However, shortly after this blooming, we find Richard Feynman expressing his contempt for philosophy of science as a discipline that had become dominated by non-scientists, a dismissal that rings even truer today.

What Is Life? is a fine example of philosophy meeting biology and producing quality interdisciplinary work. The molecular biology revolution was a practical outworking of the philosophical appetite of the time, well expressed by Schrödinger. Unless one credits Aristotle et al, philosophy of science as an academic discipline is little more than a century old. It aims to critically analyse and reflect on what science is, how it works, and the questions it asks. It puts another eye on the game, distinct from its partners, history of science and sociology of science. (I admit that I care little for sociology of science, which treats science more as a human activity than as a way of discovering actual reality ‘out there’ in nature.)

This brings me to Feynman’s distaste for the discipline. By the time he won his Nobel in 1965, it would be fair to say that philosophy of science was no longer the same field as it had been: now, it was full of musings from those in the humanities. ‘How dare these outsiders tell us what is really going on?’ was the attitude of those in Feynman’s camp. How can those who have not done any science critique what is being done by scientists, analyse what is wrong with it, and discuss its true value? It all added up to a waste of time and money for Feynman.

Fast forward to our modern challenges. Recently, I was shocked to read that the controversial postmodern ideologue Judith Butler is considered a philosopher of biology. Butler’s writings on gender, for those unfamiliar with them, have been fairly criticised for so severely underplaying the biological component of gender that you would be forgiven for thinking that biology plays no part in our development. She was also the winner of the 1998 ‘Bad Writing Contest’, hosted by the journal Philosophy and Literature, for an incomprehensible sentence in one of her articles.¹

But the characterization of Butler as a philosopher of biology is not (entirely) wrong. If an informed layperson were asked to name one modern philosopher of biology, they might well name Butler. But she is as far removed as someone in academia could be from the sciences. Her education is in literature, feminism, and philosophy, and she owes more to Hegel than to Schrödinger. Someone who believes that sex is assigned at birth rather than observed by a doctor has no business in philosophy of biology. (Other feminists who might be considered philosophers of biology, like the excellent Kathleen Stock, are much more worth listening to.)

There is a straight line to be drawn from Butler’s work to those in the humanities who now claim that biological sex itself does not exist—as anti-scientific a statement as one will ever hear. Eighty years on from What Is Life?, Feynman’s contempt is even more justified. Now, so-called experts from the humanities dominate philosophy of science and are boosting the cause of science denialism more than anyone else even as they claim to be working against it.

It is time to return philosophy of science to those who respect both philosophy of science and science itself. To be clear, there are a great many philosophers of science today who are intimately acquainted with the realities of science and who are doing first-class work in legitimate journals. They treat the discipline with the original, historical respect that it deserves. Their work would not be out of place amongst the reflections written by the giants of the field’s golden era. In other words, there is a universe of difference between Judith Butler and someone like Michael Ruse. As a whole, though, the field is in dire straits.

Let me share a personal anecdote to illustrate what is missing in philosophy of biology. Three years ago, during an interview for a PhD position at a major British university, my surprised potential supervisor halted the interview about thirty seconds in. ‘Hold on, it says here that you have an actual science degree?’ I could not hide my own surprise and affirmed that that was correct. She then put down her papers and remarked, ‘Well, that is a tremendous advantage for you. Do you have ambitions of working in academia?’ I told her that that was very much my dream, but I failed to hide the surprise still written across my face. The interview shifted and I became the one asking questions: Did most professional philosophers of science not have a science background? Apparently not—and it seemed that if I wanted to get ahead, I was in possession of a serious advantage.

One does not have to be a scientist to be a historian or philosopher of science, but today as much as ever, scientists are needed to contribute to philosophy of science. Otherwise, those who have no business speaking in the name of science are gifted large platforms to mislead a general public that might not know any better. This is also why skilled science communicators are so desperately needed.

When one looks at the great names who gave the twentieth-century Gifford Lectures or the Eddington Memorial Lectures, one sees an extraordinary array. There are prize winners and legends from some of science’s golden eras. They each speak philosophically about the questions or meanings of their work or reflect on what the future may hold. This tradition survives today, among the likes of Lord Martin Rees and Sir Roger Penrose, but it is attenuated. Rees and Penrose certainly deserve a greater platform than Butler et al.

Perhaps the problem is one of space as much as communication skills. The platforms for great philosophers of science, or scientist philosophers, are not proportionate to their contributions. Education is also lacking, as undergraduate philosophy programs hardly ever feature philosophy of science in their curricula. Unfortunately, I have also sat through many philosophy lectures that are anti-scientific, pseudoscientific, or just plain mistaken. In continental philosophy and postmodern departments, science is very much the enemy: it is an oppressive force invented by white Western men to establish the patriarchy and is unable to make any claims to truth or reality. This is a very serious problem at a time when science needs to be understood more than ever.

The solution may well be to give scientists a larger platform in society. Post-pandemic, distrust in science (and expertise in general) has increased, even as science—from developments in artificial intelligence to revolutions in cancer research—has become more important than ever for our present and future. Each Sunday morning as I drive through Beaconsfield’s old town on the outskirts of London, I see protestors clad in white inviting us to toot our car horns if we agree with them on the latest conspiratorial, anti-science propaganda they are spouting. At first it was amusing, but now it simply depresses me.

In the space of eighty years, and to an alarming extent, philosophy of science has degenerated. Once, it inspired revolutionary breakthroughs. Now, it is dominated by thinkers who have not seen a laboratory or an observatory since high school and who use their platforms to disseminate nonsense. They have helped to usher in a conspiratorial atmosphere laced with distrust of and cynicism about the sciences. To combat them, we need to recover our sense about science.

1. Take a deep breath:
   
   ‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’ ︎

Related reading

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

‘We are at a threshold right now’: Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’, interview with Alex Byrne by Emma Park

‘A godless neo-religion’ – interview with Helen Joyce on the trans debate, by Emma Park

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

The falsehood at the heart of the trans movement, by Eliza Mondegreen

South Asia’s silenced feminists, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

The post 80 years on from Schrödinger’s ‘What Is Life?’, philosophy of biology needs rescuing from radicals appeared first on The Freethinker.

Humans are a very disagreeable species.

Therefore, it is important when speaking about the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ to separate these two things:

1. The material reality that any society formed of humans will be a society in which a variety of ideas will proliferate, humans will perpetually try to convince others of their ideas, disagreement about these ideas will nonetheless persist, factions will form around those disagreements, and conflict between these factions will ensue, resulting in constant cultural change and, often, bloodshed.
2. The liberal system for managing that conflict, minimising the bloodshed, and steering inevitable cultural change through pluralistic (live and let live) norms and democratic systems by protecting freedom of belief and speech, disallowing authoritarian coercion, and encouraging open debate with an expectation that arguments will be honest, civil, reasoned, and evidenced.

