Does trans-inclusive philosophy have an echo-chamber problem?

"We have avoided citing other arguments here because we take them to be openly transphobic..."

---

Hey there, stalker. If you want to support me—a lowly, lowly student dressed in sackcloth and ashes, tears in my eyes, etc.—consider upgrading your subscription and growing Awol’s Army! I’ll make it well worth your while (wink wink). My current pricings are $6 per month, $60 dollars per year, or—if you want my undying love, a handwritten thank you letter, an hour long Zoom call on basically whatever you want, and undue, corrupting influence on the topics I choose to write about—you can become a founding member, with a one-time payment of $150 dollars or more! Now, on with the show…

---

PROSPECTIVE PUBLIC SERVANT: “…and that’s how I plan to fix waste management in the province of New Brunswick.”

HEARING CHAIR: “OK, next question.”

REPORTER: “Hi there, I’m Alex Smirkington from Patriots of Saskatoon. Our readers were just a little confused about something and were wondering if you could help—simple question, easy to answer: What is a woman?”

PROSPECTIVE PUBLIC SERVANT: “Well, uh—a woman is someone who society treats, um—who identifies—look, I’m not a biologist, can we—”

BLUE HAIR: “—so you’re implying gender is biological and that I should just kill myself and die.” *pulls out X, formerly Twitter*

PROSPECTIVE PUBLIC SERVANT: “No no no! That’s not what I—

REPORTER: “Just to clarify, ma’am, your answer is that men are women and women are men?”

PROSPECTIVE PUBLIC SERVANT: *visibly flustered*—No, no! I’m saying… I’m saying…people please this is about waste management in the Province of New Brunswick!

We’ve all heard this script before.

Quick-Quotes Quill in hand, some un-woke conservative/gender-critical feminist asks: ‘What is a woman?’. Their hapless victim—a trans-inclusive public figure who relies on a trans-inclusive base—proceeds to completely shit the bed because they can’t say ‘adult human female’ but don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to say instead. The exchange is clipped, the Right gets its laughs, the Left gets another boomer to condescendingly dismiss, the internet gets its Daily Dose, and the same thing happens the next day.

Meanwhile, miles above the fray, analytic philosophers have been asking ‘What is a woman?’ as well, and have been doing so for a long time. Their discussion of the question, however, actually has something going for it, in that it’s mostly non-imbecilic.

On the gender-critical side, philosophers like Holly Lawford-Smith, Tomas Bogardus, and Alex Byrne, have been holding down the fort for the biological view of gender—the view that what it is to be a woman is to be an adult human female, and that what it is to be a man is to be an adult human male.

On the trans-inclusive side, philosophers like Rach Cosker-Rowland, Sally Haslanger, and Elizabeth Barnes have rolled up their sleeves and defended alternative, more trans-inclusive definitions of ‘woman’ and ‘man’, ones which make it possible that some women are biologically male, and vice versa.

The philosophical literature on the ‘What is a woman?’ question tackles its subject from two main angles.

First, there’s a descriptive question about the concept WOMAN. (Note: in philosophy papers, concepts—e.g., WOMAN—are normally capitalised, to distinguish them from the thing the concept is a concept of—i.e., women. Heretoforeafter, I shall be utilising this convention, in addition to every other convention of academic writing, such as saying ‘such as’, jarringly plugging in citations (Cf. McClurg 1995), and being unbelievably entertaining and well-written.) The descriptive question is the question of what the concept WOMAN—as currently used—refers to, or picks out in the world.

The way philosophers approach this question, by and large, is by proposing some definition of WOMAN (e.g., ‘adult human female’, ‘someone who occupies a sufficient number of social roles that are traditionally occupied by adult human females’, etc.), and then testing their definition against supposed counterexamples—i.e., supposed examples of people (real or hypothetical) who we are intuitively disposed not to class as women but whom the definition predicts would be women, or people who we are intuitively disposed to class as women but whom the definition predicts would not be women. The merits and demerits of the definitions are weighed up, and, hopefully, we arrive at the best candidate.

(for example, in reply to the ‘adult human female’ definition of WOMAN, Rebecca Mason argues that on every account of what it means to be ‘female’—whether it appeals to chromosomes, gametes, phenotypes, or some combination of the three—the ‘adult human female’ definition will end up excluding people who are uncontroversially women from its definition.)

