of it – in fact did this, while many others knew that they should. It just never ceased being obvious that there are no male women. Trans activists’ central philosophical arguments were always underpowered by ordinary methodological standards; their widespread acceptance involved clear violations of academic norms that continued to be nominally paid lip service to; their popularization was aided and abetted by special pleading, political bullying and plain old cowardice. Sanctimonious instructions to acquaint oneself with the voluminous literature “establishing” that there are male women were, and always have been, a bluff.
It is true enough that, in mounting little opposition to the excesses of trans activism, philosophers and other academics have acquitted themselves little worse than society at large. The academy is unexceptional. Yet there may still be grounds for feeling a more targeted disappointment in philosophers when they make stupid mistakes. It is worse – more of a dereliction of duty, and more avoidable – when clever people disgrace themselves intellectually. It is embarrassing to discover, in a discipline whose public self-image incorporates a socratic ideal of intellectual fearlessness, a conspicuous absence of truth-tellers. And, at the level of the university, it is disappointing to find that mechanisms like tenure, whose ostensible purpose is to liberate academics to speak their minds with impunity, turn out to be ineffective to the point of redundancy. In any case, the fact that others have also revealed themselves to be severely wanting in integrity hardly immunizes academics from the critique.
Just as attempts at dialectical neutrality can unwittingly lend the sceptic the upper hand in argument, attempts at political neutrality can lend malign opponents the upper hand in politics. Many philosophers who attempted to maintain a studied indifference to the waging of the trans wars in academia have, we think, in practice ended up making concessions to trans-sympathetic progressives but not to their opponents. At a sociological level, this is no doubt to be explained by the asymmetric costs in play, and the fact that, in the McCarthyite atmosphere that has enveloped academia, to demonstrate one has any sympathy for the enemy can be enough thoroughly to taint one in the eyes of others.
It can of course be hard to take a critical stand on trans activism’s errors without that quickly becoming the only thing one takes a stand on. All the same, affected political neutrality remains a bad way of getting out of the fix. The philosopher who insists that trans questions are simply too unimportant to merit his attention ends up being an implausible figure: one who, despite his professed neutrality in some contexts, can be dragged without much struggle into making quite partisan interventions on one side but not the other. What else explains how a score of sensible philosophers in Yale’s department could lend their support to the opponents of those seeking to curb minors’ access to interventions that sterilize them for life? And moreover do so on the perverse grounds that such measures are sex-discriminatory, when as countless feminists have convincingly pointed out, it is the broader trans movement that – as well as being foundationally committed to downplaying the importance of sex-specific discrimination – is responsible, perhaps more effectively than any other movement in recent years, for promulgating regressive sex stereotypes about women and gays in liberal circles.
As history suggests, one tempting response to politically oppressive atmospheres is to kid oneself that one’s life isn’t really being affected: to carve out an inner world unmolested by political controversy and attempt to live in it. The kind of complacent adherence to progressivism in evidence in the Yale philosophers’ brief is now pervasive in academic philosophy. It has created an atmosphere in the seminar room where contentious progressive-coded examples are accepted without hesitation or complaint. (Try tabling an example with a counter-progressive political valence, and you would quickly meet with a different response!) All of this is a blight on the discipline. It is noticed by students, the most sensible of whom may turn away in disgust. It is noticed by intelligent outsiders, who will then become more sympathetic to philistine kinds of opposition to academics in general, who they reasonably infer cannot be trusted. The Yale philosophers may tell themselves their brief was mere good philosophy; but it was bad politics. The standing danger is that in the long run, the badness of the one infects the other.
Daniel Kodsi holds a PhD in Philosophy from Oxford and is editor-in-chief of The Philosophers’ Magazine. John Maier is studying for a PhD in Philosophy at Oxford and is a leader writer for The Times.
