Alex Byrne's recent book Trouble with Gender is a rare example of a philosopher willing to tackle the trans industry and the quasi-religious notion of gender identity. Following Byrne's lead, Daniel Kodsi (via Kathleen Stock) writes in The Philosopher's Magazine in support of sex realism - the once obvious but now controversial view that a woman is an adult human female and a man is an adult human male. Sex realism is fundamental to evolutionary biology, but has become taboo in progressive circles, and, shamefully, in progressive (ie nearly all) philosophical circles.
According to orthodoxy in the philosophy of sex and gender, the sex-based account of woman is not a live option. It is not even allowed as a good approximation to the truth. Rather, it is widely treated as unacceptable to rely on even as a simplifying assumption. From an outsider’s perspective, it is as if physicists had collectively adopted a ban on ever explicitly invoking Newton’s first law of motion. As would probably happen in the physical case, much orthodox theorising about sex and gender thrives on implicitly reasoning in a way which subverts the ban.
Outside of mainstream philosophy of sex and gender, the situation is better, but not by much. Many philosophers privately recognise that the sex-based account of woman is the natural default hypothesis and are yet to be persuaded of the alleged counterexamples to it. However, almost none is willing publicly to challenge the orthodox rejection of the sex-based account. Tenured professors have proved at least as shy about speaking out as more junior members of the profession; among senior faculty in particular, Byrne is almost unique in his vocal defence of sex realism....
Although in the robustness of his defence of sex realism, Byrne is an exception among philosophers, philosophers are not themselves an exception among members of their social-political class, broadly construed. Whatever they might say to each other in private or anonymously online, most people interested in succeeding in politically progressive environments have taken care not blatantly to violate the taboo on using “woman” as a sex-based term.
The reason that such care has so widely been felt necessary is the recent salience of adult males who say that they are women, and who there is intense social-political pressure to take at their word. Crucially, some such adult males are fully sex-typical, in roughly the sense that by almost all interpersonally accessible criteria, they are indiscernible from typical adult human males. For instance, as well as being adult males, they look and sound like adult males, have the usual male genitalia and male levels of testosterone, are exclusively sexually attracted to females, and grew up being perceived and treated by everyone around them as male.
These males insist that they are women, with the well-worn slogan "trans women are women" - which boils down to “a woman is anyone who says that they are a woman”.
How could so simplistic a slogan have become so influential, in philosophy as elsewhere? Much of the story will likely have to do with broader social-political developments. But some of it may have to do with squeamishness about the activity of sex. After all, it is often not very nice to attend to the specificities of human male sexuality. Yet the temptation to look away from variant forms of male sexuality may underlie some of the difficulty in understanding why there are sex-typical heterosexual adult human males who not only say that they are women but sometimes make significant personal sacrifices to look the part. More specifically, it inhibits properly addressing a latent challenge for the sex-based account of woman: if such males are unequivocally men, then why do they want so much to be seen as women? For in salient cases, the candid answer turns out to be: because they are sexually aroused by simulating being female.
Bingo. We got there.
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