It is important to distinguish these two concepts because there are always some people who believe that, if they do away with the liberal system that protects the free exchange of ideas, they will also somehow do away with viewpoint diversity itself. This is utterly false. Unless homo sapiens somehow changes radically from the big-brained, combative, cooperative, tribal, territorial, social mammals that we are, we are stuck with the material reality of the Marketplace of Ideas. From school children negotiating the scope of an imaginary game to leaders of political parties trying to win voters, we will always be in the business of selling ideas and deciding which ideas to buy into. We cannot help ourselves. I’m doing it right now and so are you.

The liberal system of the Marketplace of Ideas can, of course, be changed. It has not been in operation at all for most of recorded history, is not in operation in many places even now, and has never been upheld perfectly anywhere. Liberal democracies that seek, in principle, to protect freedom of belief and speech, value viewpoint diversity, and actively encourage the free exchange and critique of ideas with an expectation of rationality and the use of evidence are relatively new developments of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) societies. WEIRD countries have always struggled to do this fully in practice, although their attempts have resulted in greater advances in knowledge and human rights than were known previously or that exist in countries that have not attempted any such system. It has been much more common for a dominant ruling power to decide what may or may not be said and by whom and to penalise disobedience under concepts like ‘treason’, ‘heresy’, ‘apostasy’, and ‘blasphemy’.

It may well be that it is fundamentally counterintuitive for us to allow other people to be morally or factually wrong or to see anything to be gained from having a variety of contradictory viewpoints or having these viewpoints do battle with each other when we think we know what is true and good. Even when well-established liberal democracies are doing comparatively well at remaining open to viewpoint diversity, we are always having to fight against people who want to make some things unspeakable and some truth claims unquestionable. They often do so with the best of intentions: to eradicate ideas that are hurtful or untrue and to stop them from being circulated in society and doing harm to people.

If you are a compassionate human being who is absolutely sure that God exists and that the consequences for being wrong about that are an eternity in Hell, why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to stop the contrary from being argued? You will be saving lives—more, you will be saving immortal souls. Alternatively, if you see absolutely no reason to consider the proposition that God exists as a serious one and much evidence of harm being done by people who think otherwise, why allow them to continue spreading that belief? Surely trying to stamp out the conviction that one knows the divine will of the creator of the universe is what will really save lives?

Or: ‘Why allow people to misgender a trans person when it is so easy to just use their stated pronouns and could make all the difference to the emotional wellbeing of a vulnerable minority group and even reduce suicide? It costs so little to the speaker to use certain words, while having one’s gender identity recognised means so much to the trans individual,’ a trans activist will argue. Alternatively, a gender critical feminist may ask, ‘Why let people use wrong sex pronouns when it is this very failure to consistently recognise biological sex classes that underlies very real threats to women’s spaces and sports and children’s mental and physical health? Protecting people’s right to choose their own words comes at the cost of protecting safety and fairness for women and obtaining evidence-based treatment for gender-confused kids.’

‘Fine’, some dogmatic materialists will argue, ‘but the whole God thing has never been definitively established and the sex/gender issue includes political disagreements about whether to acknowledge a self-professed gender identity or insist on identifying people by biological sex. To some extent these can be considered open questions or matters of opinion. What about when people are saying things that are just straightforwardly untrue? What is there to be gained from letting people deny the Holocaust? We know that happened and remembering it is essential to ensuring it never happens again. Why let people claim the world is 6,000 years old and humans were created as humans when we know it is far older and that we evolved from earlier species as surely as we can know anything? Vital fields of science rely on these basic realities about the physical world and biological organisms. Why let people claim that vaccines cause autism when the problems with that original study have been demonstrated so clearly and further evidence refutes this claim as decisively as it is possible to refute anything? Why should freedom of belief and speech include the freedom to misinform others in ways that put children’s lives at risk?’

There are three reasons to protect freedom of speech and belief and keep the liberal system known as the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ open to ideas that are subversive, hurtful, and untrue.

Firstly, we can never be entirely certain that we know what is true. Even when something is supported by mountains of evidence so vast that it is incredibly unlikely that it will ever be falsified, we must always keep open the opportunity for someone to falsify it, because every so often, they do. In an example contributed to my and James Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories by Alan Sokal, we cite John Stuart Mill making the argument that we can only be so confident of the truth of Newtonian physics because it has withstood so many attempts to find flaws in it. Less than 50 years after Mill made this argument, Albert Einstein found flaws in Newtonianism and introduced us to special relativity (soon followed by general relativity). We must leave that door open, on principle.

Secondly, we can never know how the power to make exceptions to laws and social norms for freedom of belief and speech will be used in the future as different governments take power and different ideologies rise and fall. The only way you can protect yourself from censorship if a shift occurs in which your own ideas are considered appalling and deemed unspeakable by those with legal or social power is to consistently protect the right to express ideas that you find appalling. Atheists and religious and sexual minorities are among those whose expressions of views or attractions have been deemed most appalling and penalised most severely, so it is particularly disappointing when they justify censorship on the grounds of offence.

Thirdly, even if it were ethical to shut down freedom of belief and speech in this way (it isn’t) and even if wannabe censors could be trusted to identify, correctly and consistently, bad or false ideas (they can’t), this simply won’t work. No attempts to regulate free thought have ever been successful. That is why we have 45,000 denominations of Christianity even though Christian authorities have been among the most stringent in enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy. Having ideas and disagreeing about them is what humans do. I repeat: we cannot close down the material reality of the Marketplace of Ideas. We can only close down the liberal system for managing it in ways that make it maximally productive and minimally violent. When people attempt to shut down certain ideas by making them unspeakable, either socially or legally, we see the emergence of alternative marketplaces of ideas, including black markets where the ugliest and most hateful ideas can fester unchecked.

When attempts to ‘cancel’ certain ideas from mainstream society and make them unspeakable or ‘not up for debate’ are imposed socially rather than legally and there are enough people who hold them, we will see the growth of alternative media. We saw this with the Critical Social Justice ‘woke’ phenomenon. As those who held views that ran counter to Critical Social Justice were removed from mainstream institutions and platforms for airing opinions and debating ideas, a complex network of alternative media began to form and grow—an Alternative Marketplace of Ideas. Podcasts, talk shows, think tanks, magazines, and even an academic journal and a university all dedicated to airing the ideas that could not be discussed in mainstream outlets proliferated at an astonishing rate.

While some of these were and are very good and provide thoughtful and balanced coverage of issues and attempt to include a wide variety of ideas, including Critical Social Justice ones, the cultural problem that drove their formation resulted in serious limitations. Fear of being ‘cancelled’ or of ‘guilt by association’ limited the range of guests such alternative outlets could attract and consequently the conversations they could have. Critical Social Justice activists who took a ‘not up for debate’ stance would certainly not come. With the best will in the world, echo chambers formed as various clusters of alternative media could only attract certain ideological subsets of guests and had great difficulty in including enough viewpoint diversity to balance and challenge each others’ ideas effectively.

