They say that you should own your failures. If that’s true, and wealth is measured by how much you own, I would have become rich long ago. My failure to write this newsletter since [too embarrassed to check] is just the latest of a long list of failures to do what a proper ‘authorpreneur’ should: work harder on ‘building an audience’ and a ‘brand’ than actually writing.
Having tried several things, I’m now going to try to simplify and consolidate them all, and that has implications for this newsletter. Until now it has been nominally monthly, in reality occasional, with updates on what I’ve been up to. From early next year it will become a most-weekly Substack-style newsletter, in which I’ll be sharing some musings provoked by the week’s events, along with brief updates and some links I hope you’ll find interesting. Unlike many Substack newsletters, I don’t ever intend to charge for it.
I will also be closing my Patreon page. I’ve been very grateful to the people who have supported me but I haven’t been able to devote enough time to it to make it value for money and have suspended charges for the last three months. The exclusive content for Patreon Patrons, along with my Medium articles, will all soon be in a supporter-only area of my website, available for a £5 monthly subscription. Supporters will also be able to attend exclusive online ‘café philosphique’ discussions. (If you sign up here before I do a proper launch you’ll get no content straight away but I will send you a signed book with optional dedication, and it will be an incentive for me to get on with it!)
As this changes the nature of this newsletter (which will go under the resurrected name of microphilosophy), I appreciate this means some of you may wish to hit the unsubscribe button without any further delay. Before you do, you might want to keep reading, as what follows will give you some sense of what to expect from future editions.
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Unless you’ve been living a news-free, off-line hermit’s life, you can’t have missed the increasingly heated debate about trans rights. A few years ago I would never have guessed it would get this fraught. Of course there were some ultra-conservative religious folk who were never going to accept people who don’t want to live as society says someone with their body should. But most of us had come to embrace gay and lesbian rights and wanted trans people to be given the same respect as anyone else. Trans rights was not a done deal, but most had already signed it.
So why has the issue become so divisive? This has fascinated me ever since I invited a philosopher with view on this to take part in the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s 2019 Annual Debate. If you didn’t know her name then you will now: Kathleen Stock. As far as I knew, she was a respectable, lesbian feminist academic who had the support of other philosophers with impeccably liberal credentials. To others, however, she is a transphobic peddler of hate speech, whose bigotry actually puts trans people at risk.
To briefly summarise the main point of contention, people on both sides of the debate say that they want full rights for trans people. The difference is that the most visible trans rights advocates hold the position that the categories ‘man’, ’woman’ and other non-binary options, should be assigned purely on the basis of what each individual believes that they are, irrespective of any other facts. So if a person with a penis, testicles and XY chromosomes says that they are a woman, she is a woman, period. On the other side, gender critical feminists say that biology cannot be ignored and that although in many situations we are right to address people how they would like be addressed, using the pronouns they prefer, the biological categories of male and female cannot be abolished and that in many situations, those are the categories that should determine the use of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’. This, according to the other side, is transphobic, and people who maintain it are called Terfs: trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
In situations like this you come to realise that we may all live on the same planet, but we can live in very different worlds. Since I’m both morally and intellectually committed to trying to understand others’ points of views as sympathetically as possible, this is all very unsettling. It seems that both camps believe completely different things, both can’t be right, and whoever is wrong is making a dreadful mistake. So if I’m missing what’s crucial, I could be making a terrible mistake too.
But when you examine the case each side is making, it seems impossible to believe they are even talking about the same thing. Take recent coverage of Kathleen Stock’s resignation from Sussex University, after coming to the conclusion she could not carry on working there under the pressures of the student campaign to have her sacked. In interviews for the FT and on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour, Stock came across as reasonable, totally in support of trans people, and also justifiably feeling very intimidated.
But then if you read an article like this lengthy j’accuse by Christa Peterson or this one by Caitlin Green on the website Liberal Currents, you’d think she was a nasty piece of work and you’d be calling for her sacking too. For example, Green says that ‘After spending considerable time and effort searching, I found no concrete evidence of Stock receiving threats or harassment from students. But there is documented evidence that Stock has, on more than one occasion, reached out to the employers of students who have criticized her and demanded professional censure in retaliation, threatened them with frivolous claims of harassment and defamation when their speech should have been protected, and dragged their names through the mud.’ The article also claims that after being told she should not have tweeted to a critic ‘oh do fuck off, you complete and utter dickhead’ she doubled-down, replying ‘Fuck off you dickhead moron xxxx’.
