How to Talk About the Issues That Divide Us, Arianne Shahvisi, John Murray Publishers Ltd, £12.42
The premise of this book, by philosopher Arianne Shahvisi, is appealing: that discussions of controversial social and political issues “almost always rely on unexamined assumptions” and that philosophical analysis can help us “to work through thorny moral questions by examining their parts in broad daylight”.
Moreover, the book comes with effusive praise. According to Alison Phipps, this book “cuts through the noise with an eminently sensible discussion” and “shows us how philosophy, far from being irrelevant, is essential for navigating today’s world”. Danny Dorling calls it “always concise, exacting, logical, readable, authoritative”. And Priyamvada Gopal’s front-cover blurb avers that the book “brings cooling clarity to the heat of today’s culture wars”.
Would that it were so.
But let’s start with the good parts (at least as I see them), for there are quite a few.
The author, a philosopher at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, is well equipped for the task she has set herself. With a background in the philosophy of physics, she has amassed an impressive CV of scholarly work in bioethics and social ethics; she is also a prolific contributor to the London Review of Books. To take just one example of her contributions to bioethics, she bucked the pieties in “progressive” circles to argue (compellingly in my view) that “it is unethical for medical professionals to offer or endorse ‘alternative medicine’ treatments, for which there is no known causal mechanism” because they “widen the epistemic disparity between patient and medical professional” and thus undermine informed consent; she followed up with an article contending that “medicine is patriarchal, but alternative medicine is not the answer”. Agree or disagree with her arguments on any given issue, she is without doubt an eminently qualified philosopher.
In the introductory chapter, Shahvisi fondly recalls her math teachers’ exhortations, many years ago, to “show your working”: “It was less important to be right, they maintained, [than to] show that I knew what I was doing.” (1) (As a math professor, I concur: my own exams bear the stern warning that “the correct answer will receive zero credit unless you show — and adequately explain — a valid method for obtaining it.”) Shahvisi adds that “show your working” is also:
… a helpful precept in my work as a philosopher, where conclusions are less important than reasoning, and in my role as a teacher, where it is more effective to show than to tell. (1)
Going further, she observes that giving a clear explanation of your reasoning has both moral and intellectual virtues:
Showing your work is a way of being open with others, in the sense of being intellectually honest, which means making your assumptions and reasoning vulnerable to criticism. (3)
Later on she elaborates:
When a person is forced to explicitly state their assumptions, they must reflect more closely on what they’re actually saying, and whether or not they can justify it. (169)
Absolutely right.
Shahvisi hastens to clarify that “I do think that some perspectives are correct, morally speaking” — most humans do, after all — but she stresses that “knowing and showing why is important, not least because the same tools will help us to see when and how we are wrong.” (2) That recognition of personal fallibility is a key insight, which is unfortunately underappreciated these days. Our susceptibility to bias and error is one of the main reasons that free and robust debate, among people with a variety of perspectives, is so crucial, and that the suppression of heterodox views is so harmful.
Shahvisi makes clear, at the outset and throughout the book, her vehement opposition to capitalism (4) and its contribution to environmental degradation and global inequality. That is an attitude with which I am sympathetic, though I wish she had been clearer about her proposals for a better alternative and had engaged with the counterarguments of pro-capitalist economists working on combatting global poverty.
Many of Shahvisi’s chapters contain ample food for thought, even when the arguments are not (at least to me) fully convincing. I particularly appreciated her analysis of how social prejudices can affect the perceived credibility of experts and witnesses (Chapter 6).
Her chapter on “mansplaining” includes a moving story (162–164) about a man insisting that she was wrong about a highly non-intuitive probability problem:
His girlfriend informed him that I have a background in mathematics. (He has a lay person’s understanding of math.) He shrugged and carried on telling me I was wrong, insisting that the answer was obvious to him and he didn’t get why none of us could see it. I lost it. I don’t remember what I said but I do recall my tone: irate, furious, harsh. He laughed and asked why I was so worked up. It was just a math problem, no need to get so upset.
