Oh, look, another reminder that other philosophers would rather appease bigots than let trans folks develop and keep the hermeneutical resources we need to even talk about how said bigots are making the entire profession an intolerably hostile environment for us. As an added bonus, it’s being amplified and legitimized in the wider academic world.

It’s not like we went through the same fucking thing just a few months ago.

Maybe I should at least be grateful that it hasn’t (yet) gotten as big as that other one last year that really blew up?

Cis philosophers, you really need to cut it out. You need to stop presenting yourselves as voices of justice while insisting that we only talk about bigots in ways they approve of. You need to stop upholding norms of “civility” and “open debate” that say it’s more acceptable to dispute the legitimacy of our political rights and undermine our prospects of social, professional, emotional, and biological survival than it is to raise questions that might reflect badly on our attackers. You need to stop hiding behind claims of neutrality while acting as enablers by giving their work a platform in the community spaces you curate and then censuring us for the harshness of our replies.

You need to give us a fucking sign that you want the profession to be a minimally safe and liveable place for us, and that you’re able to value our ability to speak out against injustice more than you value the feelings of its perpetrators.

Even if you’re not ready to reject every concern or claim raised in the recent Daily Nous guest post, please recognize that the core claim — that “TERF” is a slur or otherwise an unacceptable term of abuse — is absurd for the same reasons that it’s absurd to say that “racist” or “misogynist” or “fascist” is a categorically unacceptable term of abuse. Please recognize that we are entitled to terminology that will allow us to name and discuss the problem, and this move to deprive us of such tools is as harmful as comparable moves in the cases of racism and misogyny.

There are a lot of digressions and subsidiary claims in the guest post, and I won’t discuss them exhaustively, but I want to make a few specific points.

I’m most interested in one especially misleading complaint: the authors devote a great deal of attention to experiences of being called “TERF” that where this accusation was, in their view, unfair. This is, in effect, a glossy, pseudo-intellectual version of the #IWasCalledTERF hashtag, which is used to report stories of being called “TERF”, ostensibly for saying things that, as summarized, sound more or less reasonable and innocuous, or even straightforwardly and undeniably true. The authors of the guest post go further, insisting that there’s a troubling risk of being called “TERF” merely for holding certain beliefs that, as stated, sound like they could be held without malice by a reasonable person.

There’s some pretty philosophically embarrassing argumentation going on here. The authors haven’t faced these accusations of bigotry based on the abstract content of their thoughts. They’ve faced them based on having made particular (spoken or written) utterances in particular contexts. We’re asked to trust the authors that their brief paraphrases are based on correct diagnoses of what in the original (often much longer) utterances gave offense. More troublingly, focusing on the belief-apt literal, truth-conditional content of the utterances often misses the point. Particular expressions may, beyond their narrow semantic content, function as established dog whistles or be otherwise loaded by virtue of their established associations with certain events, people, or movements. Even in the absence of such associations, a given sentence may communicate very different things depending on the context in which it uttered, even as it retains the same literal/semantic meaning may retain the same literal meaning (give or take some issues that don’t matter here). In particular, uttering a sentence in response to what someone else has said will suggest that one thinks the content of one’s utterance relevant to what came before, and so will insinuate whatever auxiliary assumptions would be needed to make it relevant. If the structure of the conversation sets up an utterance as a refutation or counter-point, the utterance will convey that one thinks that it is at odds with with the commitments of one’s interlocutors. These considerations allow bad actors to make an utterance that clearly communicates hateful or objectionable content, and then use literal paraphrase and decontextualization to present themselves as wronged parties condemned for defending innocuous or demonstrably true positions.

An extended analogy will be useful. I take that it’s reasonable to believe that all human lives have value. This strikes me as something we ought to believe, but, even if you would reject it, I hope you’ll grant that believing it doesn’t, by itself, constitute racism. I also take it that, at the level of literal truth-conditions, “all human lives have value” and “all lives matter” are pretty nearly interchangeable.

But consider the recent history of “all lives matter”. Consider also what is suggested by uttering “all lives matter” to push back against an utterance of “black lives matter” in the context of a complaint about police officers killing unarmed black Americans with impunity. Even if “all lives matter” weren’t already an established catch-phrase of apologists for systemic racism and police impunity, the context would do most of the work. Using “all lives matter” to push back against “black lives matter”, one suggests that the advocate of black lives mattering rejects, or is logically committed to rejecting, that all lives matter — it insinuates that their advocacy for the value of black lives devalues some other lives. It also serves to derail the conversation. Instead of addressing the distinctive problem of how black lives are denied value, everyone is expected to put the fight against murderous white supremacy on hold and offer reassurances that other lives matter too.

