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1/ A thread with my thoughts on the current controversy on trans people and gender critical positions. I have stayed mostly silent so far, but I’ve been reading all of the main recent pieces published on both ‘sides’ of the controversy.
2/ As I understand the gender-critical position, there are two kinds of claims being made: metaphysical claims and policy-related claims. On the metaphysical side, it seems to be a version of biological essentialism, especially on the point that a person who was ‘born male’...
3/ ... can never become female properly speaking, and the insistence on sex rather than gender as the relevant category. On the policy side of things, there is the demand for safeguarding female-only spaces (which is supported by metaphysical claims)...
4/ ...and for protection of the purported risk posed by trans women to cis women in those spaces. I hope that’s a fair summary.
5/ On the metaphysical claim, I have deep-seated anti-essentialist metaphysical commitments about pretty much everything (Nagarjuna fan here!), and so also about sex/gender; fluid borders everywhere. The gender critical authors have not offered any new argument in favor of...
6/ ... biological essentialism, and the old ones have all been debunked by scientific as well as metaphysical considerations. So none of what has been said seems to offer decisive arguments supporting sex/gender essentialism.
7/ On the policy-related claims, first of all it does not follow that policy should be determined by metaphysics (as well put by R. Dembroff in @HiPhiNation podcast). So even if biological essentialism were true, it would still not uniquely determine the right policies to adopt.
8/ Secondly, the purported threat posed by trans women to other women seems most of all to be a primal fear of men and male individuals in general (which follows from the attribution of inherent maleness to trans women).
9/ But while the incidence of violence against women committed by men is well documented, here the relevant category for the statistics should be ‘trans women’, not men. Do trans women really display a pattern of systematic, statistically significant violence against other women?
10/ True, there are a few cases of men in bad faith claiming to be trans women in order to e.g. be sent to female prisons, and there perpetrated violent acts on women. What this shows is that *as a matter of policy* there should be mechanisms in place to block such instances
11/ As with every policy, bad actors will try to bend it to their advantage. So pure and simple self-ID as a policy might be naïve in that it does not guarantee mechanisms to deal with such cases. But that does not make self-ID a bad policy principle, broadly speaking.
12/ The GC camp tends to present the situation as a zero-sum game: the well-being of trans ppl is inversely correlated with the well-being of (cis)women. Here too I have not found convincing arguments; in fact this smacks of good-old, misguided second-wave zero-sum thinking.
13/ So to conclude, GC seems to be based on assumptions that are dogmatically repeated rather than argued for. Unlike ppl who I hold in high esteem, I do not think GC positions are not even worth engaging with, but they do not strike me as very strong philosophical positions.
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