But there is every reason to get upset. After a certain level, math is very difficult. You have to work hard to get good at it. It’s also an exceedingly sexist discipline to work and study within, and you have to fight your own internalised sexism to do it in the first place. I was not about to let my hard-won expertise be so easily devalued by a person whose qualification to dispute my knowledge lay only in his being a white man. … In isolation it’s a minor indignity, but I experienced it resting atop a mountain of similar affronts I’d endured from similar men. (163)
In a final chapter (201–227), Shahvisi addresses a very important question: How should people, trying to act ethically, deal with structural problems — such as climate change or global poverty and inequality — that are only minimally affected by our personal choices? Shahvisi doesn’t claim to have any final answers, but she does offer some valuable reflections.
Shahvisi begins her book by offering a vision of social and political debate that is marked by humility and generosity:
[A] theme that is central to this work is the idea that mistakes are unavoidable features of our moral and political lives, and should be seen as occasions for learning, rather than reasons for exclusion. I hope readers will take the errors and oversights of the text itself in this spirit. (4)
In this review I will draw attention to quite a few serious “errors and oversights”, as I see it, in Shahvisi’s book. I trust that these criticisms will be understood in the generous sense that she has here set forth.
Shahvisi devotes three chapters to the questions of whether calling a police officer a “white cunt” is racist (she argues no), whether saying “men are trash” is sexist (she again argues no), and whether asserting that “all lives matter” is an appropriate response to Black Lives Matter (once again no). Many of her arguments are thought-provoking; some are in my opinion persuasive, while others strike me as more dubious; readers can of course judge for themselves. And along the way she raises some interesting philosophical issues, such as the dangers of oversimplification and the nature of intersectionality (22–28), the meaning of ambiguous generic statements (is it being claimed that all men are trash?) (93–97), and inclusive versus exclusive whataboutery (111–113).
But are these really the central questions that ought to be discussed in a book of this type? One wonders whether Shahvisi has applied her philosopher’s skills to dissecting the most superficial and sloganeering aspects of the “culture wars”, rather than to unearthing the more serious questions that those wars conceal.
A more weighty issue is evoked in Chapter 2, which asks whether “political correctness” has gone too far. So the first task, in line with the author’s own stated aims, ought to be to clarify the question, and to seek out the genuine issues hidden under the “culture wars” phraseology.
As Shahvisi correctly though incompletely observes (36–37), the term “politically correct” originated in intra-left debates in the 1930s and 1940s; it was resurrected by feminists and leftists in the 1970s and 1980s as a self-deprecatory appellation, to refer to our comrades — and sometimes ourselves — when adherence to some orthodoxy impeded their/our ability to think clearly and freely. (For what it’s worth as proof, I recently stumbled across a political-correctness quiz that some friends and I — singers in a left-wing chorus in New York City — concocted back in 1989.)
The term was then reclaimed starting in the late 1980s, with a pejorative connotation, by conservatives. Some of the anti-PC critiques were indeed aimed, as Shahvisi says, to discredit “any sign that the needs or preferences of marginalised groups have been accounted for” (37) or even “any kind of regulation or threat to conservative values” (38). But by no means all. Shahvisi completely ignores the many reasoned critiques of the excesses of “political correctness” — often proferred by liberals, leftists and feminists — such as Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (1993, 2nd ed. 2014); Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate’s The Shadow University (1999), analyzing campus speech codes; or Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge’s Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies (1994). Shahvisi also ignores important intellectual contributions inspired by the theme of “political correctness”, such as the 1994 article by economist Glenn Loury that proposed an insightful theory of the dynamics of self-censorship, on “right” as well as “left”.
This constricted focus is, unfortunately, a constant tactic throughout the book: Shahvisi cites extreme and easily-refuted critiques of the ideas she favors, while ignoring defensible and nuanced ones. It’s a mirror image of the approach used by Gad Saad to ridicule leftist ideas of which he disapproves; and it’s equally regrettable. We should all concentrate on criticising the strongest arguments offered by our opponents, not the weakest and silliest ones.
For instance, Shahvisi refers (38) to “a feverish terror” in the United States about the teaching of critical race theory. She correctly observes that right-wingers have frequently attached the label “critical race theory” to any effort, no matter how fair-minded and evidence-based, to study and teach honestly about the history of slavery and racial discrimination; and she accurately cites (39) right-wing activist Christopher Rufo’s frank (and frankly chilling) declaration of his anti-CRT strategy.