Second, entirely apart from this, there’s a normative question. Even if WOMAN is not currently a trans-inclusive concept, it’s surely possible to engineer the concept to make it more so. Assuming this is a desirable goal, as trans-inclusive philosophers typically do, the next question becomes: how exactly should the concept WOMAN be tweaked to suit our moral and political goals?

This is where the fun begins. Trans-inclusive philosophers have proposed a battery of new-fangled definitions of WOMAN, in the hopes that, someday, their definition in the Journal of Philosophical Philosophy will trickle down into the hands of activists and left-wing public figures:

REPORTER: “Hi there, I’m Alex Smirkington from Patriots of Saskatoon. Our readers were just a little confused about something and were wondering if you could help—simple question, easy to answer: What is a woman?”

PROSPECTIVE PUBLIC SERVANT: “Sure, someone is a woman if and only if she has an internal ‘map’ that is formed to guide someone classed as a woman through social and material reality.”

REPORTER: “Gee, maybe I should just kill myself.”

I find this all pretty interesting, and I’m excited to see how the debate plays out going forward.

To have a robust debate, though, you need the people involved to interact with those they disagree with.

This is where the trouble begins.

It’s near impossible to prove, in any given case, whether a trans-inclusive philosopher is refusing to give airtime to their gender-critical colleagues, and I’m hesitant to name names.

But there are cases that strike me as suspicious. For example, in Katharine Jenkins’s Ontology and Oppression—published by Oxford University Press—I couldn’t find a single gender-critical philosopher cited in the bibliography, despite the fact that the book cites a wide range of trans-inclusive philosophers on the ‘What is a woman?’ question.

Likewise for Matthew Cull’s book What Gender Should Be. In the introduction, Cull writes:

[W]hilst this book begins from a method that has found its most explicit defenders in the analytic philosophical tradition, I draw on a variety of other traditions throughout, some of whom (as I have argued elsewhere) are doing conceptual engineering themselves (see Cull 2021). So whilst this book is deeply shaped by analytic philosophy, especially analytic feminist philosophy, it is also a product of Black and Marxist feminisms, trans studies, Marxist theory and a number of continental philosophers. This happiness to consort across traditional subdisciplinary boundaries, whilst beginning from analytic methods, is paradigmatic of what I have called ‘analytic trans philosophy’. This quickly growing field of (mostly) transgender philosophers trained in analytic philosophy and interested in issues of justice for trans people are seeking out sources well beyond the analytic canon and bringing the tools of their training to do critical and constructive philosophy.

Yet despite this diverse array of philosophical sources, none of a gender-critical persuasion appear in the references.

In both cases, I suspect the exclusion is intentional, a new frontier in the battle for ‘citational justice’. But, again, without a out-and-out confession, such is hard to prove.

Then came “Much Ado About Nothing: Unmotivating ‘Gender Identity’” by E. M. Hernandez and Rowan Bell, forthcoming in a decently-ranked journal called Ergo. In the paper’s first footnote, in reference to the view that gender is biological (a view that almost 30% of philosophers accept or lean towards), Hernandez and Bell write:

We have avoided citing other arguments here because we take them to be openly transphobic, and we resist giving them more uptake.

And then, later on:

The claim that trans people have an autonomy-based right to transition may ring contentious. Isn’t the problem that some people do think transitioning violates principles of justice and noninjury to others (often, cis women)? There certainly are such people, though we do not plan on giving them space in this paper.

Needless to say: this is very bad! And bad not only as a one-off case, but also in terms of precedent.

Not only is it epistemically self-undermining for one side of a controversial debate to echo-chamber itself against intelligent out-group criticism; it also brings trans-inclusive philosophy into disrepute, which is bad if you care about trans-inclusive philosophy!

There is so much to read and so little time: I am very unlikely to devote hours of my life to reading a work of philosophy that won’t engage with opposing viewpoints. Why would I?

Why would anyone?

As Princeton Philosopher Robert P. George tweeted in response to Hernandez and Bell’s paper: “This is how philosophy ends—not with a bang or even a whimper, but with an embarrassing little proclamation of dogmatism.”

---

For help finding some of the relevant literature, I’m grateful to Tomas Bogardus, Holly Lawford-Smith, and a mysterious GC group-chat.

---