At the October 2017 conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existentialism, one of the largest gatherings of philosophers in the United States, I gave a sort of “state of the union” for trans philosophy, specifically its challenges and possibilities in the wake of the “transracialism” controversy that had begun that spring. I worried that, as trans philosophy was overshadowed by heated debate, working conditions for trans philosophers would become less and less hospitable. At the same time, I was hopeful about the continued work being done.
Though the audience was engaged and I and my fellow panelists were all invited to lunch afterward (the main goal for any conference talk), there were several people glaringly absent from the session, namely some of the most outspoken critics of trans philosophy. This would set the tone for the last two years, years marked by a failure to reach mutual terms of dialogue.
To briefly recap, in spring 2017 the major feminist journal Hypatia published an essay by Rebecca Tuvel titled “In Defense of Transracialism.” Tuvel argued that accepting trans people necessitated accepting people who self-describe as transracial, such as Rachel Dolezal. An open letter called for the article’s retraction on the grounds of it not having properly engaged with literature, especially work on race and gender written by women of color, while many of Hypatia’s associate editors disagreed with the decision to publish the essay. Many people, both inside and outside the profession, challenged the call for retraction as an unfounded threat to academic freedom. The challengers to the open letter largely won popular sentiment, and the article remains published with a book on the way.1
The Hypatia essay was published at a time when trans philosophers were making great strides. This is not to deny the important work of earlier trans philosophers like Miqqi Gilbert, Loren Cannon, Jacob Hale, and Talia Bettcher; but something changed in the mid-2010s, around the time of what commentators called the “Transgender Tipping Point.”2 It used to be that the best a trans philosopher could hope for was occasionally seeing another trans person at a conference; now we were hosting spaces of our own. There was, for example, the Trans* Experience in Philosophy Conference in May 2016, which I co-organized with Megan Burke and Fulden Ibrahimhakkioglu. Important work has been published in the APA Newsletter on LGBTQ Issues in Philosophy, and the Trans Philosophy Project was formed. Trans philosophers now include among their ranks such scholars as Andrea Pitts, Perry Zurn, Grayson Hunt, Robin Dembroff, Ash Williams, Rachel McKinnon, Ephraim Das Janssen, Mel Chen, Yannik Thiem, Eli Clare, and Tamsin Kimoto; there are also trans philosophers and ex-philosophers doing work outside the academy, including Natalie Wynn and Alyson Escalante.3
In short, we are in the midst of trans philosophy becoming its own collective field of study. These philosophers are shifting the decades-long program of curiosity and regulation focused on trans people from outside their lived experience. Rich, living trans worlds are bursting into that old frame of analysis, resulting in an account of trans experience, concepts, metaphors, and understanding that is more informed about the complex endeavor of being trans in the world and its resulting politics.
Before the development of trans philosophy by trans people, philosophical writing largely treated them as an afterthought or footnote. Feminist theorists in the late 20th century described transsexual women as a “necrophilic invasion,” “robots” or “simulacra,” a “fantasy of femininity” achieved through “crude transformations.”4 Book-length philosophical works about trans people were rare. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) often referenced trans people, but largely ignored the ways that trans people describe and go about their lives. Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979) and Bernice Hausman’s Changing Sex (1995) focused on the doctors and psychologists shaping transsexual medicine and suggested that trans people were detrimental to the feminist cause and women in general. Moreover, these discussions were largely not on the radar for philosophers working outside feminist theory.5
The terrain of trans scholarship has changed with the increased involvement of trans people in that scholarship, both as authors and interlocutors. In 1997, Jacob Hale distributed a guide titled “Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans ____,” alerting non-trans academics of their tendency to act as distant observers when writing about trans people without examining their own motivations, assumptions, and power. That same year Naomi Scheman published an essay refusing “the position of unproblematized, paradigmatic subject, puzzling over how to understand some especially recalcitrant object” and instead thought about her own identity alongside transsexual identity, taking both to be “livable.” In 2009, Laurie Schrage edited a volume on Sexual Reassignment and Personal Identity, including new work by Talia Bettcher and Jacob Hale; and Hypatia released a special “Transgender Studies and Feminism” issue including new work by Miqqi Gilbert, Viviane Namaste, and Riley Snorton.6
Though most in the discipline of philosophy remained uninterested in trans issues, some philosophers have been making efforts to include trans people in the scholarly conversations about our lives. Trans philosophy has become a dialogue between trans and non-trans people, resulting in a collective inquiry that is both more open and more rigorous.
But while trans philosophers have gained visibility within their field, they continue to suffer from rampant employment discrimination. Trans people who work in philosophy, where there is already a dearth of comfortable jobs, are often tasked with “diversity work”; they are isolated or exploited, without adequate pay, healthcare, housing, peer support, and job security; they experience burnout and often drop out of academia altogether.7
The skewed demographics of philosophy, which is notorious among the humanities for failing to include women, people of color, and disabled people, only make matters worse. In a 2012 keynote, then–American Philosophical Association president Linda Alcoff connected the demographics of philosophy with its practice, pointing out how the topics predominantly taken up by philosophers from marginalized communities were frequently dismissed as political rather than properly philosophical. Alcoff argued that philosophy continues to “subordinate those philosophical schools that might put its demographic problems on the table for discussion,” resulting in a general refusal to situate philosophy within its “institutional and social contexts.”8
By emphasizing trans people’s knowledge and lived experiences, trans philosophy runs at odds with much of mainstream professional philosophy, in which trans people are seen as politically biased or self-deluded as opposed to the unsituated, unbiased, disengaged philosopher. What many philosophers do not acknowledge, however, is that the distant, critical, non-trans writer has actually been the historical norm when it comes to practitioners of trans scholarship. There’s nothing novel about them at all.