But she engages in a bit of legerdemain of her own:
Critical race theory is a sub-discipline of jurisprudence that examines extra-legal racist structures and is usually only offered in graduate school, so it’s about as likely to be taught to children as fluid dynamics or tensor calculus. (38)
That argument is disingenuous, as linguist John McWhorter — one of America’s leading Black public intellectuals — has pointed out. He observes that what is being taught in some schools, while not the law-school theory or its social-science offshoots, is indeed “C.R.T.-lite”, namely:
… the idea that it is enlightened to see white people as potential oppressors and Black people as perpetual victims of an inherently oppressive system. That it is therefore appropriate to ascribe certain traits to races, rather than individuals, and that education must “center” the battle against power differentials between groups and the subtle perceptions that they condition.
An implication some educators draw from these tenets is that various expectations of some of their students, based on what are generally thought to be ordinary mainstream assumptions, are instead onerous stipulations from an oppressive white-centric view. Hence an idea that it is white to be on time, arrive at precise answers and reason from A to B, rather than holistically, etc. Again, this is not what decades-old critical race theory scholarship proposed, but yes, the idea is descended from original C.R.T.’s fundamental propositions about white supremacy.
Shahvisi prefers to pretend that all disagreement with critical race theory and related doctrines is simply right-wing duplicity, rather than attend to the nuanced critiques offered by heterodox liberals like McWhorter and Helen Pluckrose.
Along similar lines, Shahvisi contends, with possibly contrived ignorance, that “it’s not entirely clear what those who are opposed to political correctness are trying to defend” (48), and she immediately proceeds to engage in some bizarre mind-reading:
At least some of the time, they appear to be expressing a discomfort that we all experience on occasion but few of us feel entitled enough to share aloud: ‘The world is changing, I feel left behind and I don’t like it!’ And interestingly for those whose politics is ostensibly rooted in freedom and individuality, most of these tantrums relate to insufficient respect being shown to prevailing norms and institutions: People don’t respect the flag! That politician didn’t bow to the Queen! Why have they let a newsreader appear on television without a poppy? They’ve offered vegetarian food! Young people eat avocadoes! I heard a language I don’t understand in the supermarket! (48, italics in the original)
No doubt there are people who have said all of those things; and Shahvisi does indeed cite some equally silly examples of anti-PC complaints (40–41, 48–49). But does she really think that those who disagree with her ideas — such as McWhorter and Pluckrose — have no better arguments than these? If so, she is astoundingly ignorant (and I do not believe for one moment that that is the case). And if not, why doesn’t she address her opponents’ real arguments, rather than condescendingly dismissing objections to her own views as mere “tantrums”?
In truth, the most thoughtful critics of “woke” orthodoxy avoid the “political correctness” moniker like the plague, precisely because of its ambiguity and its unfortunate right-wing connotations. Instead, they focus on critiquing specific doctrines. On race, one can cite McWhorter’s Woke Racism and, here in the UK, Tomiwa Owolade’s This is Not America and Kenan Malik’s masterful Not So Black and White; on sex and gender, Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, Helen Joyce’s Trans, Alex Byrne’s Trouble with Gender, and Swedish feminist Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s brilliant book On the Meaning of Sex; and on Critical Social Justice thought generally, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories.
Despite these many works of reasoned critique, Shahvisi would have us believe that political correctness is only about “ask[ing] for considerate language” (49) and that opposition could only be, as Reni Eddo-Lodge asserts, “the final frontier in the fight to be as openly bigoted as possible without consequences” (47). That framing grossly misrepresents the disagreements over ideas — about race, about sex and gender, and about the freedom of expression — that underlie the controversies over “political correctness”. But this narrow framing does, in any case, raise an important question: What are the appropriate ethical norms concerning manners and language?
Shahvisi devotes several interesting pages to discussing the social role of good manners, and how they evolve over time (50–54); and to discussing slur words and the use-mention distinction (54–59). At one point she quotes Aubrey Hirsch:
Don’t ever use an insult for a woman that you wouldn’t use for a man. Say ‘jerk’ or ‘shithead’ or ‘asshole.’ Don’t say ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’ or ‘slut.’ If you say ‘asshole’, you’re criticizing her parking skills. If you say ‘bitch,’ you’re criticizing her gender. (53)
That precept is eminently sensible. More generally, Shahvisi is right to defend the basic principle of “a form of social etiquette that is sensitive to the contours of injustice” (53).
