# Philosophical Malpractice  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Philosophers' Magazine -]] - Full Title: Philosophical Malpractice - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Philosophers criticize Tennessee’s SB1 law for unfairly classifying medical treatments based on sex. They argue many academics avoid serious discussion about transgender issues, despite clear questions needing answers. This avoidance harms intellectual honesty and allows regressive sex stereotypes to persist. - URL: https://philosophersmag.com/philosophical-malpractice/ ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > In any case, flippant reductionism is hardly the right tone to strike when presented with the information that [at least 6,000 teenage girls](https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-consensus-no-longer) – a large proportion of whom have comorbid mental health conditions like autism and ADHD – were given double mastectomies as a form of “gender-affirming care” in the United States from 2017 to 2023. Consequently, the average academic is likelier to react to it by affecting a kind of hard-minded utilitarianism: 6,000 girls – only 1,000 a year, in a nation of 340 million people! – still isn’t that many, they observe. Needless to say, few would have dared to downplay in similar fashion the importance of, for instance, police killings of unarmed black men in the US, on the basis of the small absolute number of instances – only about 10 a year! – or, indeed, to downplay the importance of *protecting* “trans rights” on the same statistical basis. Perhaps more importantly, the fact that the number of cases of minors being subjected to such medical interventions remains relatively low is in large part *because* of the very public opposition that makes so many academics uncomfortable. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0shc425czmzrhgvbay6bz73)) > If your average academic interlocutor hasn’t managed to effect some grand moralistic exit from the conversation by the time you’ve mentioned all of the above, another effective way to reduce him to panic and temporary deafness is to mention a second egregious consequence of trans activism: namely, the treatment of male sex offenders as women. It is customary at this point for one’s nervous interlocutor to protest that most trans-identified males are not sex offenders. True. Nevertheless, *some are*. And trans ideology implies that even such men are women. Thus, there have been [well-publicized cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_Bryson_case) of men who have [raped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_White_case) or [murdered](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/nyregion/harvey-marcelin-shopping-cart-body.html) multiple women being housed in women’s spaces. (In California, as of February 2022, [about 100 male sex offenders](https://usa.kpssinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CDCR-Response-on-Data-of-Offenders-Seeking-Transfer-to-Female-Facilities.pdf) had petitioned to transfer to the female estate.) In other cases, female rape victims have been [compelled to use female pronouns in describing their attacker](https://thecritic.co.uk/she-her-or-else/). Of course, as before, the tactic of denigrating the absolute number of cases is available. And, once again, the same rebuttals to those responses are available. In particular, as before, that the number of male sexual offenders housed in the female estate remains relatively low is in large part *because* of [behind-the-scenes due diligence about which applications are granted](https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/jails-without-gatekeeping-evidence). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0sheacrce5gj18fek8h6bx3)) > Escaping to this level of commentary on the first-order debate is yet another mere method of deflection. Knowing, and claiming to know, the answer to easy questions, such as whether there are male women, or whether mentally ill children should be gratuitously harmed, is not good evidence that one *cares* about the answer to any unusual extent. You could simply know the answer, without caring about it. Lots of knowledge is like that. Of course, in an environment where everyone else is feigning ignorance about obvious truths, one does often come to care more about such banal truths. But that is a psychologically normal response to a pathological environment. It is one’s interlocutor who is in the odder position: insisting that he doesn’t care about the answer to easy questions enough to know the answer to them, while manifestly caring that the questions not be decisively settled in your mooted way. He is also at risk of setting the bar for caring about a political issue in an awkwardly high place: if the chemical castration of troubled children and the willfully-blind indulgence of sexual criminals are not enough to arouse his moral emotions, then it is not immediately obvious what will. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0shq63499xef9wj93g6nbpw))