In addition to this problem, many platforms did not operate with the best will in the world but deliberately chose highly biased and partisan speakers who would reinforce and escalate each other’s ideas to new extremes. Much of this was exacerbated by the funding structure required to operate this kind of alternative media, which incentivised ‘audience capture’ as platforms needed to feed increasingly biased and partisan audiences what they wanted to hear so they could remain solvent. All the ideas that had existed in society still existed and were still accessible, but now they were siloed and people with different views were not speaking to each other. Without checks and balances, political polarisation, tribalism, paranoia, and extremism could only grow. (I recently discussed this problem in some detail with John Cleese.)

When attempts to silence ideas are imposed legally, so as to eradicate them from society, what will then form is a Black Market of Ideas. Historically, these have sometimes been very positive as when gay men, atheists, or religious minorities have used systems of codes and secret meeting places to connect and find solidarity, friendship, or romance. (Suppression was entirely useless at making any ideas or sexualities go away.) However, sometimes the ideas found on the Black Market can be genuinely dark and being forced underground can make them both more twisted and more enticing. The best description of this process, I would argue, is to be found in Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen’s article asking whether censorship would have stopped the Nazis from gaining power. Lukianoff and Strossen track the effect of government censorship on the rise of Nazism, showing how crackdowns on publications and speech enabled the leaders of the fascist movement to use the (failed) attempts to censor them to their advantage:

‘[I]t is not surprising that the Nazis were able to spin government censorship into propaganda victories and seeming confirmation of their claims that they were speaking truth to power, and that power was aligned against them.’

We can see how this mentality manifests in the thinking of extremist groups that exist today, which can find each other much more easily via social media. Very Online conspiracy theorists who post that they are being silenced by global elites who do not want the people to know The Truth and who express radical suspicion of governments and expertise can take this paranoia into existential threat mode in the real world. There, they combine it with pre-existing prejudices to produce a volatile and violent mix of hatefulness, including anti-Semitism and ethnonationalism. Here is just one nasty example of this sort of thing, from a tweet: ‘Actually many Jews are behind the decline of western civilisation through their cultural marxist [sic] degeneracy like promoting Transgenderism [sic] etc. Jews love it when black [sic] & whites are at war with one another.’

We can also see how the least principled and balanced corners of the Alternative Marketplace of Ideas can tip into the Black Market of Ideas. This is a toxic brew of multiple, divided, and polarised marketplaces that is causing significant social dysfunction and escalating tribal tensions to a dangerous degree. It must be noted that attempts to remove ‘problematic’ ideas that run counter to those of Critical Social Justice from mainstream discourse have not caused any of them to go away. Instead, it has forced them into alternative forums where, in some cases, they have morphed into dark, extreme, and twisted variations of themselves due to the lack of productive, collaborative critique (as, in some ways, has happened to Critical Social Justice itself—see, for example, the embrace of Hamas terrorism by some of its advocates).

Those who believe we can somehow ever be without some form of a marketplace of ideas should look outside their ideological bubble and reacquaint themselves with our species. The only choice we have is how to manage the sheer range of different ideas and the need to argue about them that characterises homo sapiens. We could make the same mistake humans have made for most of history and allow a dominant moral orthodoxy to try to dictate an acceptable range of speaking points and socially or legally penalise all others out of existence. This will enable the proliferation of many mini-marketplaces of different groups speaking only among themselves, some proportion of which, without the benefit of counterviews and critiques, will surely go mad and generate highly biased, partisan, and polarising narratives. Meanwhile, extremist groups will be driven underground where they will paint themselves as the brave speakers of truth to oppressive power and attract increasing numbers of those who have gone mad due to being alienated from mainstream society. They will then become a danger to it.

Alternatively, we can decide to uphold the liberal system that protects the free exchange of ideas that has acted as the best system of conflict resolution and knowledge production that the world has ever known. We can keep a mainstream Marketplace of Ideas open to as many widely held views as possible to act as checks and balances to each other in a spirit of civil but robust debate. Society will benefit from the knowledge generated by this process, a process conducted with an expectation of evidenced and reasoned argument and through which institutions can be reformed via democratic processes and human rights and freedoms can be protected and advanced. Alternative media for special interests will still always exist but, without the pressure of cancel culture or guilt-by-association, it will also be able to attract and benefit from a wider range of views and thus be of additional value. At the same time, we can keep fringe and extreme views legally expressible where we can see them, get at them, counter them, and deny their advocates the glamour of claiming to be censored for speaking the truth that the powerful don’t want you to know. We can arrest those who threaten or commit violence and allow the rest to be clearly recognisable as pitiful fringe lunatics.

I strongly recommend we take the liberal route.

Further reading

Free speech at universities: where do we go from here? by Julius Weinberg

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, by Emma Park

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

The return of blasphemy in Ireland and Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? by Noel Yaxley

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman, by Emma Park

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’: liberty and licensing, by Tony Howe

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

The post The Marketplace of Ideas will always exist. The only choice we have is how to work with it. appeared first on The Freethinker.

Every couple of years, whenever he declares that he is a ‘cultural Christian’, Richard Dawkins provides a ‘gotcha!’ moment to a whole host of ideologues. That he has expressed this sentiment for at least a couple of decades should suffice in putting to bed the self-congratulatory notion that his latest LBC reiteration is a triumph of Christianity over nonbelief or the death knell for ‘New Atheism’. These claims have been made more frequently recently, owing to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent conversion from atheism to Christianity. In fact, her conversion prompted an open letter by the evolutionary biologist questioning her embrace of Christian beliefs.

Another reason why Dawkins’s LBC interview received backlash was that he set contemporary British Christian culture against Islam, declared his dislike of Ramadan celebrations in Britain, described Britain as a (culturally) ‘Christian country’, and noted that Islam is ‘hostile’ to, for example, gay rights and women’s rights. But again, there is nothing new about Dawkins’s singling out of Islam as being especially problematic today—even many Muslim thinkers concede this. Like Christopher Hitchens before him, he believes that Christianity was just as dangerous as Islam historically (he states as much in his open letter to Hirsi Ali).¹ Even so, Dawkins does not limit the simultaneous embracing of a cultural affiliation with a religion and staunch atheism to Christianity, even extending it to Islam in The God Delusion.

The idea that atheism and religious identity can coexist in an individual is hardly groundbreaking. In Sanatana Dharma, or Hinduism, the nirishvaravadi (one who rejects the notion of a divine supreme being) and the nastika (those who reject the divinity of Hindu scripture) not only have the freedom to self-identify as a Hindu, but also have the Vedic, or scriptural, permission to do so. Both Jainism and Buddhism stem from the nastika tradition of Hinduism, rejecting the notion of a creator—albeit still preaching the divine and the supernatural, thus underlining the fluidity of the Indic belief systems. However, while the combination of irreligion with religious culture is natural in syncretic polytheism, pantheism, and non-theism, it is more difficult to envisage in Abrahamic monotheism.

