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From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:
This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.
All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?
Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:
Transgenderism is religious dogma taken to its logical extreme. The fundamental thesis of the religion is complete mind body dualism. They see humans as a blank slate sould that randomly attached to a body and thereby has had many constraints and suffering imposed on it. Their goal is to liberate the free soul from the constraints of the physical world. The view can't be understood outside their theology. HBD, genetic explanations for class our sex differences, are the ultimate heresy against their religion. They invalidate the core principle and understanding of their theology. The woke ideology is built on a worldview that free souls were created, they were bound to physical constraints through evil and the march of history is toward liberating the soul.
The more tech Silicon Valley take is that this will be done through genetic engineering/AI/fusion powered utopia. The more social science approach is through "justice".
Academia has fallen into a pit because academia consists of writing commentary to other peoples work. In the social sciences the commentary is to a large extent based on philosophers and thinkers that had ideas that are invalid. Rousseau doesn't live up to scientific scrutiny. Yet the ideas that stem from his thinking aren't tossed out. There needs to be a search algorithm that can search citations iteratively and redact those papers whose fundamental principles are false. Papers built on ideas such as "Existence precedes essence" are wrong since your DNA is at least as old as your existence, since you became you at the point of conception or later.
Wokeism in Academia is theologists arguing about the number of angels on a needle. They are taking religious ideas with weak scientific basis and arguing them to their logical conclusion. Transgender issues are so explosive even though they are marginal issues since they fundamentally are a clash of theology. Theologians could spend centuries arguing about the word "Filoque", we are seeing similar debates today centering around the new religion.
Identity is not dualist.
Identity is the thing you will look like post singularity when you have no limits.
It is your true self in that it is where you go when all resistance is overcome. Thus it is the direction your will points.
It's teleological.
This does not require mind/body dualism. In fact, the mind itself is also subject to this.
If I don't have the mind of a woman but want to, that is part of this.
This is completely objective. It can be true or false that the direction of a person's will and effort is towards being a man or being a woman.
It is a physical fact about their wants and goals, which is- from a physicalist standpoint, a fact about the neurons in their brain.
No souls required.
I'm not addressing academia in this comment.
So the only part of this view of identity this that is dogmatic, is the radical idea that it is bad that people aren't yet what they want to be.
And I want to be lots of things. The reality is that we are humans, a slightly more intelligent primate and a biological being. Accepting who we are and finding adaptive strategies for the ecosystem we are in are the reasonable way of handling these issues. Your body is you, there is no limit to overcome, you are the physical body.
I think @CloudHeadedTranshumanist would disagree. I hope that that identity (unmoored from any pronouns that could form a link to a body of any sort) will come clarify, but my interpretation is that the comment leans in to the meme. "YesChad.jpg, the only thing keeping you from being an attack helicopter is that we haven't made enough progress on the technology yet," I want to hear that identity say.
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