Opposition to introducing 'gender identity' in UK law is being mounted, which also challenges the philosophy supporting it, philosophical ‘deconstruction’.
Deconstruction, as it has manifested in gender ideology, not just poor philosophy but nihilism; the same kind of maligning of human life which led intelligent people to hold, a number of years ago (and which many people still hold), that consciousness is ‘in fact’ the brain operating which gives only an illusion of agency, so that 'I', 'my self', am an illusion.
In academia, in ‘gender studies’, there is only language, and the subject (the self) is constituted by language. But in gender ideology, the ideas pushed by activists, ‘gender’ is also an innate quality (an essence) which is located in the body/brain, which can be mis-aligned with the sexed body. According to this ideology, a person can be ‘born in the wrong body’ and undergo ‘the wrong puberty’, which will bring about that person’s deep misery and risk of suicide. Everyone is pressurised to accept this story by that threat of suicide.
It’s important to not be intimidated by that threat, to accept this false and damaging ideology. Don’t allow the trans-perbole of ‘you’re killing trans people’ to intimidate you into accepting the ideology.
In the last two days a website has been online presenting an Open Letter in support of Sussex University’s stand for academic freedom.
https://openlettertosussexfromukphilosophers.wordpress.com/
The letter has signatories from many academics across the UK, many from senior positions in established and well-regarded universities.
Here is a screenshot of an example of an exchange in one Twitter thread, responding to the open letter and signatories. The first tweet / reply is from someone who apparently fears that trans people are threatened with being ‘erased’.
(Another reaction, to the Sussex University / Kathleen Stock situation, considers the question of whether a document which Kathleen Stock has endorsed, the ‘Declaration of Women’s Sex-Based Rights’
[see https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/ ]
is - in respect of ‘transgender’ - “eliminationist” and “genocidal”. I refer to British-US academic Grace Lavery’s blog-post, https://grace.substack.com/p/the-uk-media-has-seriously-bungled?fbclid=IwAR2kYnVhneR2qjYUjadKZGW3gprtD0Dh_EjH-kPaBB6NcpqKIhwSM82SXsA)
(A BBC statement was given on Politics Live after a student claimed the DWSR “wants to eliminate trans people in law”. The BBC statement, read out on Politics Live, stated that it was Kathleen Stock’s view that the “declaration does not amount to the claim that trans people should be eliminated in law” - quotation from the BBC statement. The Grace Lavery article considers whether or not this “elimination” is implied. I want to discuss subjective erasure, or subjective ‘elimination’, - that’s why I am referring to this here).
It’s been remarked that many of the signatories to the letter above represent British “analytic philosophy”, and I understand that Professor Stock is someone who works in that tradition, that she is an 'analytic philosopher'.
In her paper presented to the UK Aristotelian Society in 2020, “What is Sexual Orientation?”, Professor Stock makes reference to the so-called ‘divide’ in modern western philosophy between so-called ‘Analytical’ and so-called ‘Continental’ philosophy.
As highlighted in the screenshot from that paper, above, Stock makes clear that she cannot address, within the confines of that paper, the fundaments of that divide between philosophy traditions. The ‘divide’ is old (200+ years) and deep, although some philosophers see grounds for there to be a re-joining (Hans Johann Glock for example). (The topic has been discussed on BBC Radio 4 'In our time', which I recommend).
Anyway, the 'divide' in philosophy is, I think, a real divide and which is on display in this confrontation over claims for 'rights' of people who identify as 'transgender' (and how they conflict with other rights and protections such as 'sex-based protections' already established in law) and the freedom to question the basis for these claims. It seems to me that the existential attitude of ‘Continental’ philosophy collides fully in this issue. Language as thought of in Continental philosophy, that is, as ‘constitutive’ of ‘self’, is running up against language as thought of in Analytic philosophy, that is, as a kind of ‘tool’, made up of ‘concepts’.
The difference between these attitudes is profound, and to adopt one attitude and or the other can, I think, be experienced as a kind of nullification of self. (I have experienced that myself, more of which below). Maybe temperament decides for a person if they like the ‘Analytic’ approach or the ‘Continental’ approach.
Mary Midgley was a philosopher trained in the Analytic mode at Oxford University in the 1940s. I think her writing is a great resource for addressing this present issue. Her last book (2017) is called “Are you an illusion?”, which explores the massive sense of subjective erasure which arises when it is claimed - by people in academia, who command popular respect and exert powerful influence - that our very consciousness is reducible to the activity of 'matter'/brains, so that what we think of as our Agency, and our free will, is illusory. This was a line being persistently and loudly proclaimed - mostly in the US - by philosophers such as Patricia Churchland, whose school of thought even earned a name: ‘eliminative materialism’. (The ‘eliminative’ is instructive here, I think!) Indeed it is a doctrine which ‘eliminates’ something (i.e. Agency) which people hold very dear to themselves as who they are in this world. The parallel is clear, I hope, with the sense that people speak of, when they say that ‘Trans people are threatened with being erased’. The feeling of erasure is because (is it not?) the concept of ‘gender identity’ is being questioned, is being criticised.
