Debates on sex and gender have suffered from a want of moral and intellectual toughness. More detailed, less question-begging diagnoses are possible of why so many smart people shy away from publicly acknowledging that a woman is an adult human female. But there has been a gross failure of nerve. Most of the men known as “trans women” are sex-typical adult human males. Yet despite this obvious fact—and many such men’s well-documented sexual arousal at pretending to be female—much of the intelligent world has allowed itself to be bullied into treating them as counterexamples to the generalisation that women are female. To my disappointment, this pattern has been on display in my own field, academic philosophy.

In May 2023, Quillette published an article I wrote about the cancellation of MIT philosopher Alex Byrne’s book, Trouble with Gender, which had been under contract with Oxford University Press, before being rejected for spurious reasons; and the reaction to the news among philosophers. At the time, I was feeling more frustrated than tough. Indeed, I was not very tough about it at all; as I hid behind a pseudonym (“Thomas Palmer”) when I published my Quillette article.

More recently, however, I have written a review essay on Trouble with Gender, this time under my own name, for The Philosophers’ Magazine (TPM). The consideration that tilted the balance was not that I was hired to a safe academic position. I was not. Rather, it was that almost no philosopher in a safe academic position has spoken up in defence of a sex-based understanding of what it is to be a woman.

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Daniel Kodsi | “What Is a Woman? Many Philosophers (Still) Aren’t Allowed to Say” | October 16, 2024

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