Transgender identity raises a variety of interesting philosophical questions, and on an issue this controversial, the answers to those questions will necessarily be controversial too. I recently found myself embroiled in some of this controversy on Daily Nous, the main blog for philosophy as a profession.
I’ll start here by recapping the controversy to date, before turning to a response. There’s a new free zine out just launched, called Being Trans in Philosophy, which shares trans philosophers’ stories of their experiences. That’s not the controversial part: I think it’s great to give trans philosophers a dedicated space to tell their stories! I have no objection to the zine itself. What I objected to was this passage in the zine’s press release:
Philosophical conversations about trans people do not happen in a vacuum. They happen in a political context where trans people are relentlessly attacked and a material context where trans lives are particularly vulnerable. These contexts make it impossible to “just ask questions” about trans people. And trans people and our loved ones are not okay—in, with, and because of our discipline.
When I described philosophy in my “Why Philosophy?” interview, I hadn’t intended my description to be controversial. Only when Céline Leboeuf gave the interview a title did I realize that it is.
Leboeuf entitled the interview “philosophy crosses boundaries”, which is a phrase that had just felt obvious to me when I wrote the interview answers. But when I saw that that was the title Leboeuf had picked, I suddenly realized that it isn’t. Many philosophers, I recalled, don’t think that way.
David J. Blacker’s recent Deeper Learning with Psychedelics is a valuable attempt to think through the implications of psychedelics for philosophy and education. One passage in particular caught my imagination: Blacker points out the similarities between a psychedelic experience and René Descartes’s passage of radical doubt.
My photo of an elderly MacIntyre speaking in 2019 at “To What End?”
Alasdair MacIntyre is dead. He had a very good run, better than many could dream of: he was 95 years old, and produced an output significant enough to be in competition for the title of “greatest philosopher of his age”. Few indeed are the 20th- or 21st-century philosophers who have an entire learned society – in his case the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME) – devoted to pursuing the implications of their work. It seems that MacIntyre himself was a little uncomfortable with that society’s existence. The one time I ever saw MacIntyre in the flesh was at the society’s 2019 conference, held on the University of Notre Dame campus near his home, in honour of his 90th birthday – but, I was told, he only participated on condition that his name not appear anywhere in the conference title. (Thus, given his focus on teleology and the aims of human life, the conference was called “To What End?”)
Even now, MacIntyre still sits outside what is usually considered the philosophical mainstream. Though he was trained in the English-language mainstream of analytic philosophy and taught in analytic departments, he refused to confine himself to the analytic mode of philosophizing, always writing in a way broader and less precise than analytic departments were usually willing to count as good philosophy. That experience surely shaped one of MacIntyre’s more powerful philosophical insights: the recognition that philosophy itself always operates within the context of historical tradition – the conception of tradition at issue being close to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms. Kuhn and MacIntyre recognized that different paradigms differed not just on what claims they believed to be true and false, but on the standards by which one judged them true and false; MacIntyre knew that within philosophy, analytic philosophy’s standards were never the only ones available.
Thus MacIntyre is the sort of philosopher whom one often first encounters in unusual ways, outside being taught him in a classroom. Thus one colleague at “To What End?” helpfully started conversations with “What’s your MacIntyre story?” – imagining, rightly, that everyone had their own personal story of encountering his ideas, more interesting than being simply taught him in an Intro to Ethics class. (Now that I think of it, the one place I remember being asked a similar question was on a long tour around the Laphroaig whisky distillery in Scotland, which also began with the guide asking “What’s your Laphroaig story?” – a comparison that would likely have pleased MacIntyre, as he always took his philosophy to be deeply informed by his Scottishness.)
A little while ago I was at a party en femme and met an older man who didn’t know many transgender people but was interested in talking about it. He mentioned someone else he knew who’d transitioned, and asked about how to refer to that person when discussing things they’d done together before the transition. He said that in that context it felt more natural to refer to them by their old name and pronouns. While I understood that, I responded “It’s considered polite to refer to someone who’s transitioned by their new name and pronouns, even when you’re talking about them before the transition.”
I stand by that response, and I think that that custom is quite appropriate. For most trans people, their new identity is important to them, they have gone to some struggle to reach it, and that’s how they prefer to be thought of in general; they’d prefer to turn the page on the chapter of their life where they had been called something else. So where there are not other major considerations that override, it’s generally polite and preferred to respect their wishes to be referred to by their new name and pronouns, even retrospectively. That norm seems to me extremely reasonable. What I disagree with is an emergent norm that goes much further than this.
When the head of state or government goes rogue, what happens next?
Consider the recent experiences of three countries where the top leader pursued an agenda far more radical than they had campaigned on, in a way that caused widespread panic. In South Korea, Yoon-Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law, marking an attempted return to something like the country’s past military dictatorship. In the UK, Liz Truss attempted tax cuts so radical that even the business community hated them. In the US, Donald Trump is now attempting something like both: after having been blatantly caught trying to sabotage the election and encouraging a riot that sought to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, now he is not only claiming to be move toward an unconstitutional third term in office, he has also engaged in tariffs so drastic that the market’s reaction to them was even worse than to Truss’s cuts. (Trump is taking as much from the rich as much as Bernie Sanders would – just without giving any of it to the poor.)
But there is an obvious difference between the three cases: Yoon and Truss were removed from power within a few months after their drastic measures, while there is not the slightest sign of any such thing happening to Trump. And that should lead us to ask: why this difference?
Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.
It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.
Early in the first Trump administration, I preached the importance of disengaged Buddhists’ lessons: to refrain from anger, to remind ourselves that some things are more important than politics. I think that that was easier to do the first time round. For in the end, the main thing that distinguished the Trump administration from previous Republican administrations – until the various self-coup attempts at the end of his reign – was its hostile rhetoric. On policy, on running the government, Trump 1.0 was not all that different from a standard garden-variety Republican: the only major controversial piece of legislation he passed was to borrow money and hand it to the rich, just as Reagan and George W. Bush had done before him. Some of the policies that drew the biggest outrage – like putting children in cages – turned out to be the work of previous administrations, including Obama. While Trump’s bark did make the United States a more hostile place for everyone, it nevertheless remained far worse than his bite. That made it a lot easier to preach taking a chill pill.
I don’t think any of that is true this time around. After the election, my hope had been for a second Trump term mostly like the first, probably a little worse. But nothing of the sort has happened. As far as I can tell, Trump has done far more damage in the first month of his second term than he did in three and a half years of his first. The actions of Trump, and his unelected viceroy Elon Musk, have already killed thousands of African recipients denied aid, and wreaked havoc on the world from Ukraine through Canada to here in metropolitan Boston, where nearly everyone I know has had their job redefined – if not lost – as a result of cuts and freezes to science funding.
One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.
Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.
A public-domain illustration by Alex-engraver of the chakras and channels, taken from Wikipedia.
Traditional Indian and Tibetan tantric anatomy tells us that in the middle of the human torso there are three channels (nādis or “streams”), one each on the left, middle, and right, and that these proceed vertically upward through a number of circular centres (cakras in standard Sanskrit transliteration, chakras in modern English spelling). This account of the “subtle body” (sūkṣma śarīra) has become popular in modern yoga and other forms of alternative medicine or spirituality.
I don’t believe this account of the subtle body – but not primarily for the obvious reason.
