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Re: Byrne... in the third paragraph of the article you link, he pulls the standard trick of switching from using the word 'gender' to the word 'sex' without notice or justification, as if the proposed difference in the meaning of those two terms weren't the entire crux of the question at issue here. In the second paragraph, he plays the standard 'identify as an attack helicopter' card (in this case, a princess) as if this were actually a meaningful comparison.
Yes, it's true that writers back then were not writing things specifically responding to Byrne's specific rhetoric, because that specific rhetoric hadn't been compiled back then.
Better to say that writers back then were already writing things that obviated his arguments. That were sufficiently careful about semantics that they make these types of games obvious and hollow, that explored the different types of social roles and their relation to physical processes, that talked about the battle between society and the individual to define identity and social function, in ways that make his rhetoric look sophomoric.
Much of this doesn't even need to come from writing on gender, the rhetorical tricks being used are broader than that, and flimsy enough to be shown up by more general philosophy.
Re: arguing about which one of us should be treated as the authority on this topic... No, I'm not an academic philosopher working on topics of gender, as I'm pretty sure you aren't either (would have been weird not to mention given the rest of your comment). Yes, I have worked in academia and on faculty in the social sciences, and currently have a wife and several other family and friends working as active professors in various social and hard sciences, and am pretty abreast of all of the issues you mention.
And yes, I'm aware of a lot of professors feeling the type of tension you're talking about, and I'm not denying it exists.
What I am saying, to be as clear as possible, is this:
The fact that professors would get in trouble for actively promoting transphobic ideas to a wide audience, is not evidence that those ideas (or more mild ones on that side of the argument) are correct.
The fact that professors might face social policing for publicly agreeing with or praising Byrne, is not evidence that actually they secretly admire and agree with him but are too chicken to admit it.
This is what I was trying to get at in my first comment and in the first part of my previous comment, and I kind of wish it were where this conversation was focused since it was my original point.
This is not to say that it can never be the case that true, good ideas become unpopular and censured, and that this can lead to them not receiving the attention and respect they should have. This absolutely does happen, and indeed we should be ever vigilant for cases of it.
But it is, in fact, possible for bad and wrong ideas to become unpopular and censured, too.
In fact, we should a priori expect that the happen much more often than the reverse, and my experience of the world leaves me with the belief that this is how it more often goes.
At the very least, an idea being unpopular and censured should not be treated as evidence in favor of it being correct (or important or useful or etc), which I fear is very much the implication I get from articles like Byrne's and threads like this one.
If you will permit me to use the ad absurdum case for clarity, rather than as any kind of insinuation: just because Hitler's ideas are very unpopular and any professor would get censured or fired for publicly endorsing them, is not evidence that actually they are correct or important and need to be discussed more widely and taken more seriously. To the extent there is any causal relationship between those two factors at all, it is probably a negative correlation rather than a positive one.
That's most of what I'm really reacting against, here: my impression that people are using emotional affect against censors and cancel mobs to improperly imply Bayesian evidence in favor of their victims being correct, in ways that drive people towards incorrect conclusions and worse arguments.
I care a little bit about the lives and rights and happiness and etc. of trans people. But I care a lot more about bad argumentation and improper Bayesian reasoning. That's what is driving me nuts, here, and what I find I am ussually agitated by when I read arguments on this topic.
Jesus Christ. Can you name an article that you think does this job? Because as far as I can tell you're still just wrong about this. Gender theory has been infected with postmodernist motte-and-bailey doctrines from its very inception. Even de Beauvoir's foundational cleave of sex and gender is mostly motte-and-bailey, trivial when true but primarily useful to gender radicals when false.
Even calling Byrne's arguments "rhetoric" is doing just exactly what you're accusing Byrne of doing with sex and gender. Using the purely rhetorical word "transphobic" as if it had some kind of clear and agreed-upon meaning is also assuming your conclusions in advance. You're not making arguments, you're just sneering at Byrne for not agreeing with you on the matter already. You decline to take up the substance of his argument because, why? Oh, because someone in the 60s or 70s already did, swear to God, not that you can apparently actually tell me who or where. You say that people laughing at him doesn't make him right--well, no shit! And yet all I've said to that is it doesn't make him wrong, either, and so people who proceed from laughter to avoiding even engaging on the merits (e.g. by cancelling his damn book, or in your case by hand-waving "this was surely handled in the 60s") look pretty fucking shady, from a Bayesian perspective or any other.
