Talia Bettcher and Jennifer Saul have written a guest post at Daily Nous that responds to claims that Kit Fine and Gideon Rosen make in a recently published appendix to the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” otherwise known as “The Vanderbilt Report.” In particular, Bettcher and Saul are concerned to undermine (and thus demonstrate why philosophers ought not to accept) Fine and Rosen’s claim according to which there exists a “de facto orthodoxy” in the subdiscipline of philosophy of sex and gender. To argue in this way, they point out that Fine and Rosen’s “de facto orthodoxy includes the following ideas: (A) ‘Socially relevant sex and gender categories are socially constructed’; (B) ‘Sex in human beings is not binary’; [and] (C) ‘Most importantly, trans women are women and should be treated as such for every social and legal purpose’.” For Bettcher and Saul, “Fine and Rosen’s attribution of this orthodoxy to the subfield is inaccurate and reflects ignorance of the nuanced philosophical discussions that actually occur.” Parenthetically, they note: “This isn’t surprising for scholars who are outsiders to a field; what is surprising is their confident assertions about a field that is far outside their expertise.”

In this post, I want to assert–contra Bettcher and Saul–that there is indeed an orthodoxy in the subfield of philosophy of sex and gender; that the existing orthodoxy in philosophy of sex and gender is different than the “de facto orthodoxy” that Fine and Rosen describe and Bettcher and Saul aim to refute; and that arguments of the latter philosophers crystallize and exemplify the parameters of this unacknowledged orthodoxy. I will call this unacknowledged orthodoxy “The Hidden but Everywhere Evident Orthodoxy of Feminist Philosophy,” or HEEOFP for short.

HEEOFP has these features: philosophy of sex and gender is routinely conflated with feminist philosophy; (so-called) analytic feminist philosophers are venerated as the only practitioners of philosophy of sex and gender/feminist philosophy that merit serious consideration and engagement; and widely accepted exclusions with respect to disability, race, nationality, and class are routinely assumed to be conceptual externalities of sex and gender in order to comply with methodological and conceptual constraints. All three of these features of HEEOFP are, as I have suggested, easily identifiable in and even condition Bettcher and Saul’s guest post at Daily Nous and thus their supposedly critical feminist response to Fine and Rosen.

As I point out in my review of (“analytic” feminist philosopher) Carol Hay’s Think Like a Feminist, when “conceptual analysis” of sex and gender is both equated with the articulation of feminist philosophy (as it is in the guest post) and predominates in feminist philosophical discourse (as it does at present) the result is this: feminist philosophy becomes unable to address, and unmotivated to address, a range of political, social, economic, and philosophical issues, dilemmas, situations, and states of affairs because, although these issues, dilemmas, situations, and states of affairs are especially pressing for oppressed and marginalized subjects in the current world, they do not directly and straightforwardly pertain to (conceptualizations of) sex and gender. In the review of Hay’s book, I mention several of the issues, dilemmas, situations, and states of affairs that the current equation of philosophy of sex and gender with feminist philosophy thereby obfuscates or jettisons to another subfield such as “applied ethics.”

At least two very detrimental material consequences can be attributed to this obfuscation: First (as I explain in the review of Hay’s book), the homogeneity of the discipline and profession, including its demographics, are exacerbated and further entrenched. Second, coalition-building and oppositional resistance within philosophy remains limited. These consequences are especially dire in Canadian philosophy where disabled philosophers of disability and “nonanalytic” feminist philosophers have been almost entirely excluded from employment, including from Bettcher and Saul’s own department. Indeed, censorship of my work in feminist philosophy of disability by the editors of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly has arisen in large part because of HEEOFP and, in particular, due to their complete lack of familiarity with both Foucault and nonanalytic approaches to disability and eugenics.

That the Bettcher and Saul blog post evinces disregard of “nonanalytic” feminist approaches to sex and gender is explicit in the assertion of these authors that “rich and complex discussions of the metaphysics of gender have been taking place in analytic philosophy for decades,” along with the fact that the authors cite only “analytic” philosophers as exemplary practitioners of this “rich and complex” work. (Silly me: all this time I’ve been thinking that it was Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, and Judith Butler who variously revolutionized [the study of] the metaphysics of gender!) Thus, we should ask: Do Bettcher and Saul understand and know how to recognize “rich and complex analyses” in nonanalytic philosophy of sex and gender? To answer this question, perhaps we should recall their own words with respect to the “confident assertions about a field” of “outsiders to a field” that is “outside their expertise.” One could hardly blame Javier Pitts Guzman, PJ DiPietro, Perry Zurn, and other “nonanalytic” trans philosophers if they feel a sense of betrayal.

I want to underscore that what all the aforementioned “nonanalytic” thinkers–and others such as Mich Ciurria, me, Sara Ahmed, Linda Martίn Alcoff, Stephanie Jenkins, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, and Melinda Hall–have in common is that each of us convincingly argues that (the apparatuses of) sex and gender cannot be analytically, conceptually, politically, or philosophically separated from other apparatuses of power but rather are co-constituted with, by, and through them. Note, therefore, that while all the aforementioned nonanalytic feminist philosophers have elaborated significantly formative writing in the fields of (for example) philosophy of disability, philosophy of race, and theories of class, in concert with their work on sex and gender, the same cannot be said of the analytic philosophers of sex and gender that Bettcher and Saul venerate or of (most) other beneficiaries of the HEEOFP.