But she then goes on to assert categorically, and without argument, that
One of the most basic tenets of the new manners is that you refer to people and groups in the ways they ask you to, and you refrain from referring to them in the ways they ask you not to. When dealing with an individual, you use the name and pronouns they tell you to use. It is strange and spiteful to want to do otherwise. (53–54, italics in the original)
Well, no — or rather, sometimes yes and sometimes no. A religious person may refer to herself (and all of us) as a “child of God”; but I, an atheist, am perfectly entitled to refuse her self-appellation and to refer to her as simply a human being like myself. Likewise, as Almut Gadow has pointed out, a defendant may refer to himself as innocent, but the jury may nevertheless decide to call him “guilty”. A person’s self-descriptions are not sacrosanct. Sometimes courtesy deserves to win out over factual accuracy, and sometimes the reverse; it all depends on the circumstances.
Another important chapter in this book addresses the debate about “cancel culture”, which Shahvisi defines, following Eve Ng, as:
… the withdrawal of any kind of support (viewership, social media follows, purchases of products endorsed by the person, etc.) for those who are assessed to have said or done something unacceptable or highly problematic, generally from a social justice perspective especially alert to sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, bullying, and related issues. (174)
This person-oriented (and consumerist) notion is much too narrow a conception of “cancel culture”, for reasons I’ll mention later; but let’s run with it for now. Shahvisi situates (172–176) this concept of “cancellation” within the general history of ostracism as a form of social exclusion — going back at least to ancient Athens, if not well before — that “occurs when a person is deemed to have acted in an antisocial or immoral way” (174).
“It seems undeniable,” Shahvisi asserts at the outset — albeit without evidence or argument — “that ‘cancel culture’ is a tactical moral panic cooked up by conservatives to enable their bigotry” (172). The precise meaning of this claim is not entirely clear, but apparently the idea is that all (or at least most) of the victims of “cancellation” deserve it because of their bigotry, and that anyone who protests this situation can only be yet another bigot aiming to protect himself and his comrades-in-bigotry from their justly deserved fate.
And yet, Shahvisi goes on immediately to admit that “those who call out wrongdoing often do so in ways that are troubling and unhelpful. Something isn’t right about how we deal with the harms we cause each other.” (172) Once again, the precise meaning of this statement is unclear — after all, the “cancelled” have committed “wrongdoing” and caused “harms” and thus deserve some kind of punishment — but the discussion later in the chapter illuminates the sources of Shahvisi’s uneasiness: sometimes individual miscreants, though guilty enough, are made to serve as scapegoats for deeper forms of structural oppression (183–186); sometimes sincere apologies are unfairly rejected (186–188); and sometimes call-outs reflect an unhealthy desire for vengeance or an unhealthy way of buttressing a fragile personal identity (189–196).
These worries are of course justified. But Shahvisi’s framing has begged the question at the outset, by assuming that the accused person has committed some “wrongdoing” and caused some “harm”. True, a few pages later Shahvisi is careful to redefine the “transgression” as “a person says or does something morally troubling, or is accused of having done so” (175, emphasis mine; a similar caveat is on 176). But she fails to discuss the key question of how such accusations ought to be adjudicated, and by whom — though she does discuss briefly (195–196) the aspects of social media that undermine judicious reflection (in this she converges somewhat with Jonathan Haidt and Anne Applebaum, whose analyses are however much more detailed). Furthermore, the caveat that accusation does not equate to guilt is almost forgotten in the conclusion (183):
Taking stock, what we call ‘cancel culture’ is often just the supersized celebrity version of what the rest of us experience all the time: consequences for our mistakes and bigotries. You do something shitty and people distance themselves from you, especially if you refuse to acknowledge your wrongdoing and make amends. There’s nothing new or unusual about that, but there are important additional complexities …
— like the fact that cancellation is sometimes “deliberately misused to humiliate or discredit a person who is envied, disliked or misunderstood”.
But the fundamental problem with Shahvisi’s conception of “cancel culture” is that it is much too narrow. Her prototype is a person who has said or tweeted something overtly racist, sexist or homophobic, or is accused of such. Here the only questions are: Is the person guilty as charged, and what is the appropriate punishment?
