Or maybe dystopia…
Or maybe dystopia…
The profession can change, the venue can change, but the gender-woo methodology remains the same. Personally attack the person who dares to speak about biological reality, libel and defame their character while poisoning the well as to prevent discussion of an import issue facing women.
The bullshit doesn’t change. It is especially disheartening to see professionals whose business is to be thoughtful and charitable completely abandon those principles in order to defend normative patriarchal values.
“A debate has arisen among philosophers concerning a couple of papers published recently in the prestigious journal Philosophical Studies. The first paper, “Are women adult human females?” by Alex Byrne (January, 2020) attempts to refute what Byrne identifies as “the orthodox view among philosophers,” that “the category woman is a social category, like the categories, wife, firefighter, and shoplifter,” rather than “a biological category, like the categories vertebrate, mammal, or adult human female.” Byrne argues woman is a biological category, that to be a woman is to be an adult adult human female. The second paper, “Escaping the Natural Attitude About Gender,” by Robin Dembroff (forthcoming, but available already online), attempts to discredit Byrne’s argument.
The controversy surrounding the two articles does not concern the arguments themselves but the fact that Dembroff’s article includes an ad hominem against Byrne in which Dembroff effectively accuses Byrne of bigotry against transsexuals despite the fact that there is nothing in Byrne’s paper to support such a charge. The editor of the journal, Stewart Cohen, resigned in protest because he wanted to publish an apology for printing an article that included defamatory rhetoric, rhetoric which should never have made it past the journal’s referees, but the publisher of the journal, Springer, refused to allow him to do that.
Philosophers are not generally known for being warm and fuzzy. But Dembroff’s paper represents a new low in levels of civility. Usually, philosophers aim their barbs at an opponent’s cognitive abilities. Even then they aspire to some subtlety. They’ll intimate that an opponent is feebleminded, but they rarely say so directly. It’s not simply that it’s rude. It’s unprofessional. It’s rare, for the same reason, for a philosopher to directly accuse another of being a “shoddy scholar.” It’s rarer still, again, for the same reason, for a philosopher to accuse another of being immoral. Yet Robin Dembroff has advanced both charges against Byrne.
The debate amongst philosophers surrounding what Byrne has dubbed GenderGate, focuses on a brief passage at the end of Dembroff’s article. The line is:
Byrne’s paper fundamentally is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan [“women are adult human females”] that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons. And it is here that I return to Byrne’s advice to question the motivations behind this debate.”If someone is personally heavily invested in the truth of [some proposition] p,” Byrne writes, “it is prudent to treat [their] claim that p is true with some initial caution.” I agree. So we may ask: What are the motivations of someone who would so confidently insert themself into this high-stakes discourse while so ill-informed?
That is, Dembroff is insinuating here that Byrne has an anti-trans agenda that he is trying to advance in an scholarly paper published in an academic journal even though, again, there is nothing in Byrne’s paper to support such a charge.”
The Gender-woo really needs to stop. :/
Catch the rest of the essay on Counterpunch.
Douglas Murray writing in Unherd describes the penalty and betrayal foisted on J.K. Rowling for having the audacity to speak about verifiable facts.
“This is because on that issue of minimal importance but maximal rage – the Trans debate – Rowling has taken the same view that the majority of the British public holds. Which is that while trans people should be afforded the same rights and dignity as everybody else, they do not have the right to redefine biological reality. Specifically, in the case of Rowling and many others, they do not have the right to redefine what a woman is.
Last week the author took exception to the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” in a news report — the headline writer clearly trying to get around having to use the increasingly triggering word “woman”. As Rowling wittily put it:
This brought the ire of trans Twitter down upon her. That whole army of people who used to be men who tell women to shut up, and the people who think they are helping trans people by pretending that biological sex doesn’t exist and that the clownfish is a suggestive comparison for the biological make-up of human beings.”
The offended feelings crew needs to f*ck off, and the sooner the better.
Is this the future we are heading toward? A new ‘utopian’ state of anarchy? I certainly hope not.
This excerpt describing what the author describes as the ‘woke uprising’ after the killing of George Floyd:
“The key scenes in the woke uprising that followed the killing of George Floyd are rituals of purification in which public officials have washed the feet of insurgents, and acts of iconoclasm in which public monuments have been destroyed or defaced. These are symbolic actions aiming to sever the present from the past, not policies designed to fashion a different future.
The only concrete measure proposed has been to defund and disband the police. As some of the insurrectionaries’ placards have proclaimed, there will be no more police violence when there are no more police. Once repressive institutions have been methodically dismantled, a peaceful anarchy will prevail. As could have been foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, outbreaks of mass looting in Chicago and other cities have not borne out this confidence.
New, ‘transformative’ systems of law enforcement will confront problems not unlike those faced by the police forces that have been dissolved. ‘Autonomous zones’ of the kind that have been announced in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis will need to resolve disputes and enforce their decisions. Local warlords and prophets — some of them no doubt armed — will become arbiters of public safety. When they overreach themselves and fail to protect even minimal levels of security, vigilantes and organised crime will fill the void. Where this proves costly or unstable, federal government may step in and impose order. In other cases, cities may be abandoned to become zones of anarchy.”
I wonder if the current state of activist politics is the antithesis of the liberation movements that came before them. With ever advancement in our history there has always been a counter revolution and corresponding steps backward in terms of human social progress. This current phase shares a fair bit with what Maximilien Robespierre having fun with during his hey-day –
“In his Report on the Principles of Political Morality of 5 February 1794, Robespierre praised the revolutionary government and argued that terror and virtue were necessary:
If virtue is the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country … The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”
The further we descend into the political woke wilderness the more the comparison to counter revolution in France in 1794 seems to stick. :/
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