While Jews run the gamut from the ultra-Orthodox to the atheist, all of whom unapologetically lay claim to a Jewish identity, Christianity and Islam are the last bastions of monotheistic rigidity. It is no coincidence that these two became the two largest religions in the world, given the aggressive evangelicalism and the notion of one, absolutist, divine truth common to both. These strategies have since been coopted by political dogmas that establish themselves as quasi-religions, which in recent years can be seen in the rise of Critical Social Justice ideology or ‘wokeism’. The Christian uproar against Dawkins identifying with Christianity owing to his rejection of the Biblical doctrine is no different to the woke repudiation of Dawkins as left-leaning or progressive owing to his blaspheming against gender ideology, for which he has been duly excommunicated by the American Humanist Association. But, of course, these affronts carry a whole different meaning in Muslim countries and communities.

Not only is Islam unparalleled in how it explicitly names other religions as enemies, and in how it reiterates the negation of all other faiths and gods in its daily prayers, but most critically it today remains the only religion that codifies death and violence for thought crimes in numerous states. And yet, despite facing sharia-codified violence, many thinkers for centuries have managed to merge a communal Muslim identity with a rejection of Islamic faith, from Persian alchemists to Turkic physicians to Arab philosophers to Urdu poets in the Indian subcontinent. Granted that self-preservation has been a significant motivation for such thinkers, many also associated with religious culture owing to their desire for uplift and community. This invariably hinges on fighting theological dogma, for it is convenient for the fundamentalists to reject even indigenous voices that self-identify as being outside of the fold as echoers of alien ideas, an allegation customarily launched against the critical thought propounded by many prominent ex-Muslims in recent years.

Furthermore, those who establish theological belief as the definitive feature of religious identity ignore that only a fraction of humankind chooses their faith when they convert from one to another; for the rest, religious identity is just a coincidence of birth, not much different to nationality or ethnicity. Also, if belief were to be used as the determiner, its logical extrapolation would be to presume that all members of the community are adherents of all religious tenets, making all Christians homophobes and all Muslims violently misogynistic. The very reason many have championed a rethinking of the term ‘Islamophobia’ is that it conflates Islam and Muslims, a distinction that many, including Dawkins in his latest LBC interview, maintain is critical so as to protect the expression of critiques against the harmful ideas Muslims and ex-Muslims alike are born into.

Another much-regurgitated critique of Dawkins’s latest interview, which arguably he has walked into himself, is that by identifying as a cultural Christian, the atheist scholar wants to ‘reap the fruits’ of Christianity without believing in the tree that produced them. When Dawkins calls Britain a ‘Christian country’—regardless of the cultural or communal asterisks—to reject Islamic displays, he inadvertently echoes Christian nationalists and their relegation of Muslims, and members of other religious communities, as lesser members of British society, even if not in the eyes of law. Any secular state, which Dawkins has spent a lifetime advocating for, should neither be Christian, nor Muslim, nor affiliated with any other religion, which is perhaps best achieved by limiting all religious displays to their designated spheres.

This is the crucial difference between people formulating religio-cultural identities and states doing so. State secularism has been, and remains, more critical to human progress than any variation of theism or atheism, and it is the sole guarantor of coexistence for all belief systems and cultures, especially when implemented without any preference for the majority or minority. And it is in secular realms that all orthodox and heterodox identities, including nonbelieving members of monotheistic communities, can find their own spaces to express themselves.

1. Hitchens argued that all religions were evil, but not always in the same way or to the same extent at different times; he once said that if he had lived in the 1930s he would view the Catholic Church as the most evil religious force. He was well aware, too, of the many contemporary threats posed by Christian fanatics, and believed that ‘over space and time…[the threat of different religions] tremendously evens out… [And that all religions are] equally rotten, false, dishonest, corrupt, humourless, and dangerous, in the last analysis.’ ︎

The post The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

At the Freethinker, one of our aims has always been to foster a culture of free speech and open debate. It was from this perspective that, as editor in 2022, I first became interested in the debate over the possible meanings of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and the consequences for women, men and transgender people. There was a concern that voices critical of the claims of transgender activism were being suppressed or demonised across much of the mainstream liberal intelligentsia, both in Britain, America, and elsewhere. There was also a concern that transgender activists and their supporters might be putting pressure on public and private institutions to adopt their views unquestioningly.

For these reasons, the Freethinker has so far published four articles exploring objections to the claims of transgender activism: an opinion piece by the gender studies researcher Eliza Mondegreen; two interviews, one with the journalist and campaigner Helen Joyce, and the other with the philosopher Alex Byrne; and a report by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid on the spread of the ideology to South Asia.

It has been difficult to find any defender of at least some of the claims of transgenderism who would be willing to talk to us. We are therefore delighted to publish the below interview with Louise Antony, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (‘UMass’), who describes herself as a ‘socialist intersectionalist feminist’. Over a long and distinguished career, she has published widely on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, feminist philosophy and atheism. In October last year, she debated Alex Byrne at the Houston Institute on The Ontology of Gender.

I spoke to Professor Antony across the Atlantic via Zoom. Our conversation lasted three hours. Below is a condensed transcript of the interview, which she has read and amended to ensure that it accurately reflects her views.

Readers will observe that, in the gender debate, everything is open to question: language, science, subjective experience, objective fact, culture, nature, relations between the sexes, and what it means to be human. Hardly surprising, then, if this dialogue ends in a state of aporia or bafflement.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

The Freethinker: Which areas of philosophy have you been interested in over the course of your career, and how did you come to the gender debate?

Louise Antony: I started graduate school interested in the philosophy of language. When I went there, I discovered cognitive science. I was at Harvard. MIT is just down the road, and people there, like Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor and Ned Block, were diving into the idea that there could be a science of the mind, which was a view that had been in disrepute before the ‘60s. Behaviourism, which I did not find interesting, had, up till then, ruled the day. One of my teachers at Harvard, Willard van Orman Quine, said that we should study knowledge naturalistically: we should ask how we actually have knowledge. (This seemed to me exactly what cognitive science was doing, but ironically Quine never embraced it.) Quine’s philosophical outlook was called ‘naturalism’: it was the idea that philosophical questions are continuous with questions in science. That outlook coloured everything that I became interested in, including language, philosophy of mind, and the relationship between the science of psychology and the other sciences, in particular biology. Throughout my work, I have always wanted the philosophical claims we make to be consistent with and informed by the relevant science.

In the 1990s, I edited a volume of essays with my friend Charlote Witt called A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. That was my entry into feminist philosophy. I also became interested, somewhat serendipitously, in writing about atheism and religion. I edited a book called Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, where I invited philosophers who self-described as atheists to talk about their relationship to religion.

Freethinker: As a woman, have you found that academic philosophy is a tough environment? And if so, has that changed at all over the years?

