Polytropy

This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, of the following writers.

1. Lilith Saintcrow on “Domestic abusers, white supremacists, and religious bigots.”
2. C. S. Lewis on gulling the educated, and objectivity as a dubious value.
3. Marilynne Robinson on consensus as concealing the objectively true.
4. Neil deGrasse Tyson on objectivity as a good value.
5. Plato on seeming wise, without being so.
6. Mark Vernon on imagination in William Blake.
7. whoever wrote an “Open Letter Concerning Transphobia in Philosophy,” signed by many professional philosophers.
8. Agnes Callard on how philosophers shouldn’t be signing petitions.
9. Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, on the incoherence of the notion of gender identity.
10. Christopher Bertram, a signer of the “Open Letter.”
11. Nathan Oseroff-Spicer, who noticed who had not signed the letter.
12. Aaden Friday, on what’s wrong with Reilly-Cooper and other such women.
13. Brian Earp, on why declaring pronouns is not obviously a good thing.
14. Liam Kofi Bright, another signer of the “Open Letter.”
15. Masha Gessen, on wishing he could have transitioned as a teen.
16. John Steinbeck, on being a man.
17. Christa Peterson, on what gender identity might be.
18. Holly Lawford-Smith, on third bathrooms and being banned from social media.
19. Jason Stanley, who signed the “Open Letter,” but also calls for left unity.
20. Isaac Asimov, on behaviorism.
21. Dominic Berry, who will block anybody who follows the editor who published Reilly-Cooper’s essay.
22. Kathleen Stock, the subject of the “Open Letter.”
23. Caitlin Green, on what people such as Stock should do if they are going to change their research focus.

Having originally posted this essay on January 9, 2021, I edited and augmented it, on January 19 and December 19 of that year. I return to it now, on June 22, 2023, having posted “On Dialectic,” two days ago; this one is another post that quotes lots of people, and I want to check how it reads. It reads fine, to me, although I did have to correct occurrences of “behavior” spelled as “behavor.” Moreover, although I had forgotten what was here, I recognized it instantly as I read; another reader would not experience this recognition.

What stands out most to me now is Christa Peterson’s suggestion,

A representation of our own gender … could … be a means of picking out people as who we are co-gendered with …

As the essay already suggests, if you replaced “gender” with “race,” then the resulting speculation could get you called a racist, and that is supposed to be something bad. However, if we replace “gender” with “sex,” we obtain a proposition that is fundamental to contemporary biology, as I understand it, because evolution is

• not only by natural selection, or “survival of the fittest” – selection by the rigors of the natural environment,
• but also by sexual selection, or selection for mating by members of the opposite sex of one’s (sexually reproducing) species.

I think this is why Nina Paley can say, in a blog post called “Why I Don’t Use ‘Preferred Pronouns’,” which I referred to also in “Imagination,”

Like most mammals, I can’t help but identify someone’s sex with +99% accuracy. (… Women, I think, are better at identifying sex than men, either due to instinct or conditioning for survival …)

We know that there are two sexes, and we know who is of which sex, the way we know that some foods are good to eat. However, Peterson seems to think of this knowledge a bit differently:

Trans people’s dignity and legitimacy does not depend on the success of any one attempt to conceptualize their experience. But the most common way, in terms of “gender identity,” is perfectly functional. The commitments of the popular notion are minimal: people have an internal sense of their own gender that can come apart from their knowledge of their assigned sex, and is generally fixed, and certainly not revisable in the way ordinary beliefs are.

What is the word “assigned” doing here? Does whether you are trans depend on whether somebody made a mistake when checking one of the boxes marked “male” and “female” at your birth?

“Human egg and sperm cells.”
Asimov’s New Guide to Science (1984), page 600