The point is not that someone is, or is not, correct because people laugh at them. The point is that the people who hold themselves out as being most committed to engagement with challenging ideas, have refused to engage with these challenging ideas. Your sneering response was "eh, you deserve to be laughed at instead of engaged with." Which is exactly what is being complained of.
You have dragged this conversation onto irrelevant grounds. I don't appear to disagree with you about whether laughter makes someone more or less likely to be right or wrong. Where you and I appear to disagree is that you have shown yourself to think that laughter is an adequate response to ideas you don't like, or don't agree with, or imagine to have been taken care of at some point in the past--and I do not. At minimum, because there are always new people who must learn what others before them came to discover! To refute with the shorthand of laughter is to decline the responsibility of teaching. Which is something I can accept from people whose vocation is not to teach, but when university professors engage in that shit, it is shameful and embarrassing. I pity all students subjected to attitudes like the one you are defending here--to say nothing of the fact that such responses contravene the very spirit of this discussion space.
It feels like you're really dedicated to assigning me a position and actions that I don't hold and am not taking. This assumption about me feels weaved throughout all your comments in a way that makes it hard to respond to the other parts, because engaging with any of it feels like granting your premise about my position.
I never called Byrne transphobic, nor anyone else. I've used that word exactly once in this conversation, in a hypothetical example to agree with you that professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things, and where I also explicitly called out the distinction between that and the milder, non-transphobic arguments on that side of the debate (eg Byrne and you and etc.)
Nor have I failed to engage with Byrne's ideas, in the comment you are currently responding to I called out two big philosophical failings in the first three paragraphs. If you are going to insist, I could go through the whole article you linked, doing a section-by-section analysis and re-explaining the same arguments against each point that everyone here has presumably been familiar with for a decade or so, but that's not related to the point I was originally making and not something I'm super interested in doing.
Because, as I have been trying to communicate, I'm not really making a point about the object-level question about gender philosophy. I'm making a point about the arguments and politics and rhetoric around those issues and how society discusses them, a point which you seem to at least partially agree with while also dismissing as obvious and irrelevant.
If you agree with my point but think it's not relevant to the situation, and would rather discuss all these other points, just say that! What I don't appreciate is assigning me a different point, then challenging me to defend it with citations.
To be clear: my point was that people finding that your ideas don't have enough merit to be worth engaging with, and have been answered so many times already that they don't need to be answered yet again, are sufficient to explain the observations which Byrne instead attributes to fear and weak stomachs. This meta-point about explaining observations in the situation would be equally relevant and valid if it were in some subject I know nothing about, like the historical study of 12th century architecture; my personal ability to refute the claims and cite sources is not relevant to the meta point that this is a sufficient alternate example.
And I think this all leads into another point that's related to my original point and becoming obviously relevant to the way the conversation is going now, which is the idea of the distributed Gish Gallop. The pattern where, thanks to the way modern media and the internet and politics work, the same questions and arguments can be asked and advanced a million times by a million different people, with a much smaller group of people 'responsible' for giving the same answers to each of the million instances, followed by swift declarations of victory and bad faith if they ever get tired or frustrated or bored and fail to answer a single instance, or ever make a single mistake in any of the million responses.
This pattern doesn't require that any one of the people bringing up the same points is being dishonest or hostile, it's at its most effective when a situations can occur when every one of them is more-or-less sincere and trying to engage honestly, because then they can be sincerely and honestly offended when engagement from the other side fails.
To them it looks like they raised these perfectly reasonable questions, one time, and no one wanted to talk to the. They're not considering the other side, where a thousand people wanted to ask you the same question, and you only responded to 500 of them.
Again, if no one had ever responded to ideas like Byrne's, then I'd agree with you that they are failing in their duties.
But my point is that Byrne is not making any new points (in the article you linked), he's making the same standard points and moves that Contrapoints was making videos against half a decade ago, he's using the same hacky attack helicopter logic that was a copypasta meme a full decade ago, he's equivocating between gender and sex without acknowledging the distinction in ways that haven't help academic rigor since de Beauvoir.