But the key issue in “cancel culture” — at least in my view — is not in fact the treatment of individuals, but rather the treatment of ideas. The overarching purpose of cancel culture is to suppress the expression of disfavored ideas; the exemplary punishments meted out to individuals are primarily a means to that end. And though the ideas involved are routinely characterised by the cancellers as being racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic, that characterisation is most often highly tendentious. For instance:
- Philosopher Rebecca Tuvel publishes a peer-reviewed article in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, exploring the analogies between transgenderism and transracialism. Tuvel is subjected to vile abuse, and an open letter with 830 signatories demands retraction. In the end, the article survives — as does the untenured Tuvel, who is courageously supported by her department chair — but the journal’s editorial board is decimated.
- Cardiology professor Norman Wang publishes a peer-reviewed article reviewing the history of affirmative-action policies in the medical profession in the USA, and arguing against the continuation of racial and ethnic preferences in medical-school admissions and medical hiring. A social-media storm ensues, and the paper is summarily retracted by the editors, without giving the author any opportunity to reply to his critics.
- The American Anthropological Association cancels a conference panel expressing the modest idea that “biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”. The rejection document is entitled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology”.
These cases, and several other similar ones, are well known; but Shahvisi says nothing about them, or about the issues that they raise.
Shahvisi does mention, briefly (176–177), the famous Harper’s Magazine “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, co-signed by 153 well-known intellectuals and artists including Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. But she doesn’t address the content of the letter or its arguments, beyond quoting half a sentence. Instead, she attacks, in classic ad hominem fashion, the imagined motivations of the signers:
People who have no trouble making their voices heard, and whose collective online following runs into the billions. It’s not entirely clear what they were worried about, and it looked a lot like a plea for unconditional exaltation, or immunity from criticism. The prominence of ‘cancel culture’ as a flashpoint in public discourse derives in part from the efforts of a small number of people who are fiercely protective of their power and influence. (177, italics in the original)
Here Shahvisi appears oblivious to the true goal of high-profile “cancellation” campaigns: not to silence J.K. Rowling, Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins — who are indeed “too big to be cancelled” — but to serve as a warning to less powerful people that they could be next. As graduate student Shaun Cammack eloquently observed in connection with an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America calling for the removal of Steven Pinker from its list of distinguished fellows:
… this letter wasn’t really about Pinker at all. In fact, it has a very specific function — to dissuade lesser-known academics and students from questioning the ideological consensus. …
The letter is really directed towards you — the unknown academic, the young linguist, the graduate student. And in this particular goal of dissuading dissent, it will undoubtedly be successful. Although the letter has been widely criticised, you are not Steven Pinker, and Noam Chomsky and others probably aren’t going to come to your defence when you get sanctioned for expressing the wrong opinion. Not because they don’t believe in free speech, but because they won’t even be aware of your case. There will be no articles lambasting and criticising the cancellers. Your cancellation will be a blip on the radar and the academic world will chug along without you.
All this is well enough known: it was discussed by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, by Jonathan Rauch in his book The Constitution of Knowledge, and by Umut Özkırımlı in his book Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke. Furthermore, a few cases of young scholars pushed out of academia for their disagreement with “woke” dogmas have become publicly known. Shahvisi’s claim that “it is not entirely clear what [the Harper’s authors] were worried about” looks entirely disingenuous, and an evasion of her responsibility as a philosopher to address the arguments with which she disagrees.
But Shahvisi is correct about one thing: cancel culture is not solely a tool of the “left”. Right-wingers have been equally avid to cancel liberals and leftists, whenever they have had the power to do so. Shahvisi cites several examples (181), and there are many more.
Furthermore, both “right” and “left” have repeatedly engaged in fratricidal cancellation, aimed at ensuring ideological homogeneity within the tribe and at suppressing internal dissent. Indeed, in-group cancellation is often the most ferocious. Shahvisi has grasped the psychological reason for this: “the determination to divide the world into the perfectly virtuous and the irredeemably evil requires that those who err are booted into the depths of hell to sustain the binary” (192). But what she misses — ironically for a good leftist — is how cancellation is also an exertion of power within the group. This was understood by feminists in the 1970s, when cancellation in the pre-social-media era was called “trashing”; and it was re-explained recently in a perceptive essay by the heterodox conservative David French.