Stemming from a tradition in philosophy (the ‘Continental’ tradition) in which the idea of ‘essences’ is challenged, such that all we take to be 'essential' is in fact ‘linguistic’, ‘gender’ is - on one hand - regarded as a matter of ‘performed’ ‘citations’ of previous ‘gender’ ‘presentations’, all understood, more or less, as kinds of language; and language is 'constitutive' of 'self' (or, of 'identity', possibly). There is no ‘essence’ of ‘gender’ in this approach. But this appears to be at complete loggerheads with, on the other hand, the notion of an innate ‘gender identity’, free-floating from language. The ‘self’ is either ‘constituted’ by language or it is prior to, and grounded somewhere outside of, language: ‘extra-‘ or ‘pre-‘ ‘discursive’. It can’t be both. The ideas are incompatible and mutually exclusive.
But (bizarrely in contradiction to any post-structuralist writing I am aware of, where ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are discussed, and which theories are the origins of this rigid dogma) innate ‘gender identity’ is posited as the neurological condition for ‘gender dysphoria’ to occur, such that medical intervention is required - as a matter of expert medical opinion, repeated in many activist presentations - to ‘adjust’ the body to conform to the ‘identity’. (See, for example, YouTube conversation between Meghan Murphy and Julie Rei Goldstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yawM1CRWxE). If the concept of ‘innate’ ‘gender identity’ is questioned, so is the basis for Medicine to retain its claims to expert status and privileged position from which to pronounce on ‘gender-affirmative care’, such as is on display in WPATH’s statement in response to Abigail Shrier’s recent interview with WPATH member Marci Bowers MD.
A very popular Marxist (‘Continental’) philosopher Slavoj Zizek has spoken about this 'gender essentialism'.
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It does not perturb the post-structuralist-inspired political disrupters of norms (‘enforced heterosexuality’ or whatever) that essentialisms like ‘neurologically-based’ or ‘biologically-based’ ‘gender’ are given, because they know these arguments are diverted down cul-de-sacs of ‘what the science says’, ‘what is objectively true’, ‘what science shows to be true’. The reason is that these political disrupters of norms can point to ‘intersectional’ feminism, and feminist theories such as Standpoint Epistemology, which regards itself as having rendered science an arbitrary framework, which is justifiably set aside or un-learned on grounds that it is Patriarchal, hetero-sexist, or whatever. (The self-described ‘recovering Logical Positivist’ Prof. Sandra Harding is one of the US academics behind Standpoint Theory. So far as I can tell, this theory - like so many others influencing institutions today- has emerged from a distinctly American-empiricist and instrumentalisibg uptake of French post-structuralism.
This instrumentalising attitude within US academia, seems to have been noticed and commented on by Jacques Derrida, a French post-structuralist philosopher, who taught in the US. In this YouTube clip he is questioned by an American journalist on comments he had made about this, and he is presented, in the very stance of the journalist, with an example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2j578jTBCY
What a pity Harding could not have opted - in her critique of Positivism - for the non-foundationalism of Karl Popper, as celebrated by Malachi Hacohen, instead of the radical subjectivism and idealism to which she seems to have turned).
With a few exceptions, you will not hear a post-structuralist philosopher decry philosophical essentialism deployed in these political arguments, I suspect because they know on which side their bread is buttered. Philosophical Idealism suits them very much, because it serves tbe creation of an enclosed system within academia, where abstruse questions are turned over by cognoscenti who only have ears and eyes for each other, and while the population at large is subject to all manner of tyranny of their ideas, passed down by an indoctrinated bureaucracy, installed for the benefit of its own existence.
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One of Mary Midgley’s ideas - I recall it from one of the last interviews she gave before she died - is that our emotions can and should be controlled by our intellect. In the face of feeling ‘erased’ by an idea, what else is there to do except try to come to terms with the fact that it is an idea which is causing this pain? Letting go of an idea that has gripped us is painful, and we might prefer to continue to act in the world so the idea is upheld, is realised! Is it a good idea?
I am reminded of a film: “Come and see!”, set in Poland (I think) during WW2. A young Polish man witnesses the worst atrocities of Fascism and Nazism in his country, and at the last moment - as he is about to kill and become a killer - he recognises the human being that is, and has been, in the grip of a pernicious and evil idea, and decides to (metaphorically) “Kill the Hitler” in himself. The idea dies. He succeeds to 'Kill the Hitler' in himself and spares himself and the world (the other person).
If people reading don’t know about the ‘divide’ and what it entails in history, I recommend anything by UK philosopher Andrew Bowie; a short book ‘Continental Philosophy’ by UK philosopher Simon Critchley, and the (still, to my mind) amazing pair of essays by John Stuart Mill exploring the limits of Utilitarianism: ‘Bentham’ (1836) and ‘Coleridge’ (around the same date).
Criticisms of 'gender identity' are expressed from within academic discourse, which question an idea implied in a doctrine also generated within academia.
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