I agree that students should see those arguments refuted in the classroom (even if they're already seen them refuted a hundred times on social media and podcasts already), and I'd be surprised and upset if there was a class that was supposed to cover those topics and didn't consider them.
That's not what Byrne is talking about, though, he wants to be a public intellectual with a successful book deal, and to obligate everyone to argue with him in public in order to build his brand and name recognition. That's not actually a duty that accrues to other academics and intellectuals, they do get to choose who they engage with in the public sphere and why. And the nature of the distributed gish gallop on this issue is that many of them are both weary and wary of engaging with the next talking head down the pike repeating these same lines that they've been answering for a decade or more.
It's not actually a duty that accrues to me either, but you seem pretty fixated on it, so I'm willing to move to that topic if you want to go through it. To answer you specific question: people like Lévi-Strauss and Beauvoir and Friedan built the distinction between gender/social roles and physical sexual characteristics which obviates Byrne's 'look in a mirror' argument and makes clear the problem with his equivocation between sex and gender. His confusion about 'core gender identity' could be answered by meditating on Foucault's discussion of how Power creates Subjects. Etc.
Anyway, I'm not especially dedicated to the '60s and 70s' line, I think it's largely correct but I'm not enough of an expert on the history o philosophy to defend it in depth off the top of my head, and don't care enough to be the one responsible for doing all the research in this discussion. If you want me to shift my position to 'that was hyperbolic and wrong, I should have said 80s and 90s instead' then sure, fine, that doesn't really change my point at all.
My point is that in contemporary times, Byrne is not bringing up things that are novel enough that everyone should be expected to excitedly engage with them in the public square today, and I can demonstrate that by linking old Contrapoints videos.
This is still rhetoric. When you say "professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things," you are describing what I would call "professors getting in trouble for saying things that challenge a particular worldview." The very use of the pejorative word "transphobic" is bullying a judgment into your argument. People who doubt gender revisionism are treated as bigots, and called "transphobic," only as a rhetorical silencing tactic. There is no substance to saying that Byrne's arguments are transphobic, there is only hollow condemnation of an outgroup. That is the whole substance of gender revisionism: refusing to engage on substance, expanding influence not through persuasion but more in the manner of a cult, through shaming and ostracism of doubters and coddling of those who send costly ingroup signals--like repeating obvious lies for the movement's good. The whole gender revisionist movement is culture war from top to bottom, and the scholars you have cited to me were all culture warriors to the bone. I am not unfamiliar with any of them, and I doubt Byrne is, either. I appreciate you citing them, though by your own admission you appear to regard them as holy scripture you haven't actually bothered to learn, rather than knowing them to be truly substantive pre-responses to Byrne. Now I am fully comfortable that my initial assessment was correct: you're definitely wrong.
You didn't say that, though. What you said was:
Now, you wrote that post in such a way as to possibly be an indulgence in a sort of prosopopoeia, "I'm not the one sneering, I'm giving voice to the totally understandable sneers of others." But the amphiboly you've left in the identity of the speaker and the addressees barely withstands charitable scrutiny or plausible deniability--in part due to your steadfast failure to steelman Byrne in the slightest. This is often how trolls approach discussion, and those using arugments as soldiers, which is why I made the comment I did about the spirit of this discussion space.
I have relatively little objection (beyond obvious points of simple disagreement) with what you've written since your first response to me. The only reason I am still talking to you is because your first post was bad, and if it hadn't been a direct response to me I would have moderated you for trolling and left it at that. You still seem to think this is somehow a conversation where you get to explain why it's okay for scholars to sneer at Byrne. I understand your argument. I just find it to be a lot of empty rhetoric aimed at defending the indefensible: the substitution of patient engagement, however Sisyphean, with mere vapid disdain. And while I recognize that this is probably asking too much of most people, I think that university professors, especially, should be held to a higher standard in this regard (as well as other spaces, like this one, which are explicitly committed to open discussion).
When you have to cut off a sentence in the middle to make your point, it's a good indicator that you might be continuing to do the thing I said you were doing, trying to assign someone beliefs they don't actually have and actions they aren't actually taking.
When I literally explicitly say that I am not calling Byrne transphobic, in the latter half of a sentence you quoted the first half of and therefore presumably read, and your response is that I need to stop calling Byrne transphobic, I literally don't know what I'm supposed to say to you. When I twice give substantive criticism of specific arguments and each time you ignore that and say I refuse to engage with teh substance of the arguments, it feels like you don't intend to hear any arguments against your position. It feels like communication is impossible because you're dead set on arguing with a different person who is saying different things.