How on Earth is an outsider supposed to make sense of this? And the question that worries me, as a philosopher, is: how on Earth can critical thinking skills be of any help?
Although I might feel dismayed, I do think that the key habits of good reasoning should help. First and foremost, good thinking requires that you do not jump to conclusions, that you are willing to abide in uncertainty. A lot of the discomfort in this case is that the desire to be on the ‘right’ side makes you too eager to jump too soon. Simply accepting that it is confusing and might take a while to clear up should be part of the critical thinker’s skillset.
Second, as David Hume said, ‘a wise man [cis or trans] proportions his belief to his evidence.’ This proportioning should be according to the quality of the evidence, not the quantity. The pieces attacking Stock are very long indeed and it’s easy to assume that the sheer volume of evidence presented is damning. But if you look at each piece more carefully, there seems to be a lot of pre-judging and assumption going on. In Green’s piece, for instance, we are told right at the beginning that Stock is not ‘focused on philosophy of fiction at this time,’ preferring instead to focus on writing, broadcast appearances, and activism ‘aimed at rolling back the rights of trans people in the UK.’ That last claim is extremely question-begging, and assumes malign motives on Stock’s part, telling us the author has already made of their mind.
A lot of the other claims are presented as though they are clear-cut but as soon as you look, it’s not so clear. For example, nothing could seem to be more empirical than they claim that Stock tweeted ‘’oh do fuck off, you complete and utter dickhead’. But reconstructing the actual circumstances of the insult isn’t easy, and Stock and her defenders claim it was in response to a libellous tweet. It’s hard to say what an ill-judged outburst reveals, other than limited patience.
When comparing evidence, it is always better to place more weight on direct rather than indirect evidence, what you know to be true not what has been reported. Whenever I have heard Stock she has never sounded at all bigoted. I have also read her book, Material Girls (which I reviewed here) and again, it does not contain an ounce of hate.
So, I think a reasonable outsider to these debates, using their critical faculties properly, would come to a few well-grounded conclusions. First, Stock is not nasty, but she could be wrong in ways that are very bad for trans people. Second, given that many people are convinced her views are harmful for trans people – Green says ‘for some people, social acceptance of their gender identity is a matter of life and death’ – it is understandable that hearing Stock say them again and again is hard to take. So it is possible to make some sense of the heated conviction both sides have of their superior virtue without deciding which is correct on the substantive issue at the core of the debate: whether a trans woman is a woman, and a trans man is a man, period.
However, that does not remove all my unease. What is still worrying is that all of the academics involved in this debate should have very good critical thinking skills, but a lot of them are coming to a hopelessly wrong and misguided conclusion. I often like to think that clearer thinking can help us through difficult debates but in this case, I fear that even more than Hume believed, reason really is the slave of the passions.
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Upcoming events
I’m doing a talk on the Speakeasy platform this Tuesday, November 16, called ‘How to Think Like a Philosopher (and When Not To)’. It’s usually $25 but I’ve got a discount code for you which gets you in for half price. Just enter THINKING50 at checkout. The talk is an early sneak preview of a book I’m writing of the same name.
I’m chairing the weekly Royal Institute of Philosophy London [but online] Lecture Series most Thursday evenings, on the theme of Expanding Horizons. We’ve had three great talks already which you can watch here but it’s good to have people join live on the night and to receive your questions.
I’m handing over chairing duties to the BBC’s Ritual Shah for the RIP’s Annual Debate, ‘Has Science Killed Philosophy?’ with Carlo Rovelli, Eleanor Knox, and Alex Rosenberg. This is going to be a real highlight.
On November 24th I’m doing an online talk ‘Is Humanism Global?’ in the University of Dundee Chaplaincy series ‘One People: Many Philosophies’.
If you’re in or around Bristol, I’ll be doing my monthly in person Philosophical Times discussion at St Georges on Saturday 20 November and 11 December.
Recent writings
Apart from my Stock review, I wrote a correspondence-inducing piece on throwing out books for the FT and a cinematic memoir for Bristol Ideas’s Film 2021 project.
Book of the week
My review of Michael Ignatieff’s On Consolation will be published by the Literary Review in the new year. No spoilers, except to say Ignatieff should be pleased.
That’s it for this preview edition. I hope you’re persuaded it’s worth passing over that unsubscribe button and sticking around for more.
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