Louise Antony: From an early age, I was aware that I did things that girls were not supposed to do. One of the things that I got in trouble for was arguing with people. When I first started taking philosophy at Syracuse University, I had no idea what it was. But when I got into the classroom and found it was just arguing about things, I thought, yes. I found myself naturally fitting into the ethos of asking questions, making objections. I loved the norm that when you asked somebody a question or made an objection, they were supposed to say something relevant back to you. Philosophy felt like home to me. That is not every woman’s experience, but it was mine.

That’s not to say it was easy to be a woman in the academy – there was a lot of prejudice against women, and a lot of inappropriate treatment.  There were not many of us – that has changed a little.

Freethinker: How would you define your philosophical conception of feminism as you have developed it over the years?

Louise Antony: Feminists disagree about many fundamental things. What we all have in common, I think, is commitment to the full personhood of women and its social recognition and material support. Where we differ is over the things like the nature of the obstacles that need to be overcome, and what other changes are necessary, such as in the law. That kind of reform is as far as some feminists want to go. I and my socialist feminist friends want to go much further.

Freethinker: So you would describe yourself as a socialist feminist?

Antony: I am a socialist and intersectionalist feminist. The idea is that there are different parameters or vectors of oppression, and your social location is a matter of what point you are at in a multidimensional grid. Parameters include race, disability, economic status, relationship to geopolitics, and being a woman. The thing that women have in common is their occupation of a social role that fundamentallyinvolves the idea that women are for other people: for men, for children, for the elderly and sick, anyone who is in need of care.

Freethinker: What, in your view, is ‘sex’, what is ‘gender’, and how do they relate to each other?

Antony: I am a realist about biological sex. I think it is a robust dimorphism in the human species. There are intersex conditions, where an individual has some of the characteristics typical of one biological sex, but not all of them. The estimates of the occurrence of these conditions seem to range from about one and a half to three per cent. So I do not think the existence of intersex conditions means that we do not have a robust biological phenomenon here. This puts me at odds with many other feminists. However, I do not think that biological sex determines gender, which is a social construction.

In a paper I published in 2020, ‘Feminism Without Metaphysics or a Deflationary Account of Gender’, I drew an analogy between gender and parenthood. I use the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to refer to genders and the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ to refer to sexes. That is just an orthographic rhetorical convenience – the terms are highly contested, and indeed, in ordinary language, they are ambiguous.

I think the existence of the biological dimorphism explains why there are systems of gender – what I call ‘gender regimes’. By that, I mean social roles that are constructed and elaborated differently at different times and places in human history, but that all have the function of trying to discipline people into particular social roles on the basis of actual or presumed biological differences. The analogy with parents is that I call contributing biological material to the development of a child being a ‘progenitor’, a matter of biology, just as being ‘male’ or ‘female’ is a matter of biology. But not all progenitors are parents, and similarly not all male or female people are men or women.

When people ask if biological sex explains gender, my answer is that in a sense, it does, because the fact that we socially divide human beings into men and women, boys and girls is due ultimately to the biological dimorphism. But there is not a deterministic relationship between being biologically male or female and being a man or a woman. There is a lot of social elaboration that is necessary.

Freethinker: Don’t the central cases, whether in being a man or woman, or in being a parent, all have a biological foundation? On this view, the central case of being a parent is a biological parent; the central case of being a man or woman is biological.

Antony: I do not know. Statistically, there are probably more biological parents who are parents in virtue of biological connection to the child than there are other kinds of parents. But in contemporary society, in the United States, for example, there are a lot of adoptive parents, there are a lot of step-parents whom we do not think of as marginal cases of parents. The central cases of parents are individuals who accept and carry out responsibility for the physical well-being of the child, have a secure emotional connection to the child, foster the child’s psychological, intellectual, maybe spiritual development, and so forth. People who fit pretty squarely inside our conception of what it is to be a parent do not need to be biologically connected to the child.

 No one thinks of anonymous sperm donors as fathers. There are cases of a so-called ‘surrogate’ mother that are very difficult. There are cases where she has contributed the egg. There are cases where she is carrying an embryo developed from an egg contributed by some other woman. Is she a mother or not? There have been court cases of so-called surrogate mothers wanting to keep the child. I think that being a parent is not so much about whether you meet the biological condition, but about how much of the total conception of parenthood you fulfil.

In the case of gender, statistically, overwhelmingly, the individuals who are socially women are going to be biologically female. And similarly, the individuals who are socially men are going to be biologically male. I do not know how significant that fact is.

Freethinker: On both these questions – the definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and the definition of ‘parent’ – is there not an objection that you are putting the cart before the horse? In the case of parents, would it not be preferable to say that biological parents are, since ancient times, the natural kind, and foster parents, step-parents and so on are caregivers – substitute but not literal parents? This debate about progenitors versus parents, biological versus socially constructed men and women, is this only even possible nowadays because of where we are scientifically?

Antony: The donation of an egg to another woman who is going to carry a child is certainly a new thing. But adoption is an old institution. There are a lot of societies that institutionalise the bringing of a non-biological child into, say, a royal family. There has also been a widespread practice among women of getting pregnant by another man when their husband is impotent or sterile, without acknowledging this. So in a sense, sperm donation has been going on for a long time.

There is much that is very new to our species, technologically speaking, which is tremendously important in shaping our social life. But even if many of these questions only arise because of recent technological advances, what would follow from that about gender and sex?

Freethinker: One might think that what we mean by a man or woman, or a parent, is very old. Do innovations in science mean that we need to fundamentally revise central concepts like these? Or instead, do the possibilities of sperm donation and surrogacy, or of using surgery and medicines to become more like the opposite sex, not change the meaning of our central concepts, but simply expand their range?

Antony: In philosophical terms, I think concepts are primitive in the sense of being the smallest unit of thought. On this view, a concept like ‘dog’ gets connected in thought to dogs in the world by some process. I have spent a lot of my career trying to figure out what this process is. It has something to do with the causal relations between dogs and a tokening of that primitive element of thought, dog. Words then get their meaning by being attached to these concepts.

Now, what is it that ‘man’, as a concept in my mind, gets connected to in the world? That relation is fixed independently of what I think or believe about men, or what I want men to be. It just means that when I think a thought in terms of ‘man’, it is going to have a certain set of truth conditions in the world. That does not have any bearing on who that term should or does apply to in a public language which we share.

Whatever my concept of man is, when I talk with you, a kind of negotiation can go on between us about what we want that term to pick out. And this negotiation can be very explicit, as it is when we make laws like which people are going to be allowed into a bathroom when the sign says ‘men’.

What you are calling a concept, I would call a conception: a body of ideas, beliefs, emotional stuff – a big mess. There are some beliefs that are central to that conception, and there are some that are peripheral and that get changed all the time. Every time you change your mind about something, you are changing the conception associated with the component concepts.

Take the concept of flying. For the vast majority of our history on the planet, human beings could not fly. Can we fly now? We can get in airplanes and travel through the air. Is that ‘flying’? Does it matter? It does if you are writing legislation on flight safety. There has to be a legal use for the term ‘flight’ or ‘flying’ that covers that.

