Sometimes, I wonder how I will know when the reign of genderism is definitively over. As philosophers say, I like to consider various possible worlds. Will it be when a national inquiry is held into child transition? Or when a whole month goes by without a drag queen story on the BBC website? Or when the head of MI6 finally takes the pronouns out of his X bio? “Gradually, then suddenly” is how Hemingway described going bankrupt. One hopes this applies to the morally bankrupt too.
Despite the recent Supreme Court ruling, some parts of the UK seem more stuck in transactivist delusions than ever. But this week, tantalisingly, I discerned signs of imminent collapse. The Scottish media appears gripped by the Sandy Peggie tribunal, with daily revelations of unsympathetic NHS managers defending the presence of a male doctor in the nurses’ female-only changing room. One newspaper even referred to the man at the heart of the case as “he”. Down south, the NHS has announced the terms of reference for a rapid investigation into a Brighton GP practice that prescribed puberty blockers to minors, and it sounds like it is not messing about. And in academia, Oxford philosophers Daniel Kodsi and John Maier just published an excoriating takedown of the Yale philosophy department’s own attempt to prop up child transition.
I am obviously particularly fascinated about what is happening in my former discipline. For years, I watched as a small number of philosophers, on both sides of the Atlantic, took a barely comprehensible proposition from the internet — “trans women are women and trans men are men” — and tried to build a system around it. The central proposition was treated as non-negotiable; any datum that didn’t fit would have to be jettisoned. Those who objected were either insufficiently well-read, too stupid to understand complexity, or simply bad actors. Quiet lifers across the Anglosphere quickly read the seminar room and went along with things.
The logician W.V.O. Quine argued that beliefs exist in holistic webs: each belief is interconnected and mutually supported by lots of others. If you reject one, you normally have to make adjustments elsewhere. Faced with a new, apparently confounding piece of evidence — say, the sight of a friend in London, who you believe to be in Dundee — you are more likely to update beliefs near the periphery of your web (“she is not in Dundee”; or “I mistook someone else for her”) than its centre (“people can be in two places at once”).
Still, it is always possible to work from the centre outward. Genderists in philosophy parachuted “transwomen are women” into the middle of their webs, defined a “woman” as anyone who said they were, and renamed the ensuing epistemological anarchy “progress”. And they were perfectly open about it. In 2020, for instance, Sally Haslanger, the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, told an interviewer: “if we wanted to include trans women among women, the body wasn’t sufficient… the pressure was to find a conception of woman that would enable us to accommodate all these differences”.
Once in the semantic upside down, there was a lot of profitable work for these web-spinners to do: not just to re-theorise every human idea and practice formerly conceived of as sex-based; but also to build up a satisfyingly dark story about the women and men who would not comply. Haslanger became a fan of authoring open letters, and other heroines in philosophy rose to the occasion too. “I hesitate to attach the label feminist to any view that is committed to worsening the situation of some of the most marginalized women,” wrote Jennifer Saul, a senior philosopher of language at the University of Waterloo, putting a typically charitable gloss on dissenters’ attitudes to trans-identified males. “No one really wants a mercy fuck, and certainly not from a racist or a transphobe,” wrote the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls, Isaiah Berlin… only joking, I mean Amia Srinivasan, reframing erotic attraction toward a single sex as ethically problematic, whether hetero or homo.
Even during my most depressed phases in academia, I knew that these people were taking a big risk — albeit one they apparently didn’t notice. The higher they flew in daring reconstructions of familiar concepts, the further there was to fall, should their central proposition be later rejected. And surely it eventually would be. For “woman” and “man” are categories associated with distinctive visual appearances, and the adaptive capacity to discern the difference between them has been honed over millennia. Sometimes you just know you are looking at a man, despite what the people with the fancy titles are telling you. Indeed, it is a testament to the awesome chutzpah of the latter that they ever thought they could persuade people otherwise.
The risk for them, to be clear, was not merely that they would be proved wrong, a common enough occurrence in philosophy; but that they would be revealed as quite thick. If trans women are women, then not only are there surprisingly high numbers of children in the wrong bodies, women rapists, and mediocre female athletes etc, but those far-sighted philosophers making the case are bravely speaking truth to power. If trans women are in fact men, and have been all along, then the only major revelation is just how many gullible idiots have got into prestigious positions in academic philosophy.
Circa 2019-2022, these women — and they were mostly women — were trying in their own way to be what Cass Sunstein has called “norm entrepreneurs”. Their preferred norms quickly cascaded through a mostly male discipline, one made timid by several high-profile scandals, and with a general air of scary feminine malevolence floating about post-MeToo. Acolytes flocked, grants flowed, invitations proliferated, and their critics were silenced or exiled.
But the thing about norm cascades is how rapidly they can collapse. In a situation of pluralistic ignorance, each member of a particular group believes that every other member of that same group endorses some particular norm, even if very few still actually do. Still, private sceptical thoughts remain hidden as long as most people pay lip service to the norm for fear of reputational cost. If you don’t know what everyone else really thinks, chances are you will continue to keep quiet, especially if an example has previously been made of dissenters.
This situation can go on for a long time, yet should a tipping point of public dissent be reached, things can change fast. (The news that Gen Z are now reportedly abandoning sunscreen en masse looks like a good example.) Overnight miracles can occur: the most marginalised women can suddenly become men again, and formerly insightful thinkers revealed as deeply unserious people.
Of course, this possibility is not confined to academia. In every hospital, school, or civil service department, local transactivist gurus and witchfinders currently being treated like emperors by colleagues may eventually turn out to have no clothes. But apart from fanatics posting on the internet, most will be able to deny they ever really believed any of it.
The wonderful thing about philosophy, however, is that genderists wrote it all down. For this reason, perhaps, attempts to suppress discussion in philosophy seem to be ramping up, even as the rest of the world starts to come to its senses. Haslanger’s colleague in the MIT department, Alex Byrne, has recently disclosed in the Washington Post that he is the author of a report highly critical of paediatric transition, written for the Department of Human and Health Services. A hostile open letter has duly followed by an unnamed “concerned colleague”. One wonders who that might be. Meanwhile Justin Weinberg, the academic webmaster of one of the profession’s two main websites — the Daily Nous — is point blank refusing to host an open discussion of the Kodsi and Maier piece, reportedly responding to queries with the claim that the piece does not “merit attention”. As someone who has hosted hundreds of transactivist pieces masquerading as philosophy over the years, one can certainly see why he is nervous.
Perhaps the reign of genderism will truly be over when philosophers of sex and gender start acting like philosophers again: no foot-stamping about incontrovertible axioms, no smearing opponents, no anonymous open letters, no refusal to platform uncontrolled discussion. In an alternative scenario, it will end when the general public gets thoroughly fed up with universities altogether, no longer seeing the point of supporting supposed intellectuals who can get things so obviously wrong. Unfortunately, this possible world seems to me an increasingly close one. There are many philosophers who have so far kept quiet about genderism to save their jobs, but for the very same reason they should probably start talking.
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