In the spirit of intellectual honesty, this article is a collection of self-criticisms. I reviewed over my older essays for where I could have done better and have provided some of the bigger reflections here. These criticisms include points about both material facts and approach. Inevitably, I have made some errors, some more serious than others, and the year’s end is a great time to write about them.
The articles I have chosen to write about are Interesting Times, "Protect and Serve," The Fourth Estate, How to be an Ally, On Transgender Athletes, “Gender as Art”: A Response, and Protect Trans Kids.
Interesting Times, “Protect and Serve,” The Fourth Estate
Somehow, I managed to discuss the ongoing protests in response to the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, among others, without ever mentioning them or even Black Americans in general. This isn’t just a failure to include critical context, or to introduce a vacuous statement of support for Black Lives Matter. The principle analysis of the essay is changed and deepened by examining the context.
As I mention in the essay, the American liberal mindset is founded upon the idea that the state is by and for the people. However, “the people” were initially landed white men, and even as the franchise was slowly extended, many groups were granted unequal political power. As Charles Wade Mills puts it, the liberal social contract was originally a contract among rich white men. In this context, it is not surprising that Black Americans are simultaneously terrorized and neglected by law enforcement: Law enforcement is based upon a system biased, historically and presently, towards white interests.
As Justice Harry Blackmun put it in the historic Supreme Court case Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, which ruled that affirmative action is legal: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way.” Given the blatant systemic racism in American society, genuinely universal liberalism is dependent upon us first acknowledging and then taking account of race. It is a mistake to vaguely gesture towards some dream of a state by and for the people without mentioning race, as I did in Interesting Times, “Protect and Serve,” The Fourth Estate.
How to be an Ally
The primary error I made here is in style, but it is a major one. While I still believe the core ideas are right, How to be an Ally is so incredibly abstract that I’m afraid the application is almost entirely lost on people, even with the provided examples. This was caused by two concerns. The first was that I wanted to lay out a widely applicable framework, and so I kept it somewhat distanced from its applications. (Writing that out now, it’s clear that was a silly way to handle that concern.) The second was that I was anxious about irritating the people who prompted the essay. However, if I wrote this to make people better allies, then I should’ve been aiming directly for where I saw people tripping up. Beating around the bush fails pretty frequently.
Here is one concrete example: Jesse Singal. Singal is a somewhat popular reporter on cultural issues. He particular has made a name for himself talking about transgender youth. He does not have any particular expertise in the field of transgender youth. He is not transgender, and he has been very dismissive of the idea that maybe this might cause some blind spots in his reporting (see the previous link). He has made numerous errors in his reporting, which I have variously addressed in essays like The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and Desistance and Protect Trans Kids. Many people get much of their information on transgender issues from Singal, but that is a mistake if you want to be an ally to transgender people. The first stop should be transgender people (such as Katelyn Burns, a fantastic reporter), and once you form your opinions you should redirect back to the transgender people you learned from (something Singal does not do).
Similar problems were present when Rowling published her godawful essay. Many very well-intentioned people read her essay and thought, oh yes, this sounds reasonable. But it wasn’t good! In addition to my own response to her essay (see the previous link) there have been extremely thorough responses by very intelligent transgender people that have not received a fraction of the attention that Rowling got. While Rowling made her arguments with very little evidence, she gets a massive platform, and the rest of us are left to try to convince those who trusted her analysis that she had made serious errors. This could’ve been avoided if people got their information on transgender issues from the experts (as I tried to push in Protect Trans Kids) or transgender people themselves, or, ideally, both.
Of course, there are more examples than just topics under transgender issues. That’s just the topic I can provide the most detail on, and what prompted How to be an Ally the most.
On Transgender Athletes
On Transgender Athletes could’ve used a heavy dose of analytic clarity and precision. It would’ve helped me write it and others better understand it. Laying out specific questions and providing specific answers would’ve made it far less of a jumble. So, I’m going to try to inject some clarity here.
What are the abstract concerns of the transgender athlete discussion?
Three main principles of sports ethics are 1) fairness, 2) inclusion, and 3) safety. Most of the discussion is centered around the first two principles since there are, typically, numerous rules in place to help make sure sports are safe in general, and new rules are often written quite quickly after finding a new hazard. In addition, safety often overlaps with fairness; in sports where tackling is a thing, for example, having a disproportionately strong tackle is a matter of both fairness and safety. Therefore, I will focus primarily on fairness and inclusion.
What are the concrete concerns of the transgender athlete discussion?
We can take as a given that people assigned male at birth are typically more athletically skilled than people assigned female at birth, such that you would not be remiss to assume that a randomly selected man could outperform a randomly selected woman in many sports.
This typically prompts these questions regarding fairness:
Are transgender women (as a group, or on average) more athletically skilled than cisgender women (as a group, or on average)?
What are the conditions, if any, when transgender women perform roughly at parity with cisgender women?
Asking these questions then typically prompts these questions regarding inclusion:
Is there any moral pressure to include transgender women in women’s sports?
If so, is that pressure able to override some unfairness, and if so, to what extent?
Transgender men do not typically feature in these conversations. We will assume that transgender men who are undergoing or who have undergone masculinizing hormone therapy are to participate in men’s sports only, and that this fair and inclusive.