The whole debate over the concept of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is misspent philosophical energy. What we should be figuring out is, do we want people to be able to use bathrooms that align with their sense of who they are? Do we want individuals who have gone through male puberty to play at an elite level in women’s sports? These are the questions that people really have about transgendered individuals.

Freethinker: That sounds like a practical answer. In the UK, there is an organisation called Sex Matters. According to their website, their aim is ‘to promote clarity about sex in law, policy and language in order to protect everybody’s rights.’ In other words, as far as I understand it, their position is that there are some areas of life where, regardless of what ‘gender’ may be, it is sex that matters – for instance as to whether biological males should be allowed in women’s prisons.

Antony: What do you mean by a ‘biological male’? I do not mean to say that ‘you can’t define “male” so we don’t have to talk about it’. But it is important to recognise that many trans individuals have altered their biology in important ways. If you have got an individual who has XY chromosomes, has had their penis removed and fashioned into a vagina – ‘fashioned’ is a bad word, I’m sorry, reconstructed as a vagina with a clitoris – has had their testes removed so they are no longer producing the same level of endogenous testosterone that they had been, is taking hormones, has developed visible breasts… Is this a man?

Freethinker: Certainly there are extreme cases of people who try to alter their physical condition.

Antony: They do not just try, they are successful.

Freethinker: Would you say that a man who had undergone these changes had in fact become a biological female?

Antony: I think that biological categories are fuzzy in general.

Freethinker: You did say that sex is real.

Antony: Sex is real. In nature, you can sometimes give definitions and characterisations of categories. But in biology, the category of ‘species’ does not have clean boundaries. Does that mean that there is a big issue about what is and is not a dog? In fact, there is a division of expert opinion about whether wolves and dogs are members of the same species or members of different species. Because when you have creatures that are at the boundaries of fuzzy categories like ‘species’, the criteria will not classify them clearly one way or the other.

Trans individuals, especially if they have undergone medical or surgical alterations, are at the boundary of the male-female categorisation system, just as intersex individuals are. For example, the runner Caster Semenya has never thought of herself as anything other than a woman, but in fact, she is an XY individual with very, very severe androgen insensitivity. Is Semenya a male or a female?

Freethinker: These are questions of biological categories. Semenya may well be right at the boundary. But are we talking about sex or about gender? You have mentioned people who go through some sort of biological change or have a specific biological condition. Should we make a distinction between asking, (a), whether a man who has had his penis cut off and so forth should be allowed in a women’s prison, and (b), whether a man who identifies as a woman but has not undergone any medical treatment should be so allowed? In all these areas – prisons, sports, et cetera – is it a matter of biological sex or is it a matter of gender self-identification?

Antony: It might vary from question to question. It depends on the particularities of the biological differences. On the question of whether trans individuals should be allowed to compete in sports categories according to their identity, the empirical evidence seems to vary between studies. Some say they should, others say it is dangerous for biological males to compete with biological females. But there are lots of things to take into account when we look at the particular case of trans individuals in sports.

Freethinker: Is there not a biological asymmetry here: unlike trans women in women’s sports, surely no one ever worries about trans men competing in men’s sports, because it is clear that they will never win?

Antony: It is not true that trans men never win. They do sometimes. Trans women do not always win in their categories – although they often do. Caster Semenya does not win every time she runs, but she wins a lot of the time. Just looking at her, you can see that she has more well-defined muscles than biologically paradigmatic women generally have.

One of the things that needs to be asked when addressing the sports question is safety. I do not take seriously the idea that having trans women or cis men competing in a different category from cis women arises from concerns about the latter’s safety. If people were concerned about the well-being of athletes, American football would not exist.

Sports categorisations are supposed to put people who are physically alike into the same category, so that the only determinant of the winner is talent and effort. But what happens in elite sports is that they select for freaks. If you are a man above seven feet tall in the United States, your chances are apparently one in seven of becoming an NBA basketball player.

Freethinker: Certainly some men are stronger than others, some women are stronger than others. But is it not the case that in general, men are just, as a matter of biological fact, stronger than women – by quite a considerable margin?

Antony: Who cares? What is the point of citing the average? My husband is exactly my height. He is below average height for males. I am probably a little stronger than the average woman of my age and height because I have a personal trainer who helps me to gain strength. The interesting questions are, what needs to be done, who can do it? If I need help getting something from a tall shelf in Whole Foods, I look for a tall person: I look along the parameter that is actually relevant to the task.

Freethinker: Wouldn’t a logical consequence of this position be that there is no point in having women’s sports at all, because women are almost never going to beat men? Why not just throw open women’s sports to all men?

Antony: Take boxing, where there are weight categories. The point of categorisation is to try to equalise for fixed physical conditions, so that winning reflects inherent talent and effort. In women’s sports and men’s sports, it is not just that men are bigger or stronger, it is that their physical talents are distributed in different ways. In basketball, upper body strength is an important feature. Even very tall women are not going to be able to compete at the most elite levels, are probably not going to shoot as well, or as far as the men at top levels. Sports categories are proxy indicators because you cannot really get into the precise physiological details.

In an ideal world, there might be exceptional tall women who would compete in an NBA height-based category alongside shorter men. The system that we have now excludes a lot of men from elite competition, when they could win if they played against women. The whole system of elite sports is going to leave out most of both of the populations of men and women.  A different category system would be more inclusive in many ways.

Freethinker: In which categories, if any, do you think biological differences between men and women matter, and how far? There are so many areas we could talk about: not only prisons, but medical statistics, women’s charities and refuges, whether trans women make appropriate representatives for women, trans women who want to date lesbians, and so on. Are there any areas where biological differences ought to be the starting point?

Antony: I do not want to say in a blanket way that trans women should be excluded from any of these designated women’s spaces. I am open to the possibility that there might be specific reasons why trans women should be excluded, but not qua trans women. If there is a support group for people who have suffered miscarriages, that is not open to all women to begin with, only to those who have had miscarriages. A trans man who suffered a miscarriage should be allowed in that space.

We have to look at why the space is designated as a women’s space, what the specific nature of the gathering is such that designating it a women’s space is a good proxy for the specifically pertinent characteristic of the space.

The cases that I struggle with are those where the space is a women’s space because of the presumption that women have been exposed to certain kinds of socialisation and social pressures. Women in academia suffer – from people not recognising them when they raise their hands at meetings, for instance. This is low-grade suffering, but not getting credit for contributions, having one’s published work neglected and so forth, can have a large impact on one’s career. Women like to get together and discuss what they can do about it.

From what I have read of the experiences of trans women in philosophy, they discover that they are not getting called on as much as they used to before they transitioned. And so they are beginning to understand in a different way what it is to be a woman in the field. But I think there might be spaces where trans women should be quiet and allow the experiences of women who have grown as women, have gone into the profession and been socialised as women, to take centre stage.

