Dr. Kathleen Stock was a professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. This is the first of a series of posts reviewing her brave and lucidly written Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.
In her introduction she elegantly sums up the recent, unexpected cultural “gender” tidal wave which has struck the western world. Reading just one page, you can see that despite her being a professional philosopher, this book is going to be both engaging and understandable, unlike many works of analytic philosophy.
Like other Philosophers now weighing in on these topics, she did not initially specialize in the sort of gender philosophy which has now escaped from its ivory tower lab and infected the masses. Thus, the first move of people in that narrow guild is to simply try to delegitimize her. She writes,
. . . academics already working in these fields often consider me unqualified. When I write opinion pieces for magazines or speak on TV, I can almost feel the eye rolls. I am characterised as a clumsy, intellectually unsophisticated rube, making old mistakes in my thinking that they have long since put behind them. ‘Hasn’t she read the literature?’ they ask. ‘How can she be so naïve?’ (p. 8)
Let it suffice to say that this is a vicious and irrelevant personal attack: ye olde ad hominem fallacy, attacking the person rather than the claim or argument. This is very common, I can attest, and it is a standard first move, a sort of aggressive gatekeeping seen among the True Believers such as Robin Dembroff. They will shriek that you simply have no right to be in the conversation. But it’s a coward’s move, and it betrays the felt weakness of their own arguments. Of course, this sort of cheap reply was the least of her worries.
Dr. Stock writes,
Yet my outsider status in this area has many benefits. As far as I can see, standard academic norms for the production of knowledge are not often observed in fields that deal with matters of sex and gender. The whole area has become unacceptably politicised. Particular articles and books are treated like sacred texts rather than the opinionated, potentially fallible or myopic arguments they actually are. As one trans author, Andrea Long Chu, puts it, the result is ‘warmed-over pieties’ and ‘something like church’.There are small things you may question or criticise, and then there are the fundamental orthodoxies it is considered transphobic to deny. Evidence or facts are considered relevant only when they help what is perceived to be the political cause of trans people. Any philosophical critiques that do sometimes (rarely) emerge – especially by non-trans academics – are regularly treated as equivalent to actual attacks on trans people rather than as critiques of views about trans people, or of trans activist commitments. It’s assumed these critiques are not worthy of rational engagement but should be met only with strong moral disapproval and suppression. This sort of judgement floats down from on high, via academic managers, journal editors and referees, to make sure that, on the ground, no dissenting voice gets into ‘the literature’ without a huge struggle. Even worse, it helps ensure that hardly any seriously dissenting voices get into the discipline areas in the first place.
In this suffocating context, I definitely count as a heretic. And that suits me fine. I didn’t become a professional philosopher to go to church. (p. 9)
She ends by noting that she has decided to use pronouns in the newly-demanded style. Apparently that didn’t buy her much good will from intolerant trans activists! Next time, her ch 1, a short of historical survey about “gender” ideas.