Since my talk in 2017, the climate for trans philosophers has grown worse in many ways. The concern about academic freedom that took center stage in the transracialism controversy developed into continuous calls over the past two years to lift the voices of “gender-critical” philosophers, who focus on trans people as a problematic and incoherent manifestation of a dangerous anti-woman ideology. Gender-critical philosophers focus on, among other things, the potential threat that trans people (usually, in gender-critical rhetoric, trans women) might pose to non-trans women in public spaces; the very idea of “gender identity”; the specter of a “trans lobby” that is allegedly leveraging global political power to corrupt young people and steal hard-won rights from women (i.e. “adult human females”); and the supposed lack of attention given to the needs of people who detransition. Popular philosophy news blogs have devoted a great deal of time and attention to gender-critical philosophers claiming to have been silenced or slandered, while there was virtually no coverage of the second national trans philosophy conference held in October 2018.9
Conversations about trans philosophy are now centered on the work of gender-critical scholars rather than the work of trans philosophers. And while the raging controversies around trans people in philosophy have driven trans graduate students to seek employment elsewhere, open letters continue to rally to the side of gender-critical philosophers whom they claim have been silenced and barred from open discussion—going so far as to close off discussions about transphobia and anti-trans hatred in philosophy as “cruel and abusive.”10
Just as trans philosophy was becoming transformed into a conversation with trans people, we are seeing a resurgence of philosophical claims to the right to treat trans people as objects of study and curiosity. Mainstream philosophy (ever late to the party) suddenly demands work on trans issues, but the impact of tenuous trans employment and the silencing of trans perspectives are deprioritized as issues of free and open academic inquiry. Even critiques of gender-critical philosophers continue to center non-trans critics as the primary sources of trans philosophy, while ceaseless controversy makes affiliating with trans people as colleagues and potential employees risky for professional advancement.
The work that has been done to create spaces for trans philosophers continues to be fragile, and the material conditions of academic philosophy will likely not support it anytime soon. Nevertheless, however mired in conflict this work may be—indeed, because of how great the conflict is—the work to build trans spaces and promote trans perspectives in philosophy is more important than ever.
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- Rebecca Tuvel, “In Defense of Transracialism,” Hypatia 32 (Spring 2017): 263–78; “Open Letter to Hypatia,” Google Doc last modified April 2017; Justin Weinberg, “Hypatia’s Associate Editors Resign,” Daily Nous, July 24, 2017; Justin Weinberg, “Philosopher’s Article on Transracialism Sparks Controversy (Updated with Response from Author),” Daily Nous, last updated May 1, 2017; Jesse Singal, “This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like,” Intelligencer, May 2, 2017.
- Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” TIME, May 29, 2014.
- For a good essay on the state of trans philosophy today, see Talia Mae Bettcher, “What Is Trans Philosophy?,” Hypatia (Fall 2019).
- Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 53, 71 (“necrophilic invasion”); Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983), 85, 89, 92n6 (“robots”); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 223 (“simulacra”); Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 207 (“fantasy”).
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9; Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979); Bernice Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). A more sympathetic, albeit anecdotal, discussion of trans identity can be found in Catharine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 154, 183.
- Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1–17; Jacob Hale, “Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans ____,” Sandy Stone (WayBack Machine screenshots of the original 1997 version and the 2006 and 2009 updates); Naomi Scheman, “Queering the Center by Centering the Queer: Reflections on Transsexuals and Secular Jews,” in Diana T. Meyers, ed., Feminists Rethink the Self (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 124–62, reprinted in Naomi Scheman, Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Transgression and Trustworthiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 120, 123; Naomi Scheman, “Looking Back on ‘Queering the Center,’” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3 (May 2016): 212–19; Laurie J. Schrage, ed., “You’ve Changed:” Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Talia Bettcher and Ann Garry, eds., “Transgender Studies and Feminism,” Special Issue, Hypatia 24 (Summer 2009).
- For a discussion of diversity work, see Mariam B. Lam, “Diversity Fatigue Is Real,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 23, 2018.
- Linda Alcoff, “Philosophy’s Civil Wars,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 87 (Nov. 2013): 22, 37–38; Justin Weinberg, “Addressing Philosophy Departments’ Lack of Diversity,” Daily Nous, April 8, 2019. For a longer history of divisions in contemporary philosophy, see Richard Rorty, “Analytic and Conversational Philosophy,” in Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, eds., The Rorty Reader (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 195–203.
- For examples of these conversations, see Colleen Flaherty, “By Any Other Name,” Inside Higher Ed, June 6, 2018; and Sophie Allen et al., “Derogatory Language in Philosophy Journal Risks Increased Hostility and Diminished Discussion,” Daily Nous, Aug. 27, 2018.
- @transphilosopher33, “I am leaving academic philosophy because of its transphobia problem,” Medium, May 30, 2019; “Philosophers Should Not Be Sanctioned Over Their Positions on Sex and Gender,” Inside Higher Ed, July 22, 2019.
