Thread by @jichikawa

I've been thinking for some years about defensiveness as an epistemic vice, especially as it relates to normative criticism.

We're all imperfect, which means that there is something wrong with all of us. But nobody likes to be criticized, which means we're all vulnerable to something we don't like.

One phenomenon I'm particularly interested is when criticism of an idea feels like a personal attack.

This happens with all kinds of criticisms, but it's especially pronounced with moral ones. As we all know, describing something a colleague said as racist can be extremely incendiary, triggering a virulent defensive response.

Remember a few months ago when Mark Meadows brought out a black woman to stand there while he said Trump couldn't be racist since he hired her? Rashida Tlaib accurately described that as a racist move. She ended up apologizing for hurting his feelings!

politico.com/story/2019/02/…

There's a 3-way distinction to be drawn with the label 'racist':

1- an adjective applying to an action/idea/utterance (that's racist)
2- an adjective applying to a person (he's racist)
3- a noun for a kind of person (he's a racist)

Tlaib was using 1, and Meadows flipped out at the idea of 3.

(the first bit of Tlaib's quote is about applying 2 to Trump)
(the Politico piece itself, in parts not screenshotted, muddies the distinction between 2 and 3)

This phenomenon is widely recognized. Robin DiAngelo's (2011) "White Fragility" is the locus classicus libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/v…

Compare also Karen Frost-Arnold's excellent work on "defensive ignorance", which applies the challenge particularly to social media. philpapers.org/rec/FROSMT-2

Racism is of course but one example of the phenomenon. Things play out in pretty much exactly the same way for all generally-condemned axes of structural oppression: sexism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.

The fact that so much of this oppression is structural makes the instinct to defensiveness, and the perception of being personally attacked, at the idea that one is participating in oppression, a more obvious mistake. But it remains a tempting one.

My ideas and expectations about e.g. women are the product of a lifetime raised in and breathing a deeply paternalistic and misogynistic society. My progressive feminist education did a lot but I shouldn't be too surprised if it turns out some of my ideas or actions are sexist

Certainly I should listen to a serious interlocutor who tells me they think something I said was sexist. After all if it were true I'd want to know! And hearing it as an attack on me — that I am *a sexist*—would interfere with my epistemic goals. Still, it remains tempting!

I think this may have something to do with the observation I made the other day, about how I've been getting so many personal insults from trans-exclusionary philosophers on twitter.

The pattern I documented then was, I criticise someone's ideas or scholarly qualifications, and they reply with personal insults.

"Your comment demonstrates ignorance of the literature on gender."
"Well you are a privileged mansplaining shit."

https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/1155354007151321093

Part of why this happens, I suspect, is that they think they're responding to personal attacks from me. Certainly I've read enough times about the attacks that trans-exclusionary philosophers think I'm making against them.

Professor Stock insinuated, in response to my highlighting a piece about a trans student felt unwelcome in philosophy and left, that I don't deserve my job in philosophy. (I didn't mention Stock in my thread, though the piece I linked to did.) (She never replied to my reply.)

(And @christapeterso, a grad student who has done more work than anyone to document and push back against this harmful rhetoric, thinks that trans-exclusionary philosophers are trying to ruin her career. I can certainly understand why!)

Let me reiterate, since it keeps getting (let's charitably assume) forgotten — I've never tweeted ANY of the following about any trans-exclusionary phil'pher:

* they should be punished for their speech
* they shouldn't have a job
* they deserve to suffer
* they are a transphobe

I have said that some trans-exclusionary philosophers' ideas are:

* not worth taking seriously
* doing great harm
* bad scholarship

As re white fragility, that these kinds of critiques are heard as those kind is a serious challenge to important discourse.

As in the case of 'racist', the 'transphobia' labels can be used in three ways.

1- an adjective applying to an action/idea/utterance (that's transphobic)
2- an adjective applying to a person (he's transphobic)
3- a noun for a kind of person (he's a transphobe)

(Unlike in the case of racism, sense 3 for transphobia is actually spelled and pronounced differently from the others, so there's actually even less room for ambiguity!)

Just as white fragility sucks people into hearing critiques about racist actions as labelling 'a racist' (that particularly bad kind of person), so too does 'cis fragility' make people hear critiques of transphobic ideas as essentializing personal labels. "A transphobe."

(Although actually, I've searched my tweets and it looks like I've never even described any particular thing any individual philosopher has ever done as transphobic. I.e., not even in sense 1! Certainly I could point to a lot of examples but it looks like I haven't!)

Obviously there's some relationship between doing transphobic things and being a transphobe. But if we say that anyone who ever does something transphobic is "a transphobe", we make the latter an unhelpfully weak category, given the pervasiveness of transphobic cultural memes

I'm following the model of @kate_manne's discussion of 'misogynist' in Down Girl. Misogyny is a cultural force that does not depend on the existence of that particular kind of person, the misogynist. Manne reserves that label for "over-achievers" in misogynist action/influence

@kate_manne So with all due respect to Dr. Lawford-Smith, I think this is a deeply confused reading of Dr. Manne's book (as well as being quite unfair to me personally).

That’s most obviously because Manne explicitly restricts the person-label ‘misogynist’ to people guilty of extreme misogyny, like Rush Limbaugh and Elliot Rodger. (Also of course, no where in Manne’s book does she say that criticising women’s ideas is ipso facto misogynistic.)

This mistake is also harmful to Manne, who was threatened last year by Jordan Peterson with a lawsuit that traded on exactly the conflation I’m discussing here.

https://twitter.com/kate_manne/status/1042898963706339329

I know I’m asking us to do something slightly subtle. We use similar words to discuss structural systems, actions, & people. I’m saying: don't conflate them.

Fortunately we are philosophers, so if that gives us any expertise in anything, it’s in respecting subtle distinctions!

OK, thank you for reading my thread. Have a nice day! Follow my pets on instagram here: instagram.com/drusilla.mezzo…

hi @ThreadReaderApp, could you unroll this for me? (I've never tried asking before, let's see if I'm doing it right)

Oh I guess it would have made sense to link to my previous remarks on that lawsuit, in case they're of interest to anyone following along now.

https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/1042917364893802496