The questions regarding unfairness have been met with mixed responses by professionals and researchers. Some things do not change after going through feminizing hormone therapy. However, there is effectively no research on the interaction between what changes and what doesn’t change. A heavier skeleton, for example, isn’t always an advantage. Regardless, some researchers have concluded that existing standards create an “intolerable unfairness” towards cisgender women. This is because many standards are based on testosterone levels, which do not closely track to actual physical changes. A solution to this problem will be discussed momentarily.
Among those who consider the question of inclusion, there is a general consensus that there is a moral pressure to include transgender women in women’s sports. Sports are a very human thing, and the passion of many transgender women. Existing standards often create and perpetuate environments that are hostile to transgender women. In the absence of clear evidence that the inclusion of any transgender women creates an intolerably unfair environment, it seems intolerably exclusive to flatly ban transgender women from women’s sports.
When we do have a substantial amount of research into what precisely factors into athletic ability, we may be able to create something akin to weight tiers, but more complex, in that it pits people of similar levels of advantage against each other. This would make it so that skill is the primary factor in determining if you win, with things like transgender status, mutations, and socioeconomics playing a substantially reduced factor.
There aren’t many easy and presently available answers. I can only name two. 1) The effects of puberty are small by around, say, 12 years of age. Therefore, the pressure towards inclusion suggests that preteen transgender youth should be allowed to participate in the gender category of their choice, given the minimal impact on fairness. 2) A blanket ban on transgender women participating in women’s sports is an intolerable exclusion. Past this, the only thing that can be said with confidence is that we need more research.
“Gender as Art”: A Response
I was overly critical to this article’s suggestion of gender expressivism. While I still hold that social constructivism à la Judith Butler is superior, the thesis of gender expressivism is more acceptable than I first considered. My change of heart is because I realized that I imputed to gender expressivism an error that didn’t exist: Privileging a constructed idea of “natural” over “social” realities.
Let me quote what I argued previously:
One of the proposed merits of gender expressivism is that it has explanatory power. It can explain why various languages gender things like chairs and why most humans are perceived as male or female. This seems to leave the existence of nonbinary people in a pickle. Numerous societies have included nonbinary genders which are agender or some gender which is neither male nor female. These societies seem to be left without an explanatory home in the gender expressivist world. In addition, the most nonbinary-inclusive reading of gender expressivism would seem to leave nonbinary identities as a perpetual derivative of maleness and femaleness instead of something which can stand on its own. That doesn’t strike me as emancipatory as I would prefer.
…
The strongest way I can think of to construct gender expressivism is to say that, statistically speaking, most human brains are constantly looking for maleness or femaleness. “Gender as Art” tries to console the people who are worried about a proliferation of gender identities by saying that most people, now and in the future, will be male or female, and any variation is basically an aesthetic derivative. Gender expressivism seems to recreate a structure where binary genders are set above nonbinary genders, a structure which many constructivists would say is contingent and not necessary at all.
While I am still a little displeased with the attempt to console people worried about a proliferation of genders — while it follows from gender expressivism that there wouldn’t be such a thing, I don’t want to engage as if it is a valid worry — I believe that I misunderstood the essay’s argument. The acceptance of nonbinary and transgender people under a gender expressivist framework is possible because we are not limited by our biology. Liberalism’s normative individualism supports the idea that, even though that’s how our brains might be structured, we needn’t derive any teleology. The gender pareidolia that we all experience is merely the field in which most of us find ourselves in, and within that field we are free to play with gender as we see fit.
Protect Trans Kids
Protect Trans Kids is, by far, my most-read essay at time of writing. That is fantastic. That is exactly what I wanted, because people need to stop screwing with and hyper-focusing on transgender youth. The vast majority of what I wrote in it is solid and factual. There is one place, however, where I made a notable error. After it was released, someone who is far more educated on transgender issues reached out to me and pointed out that I had placed far too much emphasis on age. Let me explain.
I put a lot of emphasis on the age of 16 as the point where cross-sex hormones are typically given. I did so because that is what the standards of care I looked at suggested. However, that emphasis rubs up against both common sense and how transgender youth are actually treated by clinicians today. There are 14-year-olds you would trust with a baby, and 18-year-olds you best keep a close eye on: Stages, not ages. While 16 may be the rule of thumb, both their mental maturity and the severity of their dysphoria are huge factors. The intensity and consistency of the dysphoria is a strong predictor of if it will persist, so it makes sense to prescribe a highly and persistently dysphoric 13-year-old cross-sex hormones. On the flip-side, if a mentally immature 16-year-old presents with mild and inconsistently present gender dysphoria, a clinician might have a mind to hold off on prescribing cross-sex hormones.
I had focused so much on the number 16 because I wanted to provide as much of pure standards of care as I could in the bulk of the text. However, that was a mistake. If standards of care clearly will be applied flexibly, then I had best make that clear.
This isn’t an attempt to be self-deprecating, to be clear. My views regularly change. For example, they often change when doing my more scientifically-oriented essays, because I try to check out whatever relevant studies I could find, and these studies don’t always track with what I previously thought. Since my views update, I thought it would be interesting and intellectually frank to show how they’ve changed from past writings. This is something I intend to do regularly, so long as Transliberalism is around.
I hope y’all like it, and that 2021 is better for you than 2020.