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From Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls. Yes, she really went and put “physiognomy” in her book.
Deliberate or just more sloppy scholarship? Who even knows with her.
I am skimming through different sections of the book and oh my god it is so, so bad
It’s a beautiful coincidence that this book was released on the very same day that a High Court judge described the “gender critical” interpretation of the Equality Act as being “clearly wrong in law” and an “obvious absurdity.”
Stock trying to justify her “endogenous” caveat for sex characteristics re: her cluster account of sex and afaict this is the best she can do. It does not seem to occur to her that no characteristics are fully “self-developed” (humans need external input to grow and survive).
Also: trans women have small breasts, she says. This matters, for some reason.
Stock says she is “keen to connect philosophy with working science in fruitful ways.” I wonder how that is supposed to fit with her apparent commitment to “physiognomy.”
Who wants to see her DESTROY Judith Butler with FACTS and LOGIC?
“The categories of male and female are nothing but social meaning”… Stock is presumably about to tell us how ‘meaning’ can be detached from social context, wait for it, should be good
Uhh… Butler is wrong because the definition(s) of sex provided are not normative.* Therefore sex are pre-given natural kinds, presumably? How does that follow?
*except for all the stuff about the importance of sex characteristics needing to be “endogenous”, I s’pose.
*except for all the stuff about the importance of sex characteristics needing to be “endogenous”, I s’pose.
Never mind, she doesn’t have the time to properly debunk Butler.
But she wants you to know that if you think sex categories are not natural kinds, this commits you to the view that there are no natural kinds at all, and no non-relative truths. Wat
But she wants you to know that if you think sex categories are not natural kinds, this commits you to the view that there are no natural kinds at all, and no non-relative truths. Wat
How can mirrors be real if our sexes aren’t real? Makes u think.
Tl;dr: this is a bad book.
Btw here’s the citation for that “debunking” of Butler. Martha Nussbaum’s 1999 article arguing that Butler’s worldview would have no impact on the world outside of academia (uhh, isn’t the “problem”, as you see it, that it did?) and that barely touches on social construction.
I’m not going to read the whole thing. The book seems to be a compendium of all the shitty arguments that she already made on Medium dot com. It hasn’t been peer-reviewed for a reason. /thread
Addendum: readers who were hoping for some details on Richard Rorty’s transing of children will be disappointed (I know I am).
