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26. Jul 2025|08:25 |
"The logician W.V.O. Quine argued that beliefs exist in holistic webs: each belief is interconnected and mutually supported by lots of others. If you reject one, you normally have to make adjustments elsewhere. Faced with a new, apparently confounding piece of evidence — say, the sight of a friend in London, who you believe to be in Dundee — you are more likely to update beliefs near the periphery of your web (“she is not in Dundee”; or “I mistook someone else for her”) than its centre (“people can be in two places at once”).
Still, it is always possible to work from the centre outward. Genderists in philosophy parachuted “transwomen are women” into the middle of their webs, defined a “woman” as anyone who said they were, and renamed the ensuing epistemological anarchy “progress”. And they were perfectly open about it. In 2020, for instance, Sally Haslanger, the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, told an interviewer: “if we wanted to include trans women among women, the body wasn’t sufficient… the pressure was to find a conception of woman that would enable us to accommodate all these differences”.
Once in the semantic upside down, there was a lot of profitable work for these web-spinners to do: not just to re-theorise every human idea and practice formerly conceived of as sex-based; but also to build up a satisfyingly dark story about the women and men who would not comply. Haslanger became a fan of authoring open letters, and other heroines in philosophy rose to the occasion too. “I hesitate to attach the label feminist to any view that is committed to worsening the situation of some of the most marginalized women,” wrote Jennifer Saul, a senior philosopher of language at the University of Waterloo, putting a typically charitable gloss on dissenters’ attitudes to trans-identified males. “No one really wants a mercy fuck, and certainly not from a racist or a transphobe,” wrote the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls, Isaiah Berlin… only joking, I mean Amia Srinivasan, reframing erotic attraction toward a single sex as ethically problematic, whether hetero or homo."
https://archive.md/YtZ0N |
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