For these and other reasons, uttering “all lives matter” in those words in that context is quite reasonably characterized as racist as all fuck.

Suppose our “all lives matter” advocate now offers the following complaint: “I was called racist for believing all human lives have value”. If they do this, they are not giving fair, complete, accurate report of what happened. They are misrepresenting events in order to conceal their bigotry and portray themself as a victim.

(We could develop similar examples around complaints like “I was called antisemitic just for worrying about the political influence and questionable ethics of financial institutions” and “I was called a misogynist just for caring about standards of journalistic professional ethics”. The details are left as exercises for the reader.)

The complaints of unfair accusations of TERFyness featured in the guest post are of this kind. Most ostensibly harmless ideas mentioned correspond to established tools of TERF rhetoric, and most often attract anti-TERF complaints when they are asserted as refutations of or counter-points to transfeminist calls to protect the safety and freedom of trans people. Take, for example the claim that “we should be able to discuss changes to law and social practice which impact women’s sex-based protections”. In TERF rhetoric, claims of this kind serve a function analogous to the function that appeals to “free inquiry” and edgy “forbidden questions” serve in the rhetoric of, e.g., advocates of discredited pseudoscientific work on race and intelligence. They can be used to suggest that almost any attempt on the part of trans activists to make our case (by calling out transphobia, refuting discredited empirical claims, exposing bias, or critique shoddy argumentation) is somehow not a contribution to the discussion, but instead a kind of censorship that shuts the discussion down.

(I won’t go through all the other examples used in the guest post, but I want to call your attention to this excellent transfeminist exploration of some issues relevant to “women’s oppression is sex-based”.)

It’s important to recognize that, as with “racist” and “misogynist”, error or malice can give rise to genuinely unfair or misguided accusations of TERFyness. I can think of a few examples of this from my own experience, some of which had me on the receiving end of the TERFyness accusation. This can be hurtful, but it is a normal difficulty of political discourse. We might seek in various ways to reduce the frequency of such incidents, but pointing out that they occur does not delegitimize that term “TERF”, any more that pointing out that some accusations of racism are unfair or misguided does not suffice to delegitimize the term “racist”.

As a final note on the specifics of the guest post, note that, when the authors suggest a “more neutral term” as an alternative to “TERF”, it proposes “gender critical feminists”. This alternative, unlike “TERF”, conveys no judgment of bigotry. Further, it suggests that transphobic and trans-suspicious thinkers like the authors are the only ones engaged in critique of prevailing gender concepts or criticism of pernicious gender institutions, and so that transfeminists are, in contrast, uncritical consumers of prevailing gender concepts and complacent about or complicit in pernicious gender institutions. This demand for ostensibly neutral language, is, in effect, a demand that TERFs be insulated from uncomfortable accusations, and that many of their key contentions be accommodated as presuppositions of the preferred terms of debate.

I am not asking you to reject out of hand all the concerns raised in the guest post (although I think that all or virtually of them are, on consideration, rejection-worthy).

I am asking you to believe me, as somebody who has watched and been a participant in a lot of the kinds of conversations that the guest post is referring to, and as someone who has seen many versions of its main complaints articulated in many different spaces, that calling “TERF” a slur is absurd.

I am asking you to understand that this complaint is entirely in keeping with a more general phenomenon of bigots not liking it when you call them bigots, that it is analogous to other “the real problem is victims of bigotry being too complain-y and accuse-y” takes.

I am asking you to recognize that the decision on the part of Daily Nous to legitimize this position by providing this kind of platform is every bit as problematic as it would be in those other cases.

I know that many of you to be clever, circumspect, and justice-minded people. It is my sincere hope that you will use these gifts to recognize this latest attack as the work of bigots and charlatans — a derivative, concern-trolling ploy, offering a little rhetorical sophistication, but nothing in the way new ideas.

Added 5 September 2018: Since posting this, I’ve had some things to say on twitter that follow up on issues related to this piece or the ongoing conversation in philosophy. In particular, I have some relevant thoughts for those of you who find some of this hard to accept because your TERF friends are nice, well-intentioned people, who are eager to point out that calling TERFs bigots is not likely to persuade them, or who have concerns about “dead TERF” jokes.