Good Lord.
Look, we all know this dude's
arguments are moronic, so let's vary up our rolling peer review a bit and just review the
style. This article is a mere 2.5 pages but it's chock-a-block with infelicities.
Clanging, Jangling Repeats
Page 1: "The article in question is
spectacularly poor scholarship."
Page 2: "This is a
spectacular failure of feminist praxis"
And just a few lines further down on page 2: "It's a
spectacular failure of a central feature of
feminist thought".
Page 1: "It purposefully
ignores decades of research by trans* scholars"
Page 2: "Well, this could only be true if one
ignores decades of trans* studies scholarship"
Page 1: "but
I think that would unduly give more visibility to what
I think is an abhorrent piece of scholarship"
I think this is a poor sentence by someone I think is an incompetent philosopher who I think should be ashamed of publishing this.
N
onsensical Sentence Structure And Argumentation:
Page 1: "I like to be up front in my work on what I think"
While his output really does amount to nothing more than "his work on what he thinks", that's clearly not what he meant here.
Page 2: "we should be deeply cispicious of anyone who writes an opening paragraph like that and then keeps going. lt's a spectacular failure of a central feature of feminist thought: standpoint epistemologies".
What's this? A central feature of feminist thought has failed? Obviously he meant a failure to
understand or
apply these concepts, but no one involved in the publication of this article seems to have read the article.
Page 2: "One failing I find in many who seem to endorse some version of standpoint epistemology is that they forget that the privilege thesis has a converse implication"
"Seem to endorse some version"? That could be anyone or no one. And is he saying that ignoring the privilege thesis is not a failing as long as you refuse to endorse standpoint epistemology? Also note that he vacillates between "epistemology" and "epistemologies" in this paper. Obviously he's trying not to step on anyone's toes by saying there's one particular way to do feminist philosophy, but the result is nonsensical vagueness.
In fact, he can't even keep the number of standpoint epistemologies straight
within one sentence. From the footnotes of page 2:
"I explain standpoint
epistemologies, and apply
it to the epistemology of gender transitions"
Apparently there is only one of the latter.
Page 3: "And even when cis scholars do read some trans* work, it's usually a tiny, non-representative selection. But fucking it up doesn't harm the cis scholars: their lives aren't up for debate. Their right to exist in public spaces, let alone their safety, isn't in jeopardy. But trans* lives are.
This is prevalent in cis involvement in trans* studies."
What is prevalent? Putting trans lives in jeopardy?
Vanity
And how about this for sheer hubris: in addition to the self-citation mentioned above, he adds
nine of his own works in the "References" section, including the same paper
twice (once as a Youtube presentation and once as a paper). This while in the selfsame paper crowing about how citation is power and he wants to deny it to his opponents
Sloppy Citation
First and most obviously, the "Feminist Philosophers" blog post this is supposedly reacting to isn't cited at all! I guess you're just supposed to break out Google on your own if you want to read the piece in its entirety for yourself.
Second: some more lazy internet use.
"Google defines a hot take as: "a piece of commentary, typically produced quickly in response to a recent event, whose primary purpose is to attract attention.""
This is uncited, and in fact another 5 seconds on Google reveals that their dictionary data is actually licensed from Oxford Dictionaries:
What does hot take mean? hot take is defined by the lexicographers at Oxford Dictionaries as A piece of commentary, typically produced quickly in response to a recent event, whose primary purpose is to attract ...
www.lexico.com
How hard would it have been to cite the actual author here?
I'm not even going to get into the obnoxious tone and the unexplained neologisms.
The journal that this was published in is here, I'm dropping the link because it took me a while to find.
www.womenandlanguage.org
The listed author of the PDF document, Michelle Dreiling, is an editor for it.