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Kathleen Stock is a philosophy professor. Her writing is careful, accessible and compassionate. Her latest essay tries to do justice to all sides of the arguments on gender identity and explores constructive solutions for protecting everyone’s rights quillette.com/2019/04/11/ign…
People like Kathleen are speaking up at significant personal cost to try to find a middle ground. To make it habitable they need back up from those who can give or withhold legitimacy. In philosophy one of these is Daily Nous edited by Justin Weinberg @DailyNousEditor
Justin refused to include a link to Kathleen’s essay in his regular “heap of links”. He said he’s not an expert but dismissed her article as containing ‘questionable moves’ and passages that were “gratuitously obnoxious”. dailynous.com/wp-content/upl…
Here is Kathleen’s response in which she answers each of his points medium.com/@kathleenstock…
And here is a thread by @mary_leng which picks up on one particularly egregious “questionable move” by Justin
Of course “no one’s entitled to a link”. Justin says as a ’cis het man’ he doesn’t have much skin in the game & he didn't want to take the time to moderate a heated discussion on the site (he has posted several links critical of Kathleen previously though)
This might just be one poor judgement, but this story of people who put themselves on the line by writing careful analysis on this topic are shunned as too offensive for even the mildest endorsement is repeated in every sector of thinking.
My experience: I tried to get my article published by organisations with an interest in gender and development medium.com/@MForstater/in…
@cgdev said no (and I lost my job for wanting to talk about this topic). The @ICRW said its “not the right fit for us”. I tried it with the @LSEengenderings. They said no. I sent the link to Ranil Dissanayake for his Friday round-up, but he didn’t run it and so on….
Or take another sector: human rights @Rights_info ran a series of articles last year about debates on the GRA but excluded any analysis by gender critical legal experts @adamwagner1 Amnesty says there is nothing to say on women's rights in relation to gender identity laws
All of this has the effect of giving onlookers the impression that there is no legitimate argument to be had. Because if there was these progressive respectable orgs would surely have made space? Because thats their job…..
And it makes it harder for those who have understood that there are real issues to speak up. It allows the debate to remain toxic, while those that could detoxify stand back and say ’see why we don’t want to get involved in that’ (and aren't those women angry?)
But courage calls to courage, while cowardice cowers. So read Kathleen’s article and share it. Because thats how walls come down.
