On "just asking questions" as a trans philosopher

It's a bad idea to shut philosophers up because we think their ideas "cause harm".

Transgender identity raises a variety of interesting philosophical questions, and on an issue this controversial, the answers to those questions will necessarily be controversial too. I recently found myself embroiled in some of this controversy on Daily Nous, the main blog for philosophy as a profession.

I'll start here by recapping the controversy to date, before turning to a response. There's a new free zine out just launched, called Being Trans in Philosophy, which shares trans philosophers' stories of their experiences. That's not the controversial part: I think it's great to give trans philosophers a dedicated space to tell their stories! I have no objection to the zine itself. What I objected to was this passage in the zine's press release:

Philosophical conversations about trans people do not happen in a vacuum. They happen in a political context where trans people are relentlessly attacked and a material context where trans lives are particularly vulnerable. These contexts make it impossible to “just ask questions” about trans people. And trans people and our loved ones are not okay—in, with, and because of our discipline.

My specific objection is to the claim that in this context it is "impossible to 'just ask questions' about trans people". I responded:

As philosophers, "just asking questions" is what we do. We ask questions about poor people, we ask questions about refugees, we ask questions about black people, we ask questions about racially mixed people, we ask questions about gay people, we ask questions about women, we ask questions about people with disabilities, we ask questions about colonized people, we ask questions about victims of genocide, we ask questions about trans people. Many of those other groups are more oppressed, overall, than we trans people are. That doesn’t stop us from asking difficult and uncomfortable questions about them – even when those questions might lead us to even more difficult and uncomfortable answers. In my case, as someone whose experience doesn’t fit a lot of orthodox depictions of trans identity (or racially mixed identity for that matter), it’s important to me to have more people asking hard questions about them. If you can’t handle people asking questions about your identity, I don’t think that’s because you’re uniquely oppressed. I think it’s because you haven’t yet learned how to handle philosophy.

The zine's coeditor, Willow Starr, responded:

nothing here says don’t ask questions about our identities! In fact many of the stories mention that this is what draws us to the field. But, suppose that the repetition, framing, sources and standards for ‘answering’ the questions do cause harm, as the stories contend. You say that must be the fault of the people harmed. They just can’t handle philosophy…. Trans people already are asking these questions in a way that avoids these harms.

That response did not entirely reassure me. I asked Starr: "Do you believe that one should avoid articulating a philosophical argument, even one that one sincerely believes, on the grounds that it 'causes harm'?" After all, advocating positions that "cause harm" has been a part of philosophers' work throughout history, from Aristotle's defence of slavery and the Mīmāṃsā school's defence of the caste system through Heidegger's Nazi sympathies. Whatever harms might be caused by anti-trans views, they are less serious than the harms advocated by these philosophers who remain part of our canon. To ban "harm-causing" positions would be to gut the discipline. I added:

I’m a great admirer of Karl Marx, but if we were to take the view that “philosophers should not take philosophical positions that can get taken up in harmful ways in the policy sphere”, then that absolutely implies that Marx should not have written any of his work. Because governments that took up his ideas in practice have killed more people – in both absolute and relative terms – than Hitler did.

This guy's philosophy caused a lot of harm, but we're still better off for having it.

I don't think that Starr's response addressed that question directly, beyond noting that "there is no uniform stance on these questions taken by the editors of the zine or the contributors." What Starr did note in response was: "One very concrete difference between trans people and other minorities that your comments have glossed over is that our very existence is being questioned, while at the same time being politically and socially attacked on those grounds." [her emphasis]

I do not think that that phrasing is accurate. I find the phrase "our very existence is being questioned" to be baseless hype – and the kind of baseless hype that, in the past, has frequently been used to encourage censorship of dissenting views. Nobody, to my knowledge, is denying that Willow Starr or Sandhya Lele or any other trans person exists. (They might refuse to call us by those names, but that's not the same thing.) Nor are they denying that we identify as genders other than those assigned as birth. Nor, as far as I know, are they even denying that "transgender" is a meaningful category to describe our self-identification. (Still less are they "denying our humanity", an even more absurd piece of hype that I hear bandied about: they're not questioning that I'm human, they just think, incorrectly, that I'm an exclusively male human.) We exist, we identify as a different gender, and "transgender" is a meaningful way to describe that identification; nobody's questioning that. What they are debating is whether we are correct in that identification.

And that is a question that can, and indeed must, be debated! (And philosophers are well positioned to take up that debate.) Because by saying we trans women are not women, our opponents take a position that would have been an assumed norm in Western societies a mere fifteen years ago, and that remains the norm in most of the world now and throughout history. I believe, as Starr does, that that globally mainstream position is wrong. But it's on us to show why that global majority is wrong – especially at a time when popular opposition to the trans movement in the US is increasing. If we refuse to engage with our opponents and respond with our good reasons, we look like we don't have them.

But the problem goes further than the political consequences. I agree, as I noted in the Daily Nous comment thread, with Mill in On Liberty: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.” Following this logic, I strongly suspect that too many of us trans philosophers have been so adamant in their refusal to engage with our opponents that they don't have those good reasons. We have assumed our rightness so much that often we haven’t bothered to think about what’s wrong with the opposing position intellectually (as opposed to merely name-calling and shaming it.)

We do ourselves no favours by acting like an inward-looking clique that treats all dissenting views as a human-rights violation – which, as far as I can tell, is what we've been for most of the past ten years. To refuse to engage with our opponents was a luxury – and a costly luxury – that we had when our side was winning. We cannot afford it anymore.

So when Starr says that there's a "third option… called 'trans philosophy'": well, great! That sounds like something we need more of. What I hope is that "trans philosophy" in her sense is real philosophy, willing to question and take alternatives seriously – which is to say that it welcomes the transmedicalists and transracialism advocates and other unorthodox trans positions into its fold, and is ready to take the trans-skeptical views of Kathleen Stock or Alex Byrne as serious philosophical opponents to be rebutted through close reading and rigorous argument. If it is that, sign me up! But conversely, if "trans philosophy" means anything like the "trans theory" referred to in the open letter attacking Rebecca Tuvel on transracialism – according to which "it is difficult to imagine that this article could have been endorsed by referees working in critical race theory and trans theory" – then I want no more part of it than I do of views like Stock's.

Since we are (rightly) calling attention to the political consequences of our philosophical speech, it is essential to note that one consequence of overstating trans oppression has been the silencing of views outside a very narrow range. And that's why I feel a need to call out the hype. If there's one thing that animates my views on these questions, it's this: in 2011, I was able to freely express my ideas but not my gender identity. In 2021, at the peak of the Social Justice movement, I was able to freely express my gender identity but not my ideas. And the ideas are more important to me.