Freethinker: It is interesting that you might see the case for giving women more space in issues where they have suffered from discriminatory social, rather than biological, pressures. But returning to biology, as a woman, would you not agree that when you have a child, it completely changes you (speaking as someone who has also been through it) – and in a way that only someone who is biologically female can be changed? There are scientific studies on the way the brain changes during pregnancy.

Antony: The study that you refer to was very small – which is one of the many problems with brain imaging studies. I do think that pregnancy was a singular, extraordinary experience for me, but it is different for different people.  All experiences ‘change our brains’.

Freethinker: Would you agree that it is an experience that a man cannot have?

Antony: I have several female women friends who have not been able to become pregnant for one reason or another. Yes, pregnancy is a singular experience, and some people who cannot have that experience are very sad about that.  But why do we have to pick it out by proxy and say it is a woman’s experience? When you have a child, you stop being the main character in the story of your life. That is a profound change – whether you adopted the child or had the child biologically. But I am the same person I was before my pregnancies. My personality is the same. I have learned things from having children, but we learn things from a lot of the experiences that we have. I find it romantic and unnuanced to say in a blanket way that the biological fact of having  a child changes you in some uniform way.

Freethinker: Is it not the case that there are clear, obvious biological changes to your body once you have a child? The shape of your pelvis changes, your hair falls out, and so on. And I am not a scientist, but perhaps women in general also bond with their own child in a special, biologically grounded way, as mothers.

Antony: The literature on the biology of childbirth and motherhood is partisan. People have axes to grind. But women successfully raise children under all sorts of adverse circumstances, and women fuck up their children under all sorts of propitious circumstances. This single biological parameter does not provide much information about the quality of your connection to your child, or the nature of the way you relate to them.

Freethinker: Nevertheless, would you accept that bearing a child does make a difference to a woman, and is one experience that a woman can have and a man cannot?

Antony: It is true. I would like to have a penis, because I think there are some experiences that men can have that I would be interested in having. So what? Of course pregnancy and childbirth change you, but there is very little you can say in a general, uniform way about this change, except for the things that have to do with the social implications of being a parent – which are eminently changeable, and that affect adoptive and step-parents as well.

Freethinker: You might also say, as some feminists have been saying for a long time, that being a woman should in general not matter. Biological considerations aside, women should be able to do everything that men can do. Why not?

Antony: I do not want to frame my aspirations for women in terms of something relative to men. I want people to be able to flourish – that is the goal of feminism.

As a socialist feminist, I think there are things that we can do socially that we cannot do individually, or not do as well. Many of the things women have traditionally done – caring for children, educating children, caring for the sick and the elderly – these are responsibilities that ought to be borne socially. Social support for these things will help more children flourish, and will enable women to flourish in more ways.

Freethinker: What about other areas where biology might be said to be relevant to the way in which women and men are treated? For example, in prisons – where women might not want biological males to be there because they say they have flashbacks to a man who raped them. If, on the other hand, trans women are likely to be ill-treated in men’s prisons, why not have a third category of prisons, or prison facilities, for transgender people?

Antony: We’re going to build separate prisons for trans offenders? That is not going to happen. But it is not clear that we have to have what we think of as women’s prisons and men’s prisons. The particularities matter. You cannot just say there is a woman who is going to feel triggered if she sees a penis. That is not the end of the story – it is an element of what we have to consider.

Freethinker: Is it fair on biological women to allow trans women in women’s prisons?

Antony: This is going to sound like I am anti-woke, but I do think that talk of triggering has gotten out of hand. People can be triggered by stuff that is not systematic. If there was a spider in my prison cell, I would go nuts.

Freethinker: Do you think that biological women should ever have the right to a space which excludes biological men?

Antony: Not a fundamental right and not a right per se. Do you think people in general have a right to not be exposed to experiences that are triggering for them?

Freethinker: I would agree with you that there should be no blanket right, though I would have thought that there should be room for protection against triggering in cases, for example, of clear psychological trauma. But in the case of trans women in women’s prisons, might they not also pose the additional risk to women of actual physical harm?

Antony: I know of no evidence that cis women are more vulnerable to sexual violence, either in restrooms or in prisons, by the presence of a transgender woman. If you are a cis male rapist and you are after cis women, what better place to go than a women’s bathroom where there are likely not to be any other cis men? If it were a gender neutral bathroom, there would be a chance that there would be other cis men there to deter you from realising your intentions. A woman’s actual safety is not secured by having women-only bathrooms.  A cis-woman colleague of mine was assaulted in a ‘women’s room’ in our university building.

If you put a trans woman into a male prison, what is going to happen to her? She is going to be brutally assaulted and possibly killed, certainly raped, by some cis men in that prison. That is perfectly predictable. So why would you add to the already existing problem of rape and assault in male prisons by putting someone there who identifies as a woman?

Freethinker: But then, on the other hand, they might be a real threat to women if they went into a women’s prison. As in the case of Isla Bryson, who was convicted for raping two women as a man, and then transitioned during the trial; or the case of the violent offender, Tiffany Scott, who transitioned from man to woman during a life sentence and applied to be transferred to a women’s prison.

Antony: Did these individuals rape anyone once in prison?

Freethinker: No. In the event, Bryson was not in the women’s prison estate for very long, and Scott’s transfer was blocked. Scott had been previously been convicted of violent offences while in a men’s prison. Both Isla Bryson and Tiffany Scott also retain male genitalia. In any case, is the problem not that someone’s rights are at risk either way round?

Antony: I do not accept the assumption that a trans woman is more likely to commit a violent assault than a cis woman. Cis women commit battery and rape, too.

Freethinker: Although it seems well established that biological women in general commit a much small percentage of violent crimes than biological men. In any case, with a pre-operative trans woman, who still had male genitalia, would you accept that such a person would, in general, present a greater risk in a women’s prison than another woman?

Antony: Suppose I grant that such a person would be physically capable of raping a woman: still, how do we know when a person is sincerely claiming a gender identity that does not accord with their current physical properties? I would like to see some evidence that cis men dishonestly claiming identity as a woman is a serious concern. There is, in at least some people’s minds, an exaggerated likelihood that a biological male is going to the trouble of really pretending to be someone who identifies as a woman for the sake of winning some athletic competition or serving their time in a women’s prison. If you have someone who has been living as a woman and enduring the difficulty and opprobrium that that still brings with it in our societies, and they are doing it for a significant amount of time, that is good evidence that they sincerely have a different gender identity.

Trans women are people. To put a person into an environment where they are likely to suffer severe degrees of physical abuse is a serious harm. There is no conservative, harm-free alternative here. For a person who has the gender identity of a woman but the biological characteristics of a male, the question is whether the possibility that that person is going to cause severe psychic or physical distress to some women incarcerated in the same place, high enough to justify putting that person into a male prison – an environment where there is a high probability that they are going to suffer severe physical harm.

Freethinker: So is it a matter of weighing the risk to the trans person versus the risk to the women?