In one brief passage, Shahvisi provides a glimpse of awareness of the dynamics by which cancel culture suppresses internal dissent, and why it is so dangerous:
[T]he threat of humiliation or exclusion has the counterproductive effect of discouraging careful, critical thinking, and motivating people to adopt, wholesale, the views of those they assume have got it right. This is one of the ways in which ‘echo chambers’ emerge; repeating the received view within a particular social milieu is the safest way to avoid the stress and embarrassment (or worse) of being called out. And this is bad news for social justice movements, which must nurture bravery, creativity and dissent if they are to imagine and enact alternative ways of living, as well as an understanding that resistance is always an ongoing practice. (192)
But unfortunately she does not pursue the thought. Here Glenn Loury’s account of the dynamics of self-censorship and Timur Kuran’s analysis of preference falsification could be good starting points.
Further information about how cancel culture operates in practice — how it aims to suppress and circumvent debate over ideas, and not just to punish individuals — can be found in Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s recent book, The Canceling of the American Mind, which recounts in detail numerous cases on both “left” and “right”. Their book is far less philosophically sophisticated than Shahvisi’s, but it is more realistic and balanced in its assessment.
The bottom line, as Jonathan Rauch has eloquently observed, is that there is a profound difference between cancel culture and honest criticism:
Criticism seeks to engage in conversations and identify error; canceling seeks to stigmatize conversations and punish the errant. Criticism cares whether statements are true; canceling cares about their social effects. Criticism exploits viewpoint diversity; canceling imposes viewpoint conformity. Criticism is a substitute for social punishment (we kill our hypotheses rather than each other); canceling is a form of social punishment (we kill your hypothesis by killing you socially).
As I stressed at the outset, Shahvisi is absolutely right, in my judgment, to observe that many discussions of controversial social and political issues rely on unexamined assumptions, and that philosophical analysis can help us to uncover those assumptions and to subject them to critical scrutiny. So it is deeply disappointing that her book is itself so full of unexamined assumptions. I have already noted some of them; but perhaps the most blatant ones concern the vexed issue of “transphobia”.
The words “transphobia” and “transphobic” occur nine times in the book (8, 31, 42, 71 twice, 177, 179, 191, 199). Further, the author refers blithely to “J.K. Rowling, whose transphobia has been widely criticised” (177), taking for granted that “her transphobia” (179) is an established fact that no one could possibly dispute. But nowhere in the book is the concept of “transphobia” defined, or its meaning in any way elucidated. Nor is there any recognition of the fact that different people use this term in radically different ways. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “transphobia” as “hostility towards, prejudice against, or (less commonly) fear of transgender people”. On the other hand, many people use the term to mean “opposition to the legitimate rights of transgender people” — or to be more precise, “opposition to what I conceive to be the legitimate rights of transgender people”, albeit usually without making this crucial clarification explicit, or explaining what that hidden conception is (concerning, for instance, single-sex changing rooms or women’s sports).
Disambiguating these uses of “transphobia”, and evaluating which arguments are valid under each definition, could be a useful philosophical task. But Shahvisi does not even notice it, much less attempt to address it.
But things are actually much worse than this. However one may choose to define “transphobia”, its meaning is clearly dependent on a prior understanding of the meaning of “transgender”. Now everyone, on all sides of the debate, is pretty much agreed that “transgender” refers to a person whose self-declared gender identity differs from their biological sex (or their “sex assigned at birth”, if one prefers to use the medically approved euphemism). But this raises the questions: What is meant by “biological sex”, and what is meant by “gender identity”? Only if we first get these things straight can we have any hope of understanding what is meant by “transgender”, and thence what is meant by “transphobia”.
These two issues were indeed addressed at great length in two recent, and very clearly written, books by philosophers: Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls (2021) and Alex Byrne’s Trouble with Gender (2023). It is fair to surmise that Shahvisi doesn’t like these authors’ conclusions. But why, then, doesn’t she “show her working”? Stock’s book appeared two years before her own; if she thinks that Stock’s arguments are mistaken, why doesn’t she analyse them and show us where the errors lie? That could have been a valuable contribution by a philosopher to an important social and political debate. (And one that has serious medical implications, since the debate over puberty blockers for gender-norm-nonconforming teenagers is also dependent on unexamined assumptions about the meaning of “gender identity”.)
This is a great lost opportunity. And so, in the end, I must sadly conclude, is this book.