Is your point just that no argument could ever be transphobic, that the word 'transphobic' is itself meaningless and only used as a rhetorical slur and should never be used in polite conversation? Given how fixated you are on that word appearing one time in a hypothetical and in a way that was specifically not directed at anyone or anything in this conversation, it seems like maybe that's your point. If that's your position it's a pretty bold and broad claim, and you'll need to make it explicit before I respond.
Beyond that, the rest of your post seems to be saying, again, that yes there's a perfectly innocent and cogent way of reading what I wrote, yes it's exactly what I have said I was saying since then, no you don't believe that's what I was saying because you'd rather me be just sneering and insulting people because that's already your impression of everyone who disagrees with you on this topic and fits your narrative and makes you the hero of this exchange.
While your central point seems to be the assertion that I'm 'merely sneering Byrne' to dismiss him, you're happy to completely dismiss everyone I cite as 'culture warriors to the bone' without engaging with any of their arguments, sneer the entire class of people who disagree with you as 'a cult', and sneer me personally in a myriad of ways.
At this juncture, I've made my points, explained what they are several times, defended them with supporting arguments and evidence, offered to discuss other related topics in other ways if that's what would make you happy, and just been repeatedly rebuffed, insulted, and misconstrued.
For a second time, if your objection is that you wish this conversation had been a discussion of the merits of Byrne's arguments (even though that has nothing to do with your original post, which was 'just sneering at' university profs for not engaging in the debate, not about the merits of the arguments themselves), then I'll have that discussion. Go ahead and present the argument from Byrne which you think is worthy of debate, and I'll answer. I'm happy to do the thing you claim no one who disagrees with you will ever do.
If you don't want to do that, it doesn't seem like we have anything else to discuss here.
I don't know how many different ways to say what I'm saying but you don't seem to have understood at all.
Your original post was terrible. The most innocent way of reading it, is that you were not personally sneering at Byrne (or me), but you thought it would be appropriate to rhetorically speak from the perspective of others who are sneering at Byrne (or me) instead of engaging with him (or me)--implying that the sneering perspective is totally cool and fine.
My point was that the most innocent reading of your comment is bad, because that perspective is neither cool and fine, nor the kind of perspective we indulge here--so even prosopopoeia makes a thin excuse. Your prosopopoeia was neither innocent nor cogent, it was just voicing a sneer.
You can make the argument that their perspective is totally cool and fine, which task you partially took up in your later comments. That's fine! It's fine to argue that sneering instead of engaging is cool and fine (you'd be wrong, on my view, but you are free to be wrong!). Delving into the substance beyond that was in pursuit of illustrations only, which I regret because it seems to have only further confused you about the nature of my objection to your original comment.
Ok, lets circle back to our original comments then.
You talk about my failure to 'engage with' Byrne, but I think we need to specify between two different types of engagement here.
There's 1. Engaging with Byrne's arguments about trans people and gender ideology, and 2. Engaging with Byrne's assertions about how academics are cowardly and won't engage with anything that could get them in trouble.
Your original post was entirely about 2, and never delved into 1.
My response was also entirely about 2, and not meant to say anything about 1.
You're correct that, if I had been trying to disprove Byrne's claims about trans issues by saying that people consider him to be a laughably wrong asshole, then this would just be sneering at the opposition to dismiss them without engaging their ideas. I agree that would be bad, and also stupid.
But my post was providing an alternate explanation for Byrne's observations about academics not engaging with him. It was solely about 2, and I believe I engaged with 2 directly and reasonably. The theory I propose is actually sufficient to explain his empirical observations, it's a viable alternative hypothesis that deserves to be a part of this conversation, and it's what I actually believe to be the most likely cause.
So, again: it was not sneering at Byrne to dismiss 1, it was engaging with 2 by suggesting that it is explained by people sneering at 1.