Antony: You say ‘risk to the women’. We need to consider all persons. I am not a utilitarian, but I do think it matters what the consequences of our actions are, morally speaking. And when you look at the consequences, you have got to look at not just the possibilities, but the probabilities. I would bet that most women prisoners are far more concerned about being raped by the guards than by a transgender woman. (See this article.)

Freethinker: Another problem with failing to distinguish between trans women and women on biological grounds arguably comes in scientific research and the compilation of medical data. Would it not be problematic if a trans woman was labelled female on the medical record, and then their data was used to contribute to a picture of how diseases affect women’s bodies? Would doing so not risk skewing the data – if you accept that women’s bodies are biologically different from men’s and have, to some extent, different susceptibilities to different diseases?

Antony: Maybe medical science should ask more directly about the conditions that they are concerned about. If you are an XX individual, there are certain regularities that are captured when we taxonomise in terms of men and women, whether those medical regularities are the result of innate biological differences or the differences that result from being socialised as men or women. Take, for instance, the appalling difference in the rate of maternal mortality between black and white women in the US. Is that the result of some biological similarity among black women versus white women, or is it the result of the social conditions under which black and white women typically give birth?

There are a lot of people who are uncontroversially women or uncontroversially men who are biologically atypical – and their data goes into the samples. That is why we have statistics to find central tendencies and to try to tease out causally relevant factors.

Freethinker: But men, for instance, can get prostate cancer. Women can’t.

Antony: That’s right.

Freethinker: Women can get endometriosis. Men cannot get endometriosis because they do not have a womb.

Antony: In this case, people without wombs cannot get endometriosis – including women who do not have wombs.

Freethinker: Is it not the case that people with XX chromosomes, which are found in every cell of the body, have different genetic susceptibilities to certain diseases and conditions from those with XY chromosomes? Women are more susceptible to breast cancer than men, for example.

Antony: Maybe so. But there is a much higher mortality rate for men who have breast cancer than women, partly because it is standardly believed that men cannot get breast cancer. It is clear that the parameter for effective medical intervention is being susceptible to breast cancer.

Freethinker: But how would we even know that biological men could get breast cancer in the first place, or that they had a higher mortality rate, if patients were simply able to designate themselves ‘male’ or ‘female’ on medical forms regardless of their biological sex? Wouldn’t the statistics get muddled?

Antony: Hang on. If somebody comes to the hospital with a lump that may be a sign of cancer, the diagnostic procedures are the same. Classifying them as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ does not add any information to the clinical situation.

Freethinker: But would it not add information for the future, for people down the line who wanted to know what percentage of biological males and females get breast cancer, whether one sex was more susceptible than the other?

Antony: Look, there are generalisations. It makes sense to put information about menstruation in places where girls are going to see it, despite the fact that some of those girls are going to be amenorrhoeic. There might be some androgen insensitive XY individuals among the girls. There may be some atypical XX individuals who are in the boys’ room. It is very difficult to craft generalisations in precise terms.

Freethinker: In statistical science, the way you make patterns is by amassing data. The patterns help you to make diagnostic predictions, even if they are not always accurate for all patients, who may differ amongst themselves. But even to compose the general pattern, don’t you need to have some parameters – some truth basis, such as knowing whether it represents males or females or both?

Antony: I was with you up to ‘truth basis’. What I am challenging is the claim that, for medical purposes, the proxy classifications, man and woman, are preferable characterisations. Take information about endometriosis. Why shouldn’t the pamphlets in the doctor’s office say, ‘If you have a womb, read this pamphlet’?

Freethinker: How about, ‘If you are a biological female, read this pamphlet.’ Wouldn’t that be the same thing?

Antony: Why not just say, ‘If you have a womb’? That is the specific circumstance where you need to be concerned about endometriosis. Why is it better to say ‘biological female’?

Freethinker: Because biological females may not all have a womb, but they almost all do. Even if they do not, their body still has most of the same features as other females. Would you not agree that biological males and females involve two types of body with some broad differences and which to some extent behave in different ways?

Antony: I agree that there is a robust sexual dimorphism in the human species, but it does not follow from that that we cannot do better than using the proxy categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ for scientific purposes.

Freethinker: If you believe in sexual dimorphism, why not just use ‘male’ and ‘female’?

Antony: Because when we get down to specific conditions like endometriosis, we can do better even than male and female, because there are borderline cases and furthermore because there are trans cases. Those pamphlets on endometriosis might be picked up by a trans man with a womb.

Freethinker: Why not say ‘biological female’, then, since trans men are biological females?

Antony: Because the thing that I said is more informative and does not involve having to take a stand on this issue about the biological female.

Freethinker: Do you think that trans men are biological females or not?

Antony: I do not think they are biologically female. ‘Biologically female’ is a biological category that has fuzzy borders. Trans men are in the fuzzy border region.

Freethinker: What about trans men who are clearly biologically female – as presumably some of them are, especially, say, if they are pregnant and stop taking testosterone supplements and so forth?

Antony: I do not see the usefulness of the term ‘biologically female’. There are some lasting changes from having taken the masculinising hormones. What are we adding in terms of human well-being or understanding by insisting that a trans man who stops taking masculinising hormones in order to become pregnant is biologically female?

Freethinker: Isn’t it the truth?

Antony: I do not know if it is the truth, because you have not really told me what is required to be biologically male. My point is, what are we gaining either in terms of human well-being or understanding by insisting that we take those who are in the border and classifying them one way or the other? What is gained by saying, he is really a woman or she is really a man?

Freethinker: I was using the terms ‘biologically male’ or ‘biologically female’, rather than ‘man’ or ‘woman’, at this point.

Antony: But what you seem to be pressing on is a case where someone does not fit the full criteria for being biologically male or biologically female and insisting that I classify them on the basis of one of the determinants of being biologically male or biologically female.

Freethinker: You yourself have been talking about XX and XY individuals, rather than biological males and females. Is it not the case that an XX person cannot change all the chromosomes in their body to become XY, or vice versa? So in the great majority of cases, except for those very rare instances on the border, is there not a fairly clear sense in which someone is immutably either XY or XX?

Antony: I agree there is this classification. It covers, as I am prepared to concede, 98.5 per cent of the human race. But why insist that we apply the classification to the ones who do not fit the complete profile? Why do we have to decide whether somebody is biologically male or female? Even if the vast majority of human beings can readily be so classified.  There are individuals who look morphologically like XX females who have an XY karyotype.

Freethinker: One final question. For you as a socialist intersectionalist feminist, what is fundamentally at the heart of this debate about sex and gender?

Antony: I am a gender eliminativist. I believe that gender is real, but I think it should not be. People should be allowed to flourish in all sorts of different ways, depending on their different aptitudes, proclivities, characteristics and so forth. It is a fundamental injustice to try to package people into these socially preformed categories of man and woman, boy and girl. The elimination of that kind of categorisation is very important to me. As a feminist, I think that anyone who is being gender transgressive is putting us on the right road. So I want to give absolute support to trans people.

The post On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony appeared first on The Freethinker.