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Abstract
Robin Dembroff’s “Escaping the natural attitude about gender” replies to my “Are women adult human females?”. This paper responds to Dembroff’s many criticisms of my arguments, as well as to the charge that “Are women...?” “fundamentally is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons”. I argue that Dembroff’s criticisms fail without exception, and explain why the claims about my motives are baseless.
Highlights
Philosophers often seem to think that they can just ‘assign’ any meaning whatever to any word; and so no doubt, in an absolutely trivial sense, they can
It will come as no surprise to those who have been following the recent turmoil in philosophy over sex and gender that “Are women adult human females?” ( Are women . . . ?) was not a hit with a number of anonymous referees.[1]
On P3, about the Adam and Eve of human genetics, Escaping... says that “supporting the sufficiency direction of AHF [that being an adult human female is sufficient for being a woman] is highly uninformative”, seemingly on the ground that a similar argument would support the view that being a lesbian or a wife is sufficient for being a woman.[29]
Summary
José Luis Bermudez et al, “Philosophers should not be sanctioned over their positions on sex and gender”, Inside Higher Ed, July 22, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/07/22/ philosophersshouldnotbesanctionedtheirpositionssexandgenderopinion; Linda Alcoff et al, “On philosophical scholarship of gender: A response to “12 leading scholars””, Blog of the APA, August 7, 2019, https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/08/07/onphilosophicalscholarshipofgenderaresponseto 12leadingscholars/. ?: Alex Byrne, “Are women adult human females?”, Philosophical Studies 177 (2020): 3783–803. Since Referee 1 was rather short on specifics, naturally I wondered what, exactly, Are women . ) is trenchant, to put it mildly.[2] Dembroff’s reply convicts me of “rhetorical bullying”, of using “cherrypicked quotations to undermine the legitimacy of queer communities”, of deploying “uninformed and poorly constructed” arguments, and much else besides.[3] Are women . An unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons”.4. Let us start with the least inflammatory of these accusations, my poorly constructed arguments, which “are at best confused—more often, they are questionbegging or false”.5
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