Now, aside from the content, there's the question of tone. Certainly I used strong language, and I could have written something more oblique and indirect, like:
"Although I can appreciate why it would feel to someone in Byrne's position that the lack of public engagement to his ideas must be some sort of conspiracy or enemy action, I don't think this is actually the only or most parsimonious explanation. Consider the fact that many of the ideas he advances in the article you linked have been around in the popular media discussion of this topic for years now, and in academic discussion of these topics for much longer. Consider also that, as you yourself say, Byrne is only a recent entrant to this topic of study, and seems to be entering it with teh intent to reach a mass popular audience quickly, rather than slowly building his credentials through academic publishing and conferences. It seems quite plausible to me that academics who are more versed in this subject matter simply don't find his ideas novel enough or persuasive enough to merit that type of public engagement, and that they are weary of engaging someone who may pattern-match (perhaps through coincidence and no fault of his own!) to the type of person who is jumping on a popular trend in hopes of garnishing fame and fortune. I also note that this pattern by which someone notices that their ideas are not being engaged with, and suggests as a natural explanation that people must despise or fear their ideas or be motivated by some political commitments, is to my mind a common and potentially dangerous form of bias. While such events certainly do occur, I think they are rarer than people imagine, and less likely than they feel to the person living inside such a situation; a more common explanation is simply that most people never merit that type of attention and engagement for their ideas in the first place, and most ideas are not persuasive or interesting enough to inspire such a response regardless of their social context.'
Would that have been a better comment?
My feeling is that, while it's certainly more politely-phrased, it would be a significantly worse comment.
It lacks the visceral emotional impact that captures attention. More importantly, it lacks the visceral emotional narrative which I think accurately captures the real psychological and social dynamics at play here. In the name of tone and politeness, it obfuscates to the point of misleading; the laughing in derision at something you've seen pop up and be (to your mind) debunked a hundred times is a very real thing, the avoiding and hedging out of people you think are opportunistic assholes is a very real thing, and I think the understanding of those emotions are important to the argument.
I think it's good to use blunt language, when that most accurately conveys the point being made. I think it's good that you called the people who disagree with you on gender issues 'a cult', and say that they seem to only believe what CNN tells them to believe. I think it's good that LS says his political opposition 'like getting politically pegged'. I think it's good that Armin says the Left is full of apologists for jew-slaughter and WC responds by talking about their naked insanity.
These comments do not use maximally polite language, but they do clearly express a position in a way that is succinct, intuitive, easy to understand, and easy to engage with. I think they often do a lot more to advance the discussion and communicate ideas effectively than a wall of oblique caveated mush ever could. I think the push away from that type of blunt language often ends up with misunderstandings and lack of communication, because people have trouble maintaining focus over and fully responding to large walls of oblique text, when they even bother to read them thoroughly in the first place. And because they lead to responses fracturing into sub-responses to sub-sections or only responding to one paragraph out of eight or etc.
All of which boils down to a stylistic preference which, again, I'm happy to discuss. Or, if you want to edge more into your moderator hat and just declare that it's not acceptable, I'll just have to accept that and try to remember.
Yes!
I've been trying to not lean in to the mod hat here, but as that is where I have the most direct experience with this problem... let me put it this way. From a tone-and-phrasing perspective, your original comment is indistinguishable with the black-pilled "rationally the only choice left to us is violence against the outgroup" stuff that we are periodically called upon to moderate. Sure, it might be more rhetorically effective to sneer or saber-rattle in these ways. But thought-terminating cliches are the end of discourse, and discourse is the foundation, the whole reason this site exists. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; rhetoric is the enemy of light, perhaps most especially when it is highly effective. This is more than mere stylistic disagreement, this is a question of whether you are here for discussion with people who disagree with you, or here to wage culture war.
And the thing is--you really have, now, engaged in a lot of discussion with me, here! You seem to be totally capable of it, and if you really hated doing so I can't imagine you would have continued coming back to respond to me for as long as you have. So just, like... lead with that! It doesn't mean you can't express pointed evaluations--the rule is not "no antagonism" it is "be no more antagonistic than necessary for your argument." The rule is not "don't criticize your outgroup," it is "provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." Blunt language is fine, but there is a meaningful difference between speaking plainly and unapologetically, and simply airing disdain (whether your own, or someone else's). If your post amounts to little more than a "boo" light, then it doesn't meet the standard of discourse here.
Ok, I do still think there is value in that type of pointed comment, but I am getting the message about how it will be interpreted when it is too much of an inferential gap away from a reader's expectations. Which makes sense.
I'll try to remember that and use the other style.
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