Think of an untenured professor with views you like undergoing them. Still, even if one thinks that Byrne is seriously mistaken, and perhaps insufficiently sensitive to the difficulties trans persons face, one can still think that his testimony about his experiences describes actions (and omissions) by editors and publishers that are concerning. Recent legal developments in the United States have made things even worse for them. Let me state that while I don’t know Byrne personally, nor am I familiar with all of his views on the myriad questions that arise in regard to “trans issues,” I think he and I would disagree about them quite a bit.Īlso, as I’ve said before, we should take seriously just how difficult existing discourse about transgender issues can be for our trans colleagues and students-in academia and also in the broader discriminatory culture. But how likely is it that they were so unsalvageably bad that the unusual deviations from standard publishing protocols, and even the lack of substantive explanations for the rejections, were warranted? Isn’t the answer much closer to the “not likely” end of the spectrum? (And if so, shouldn’t we be curious for more details?) Maybe they are quite terrible, and so the rejections were warranted. I haven’t read Byrne’s handbook chapter or his book manuscript. I think leaping to that characterization would be a mistake. Here’s one way of characterizing all of this: a philosopher whose subpar work in an area he is relatively new to is bitterly and unjustifiably blaming the powerful forces of political correctness for his deserved rejections and ill treatment by editors and publishers. A version of his handbook chapter is forthcoming in The Journal of Controversial Ideas.īyrne takes his recent experiences to support the view that trans issues are a subject on which a reigning political orthodoxy within academic institutions is stifling legitimate inquiry. The chapter’s eventual rejection (itself somewhat unusual, given the normal way these volumes are put together) was telegraphed publicly on Twitter by one of the editors of the volume. Regardless of one’s positions on various questions regarding gender, sex, and trans issues, those acquainted with book publishing in philosophy will recognize this as a very unusual way to handle a contracted manuscript.īyrne did not contest OUP’s decision about his book manuscript, he says, because of a recent experience regarding his invited chapter on pronouns for the Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. To excuse the large number of citations, I had earlier written to OUP, “a persistent criticism of people not hewing to the party line is that we haven’t ‘read the literature,’ so it’s probably a good idea if I demonstrate that I have in fact read the literature.” The (unsubstantiated) allegation of unseriousness was particularly galling, since the draft had 16,000 words of endnotes and a massive bibliography. That’s Alex Byrne, professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an essay describing his experiences writing about transgender issues. “A couple of weeks later, I heard that OUP would not be publishing Trouble with Gender… for the sole reason that ‘the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.’ No errors in the manuscript were identified and… no revisions were allowed.”
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