A Philosopher Takes to Quillette to Complain About His Book Reviews

Sure seems like Alex Byrne wrote a bad book of philosophy.

by Evan Urquhart

Discussions about gender, particularly when they touch on trans identities, can be very contentious. Let’s grant Alex Byrne, a philosophy profesor at MIT who wrote an ungodly number of words for Quillette complaining that his colleagues didn’t like his book enough, at least that much. It’s difficult to talk about gender if you confine yourself to cis and binary ways of thinking, and even more so if you insist on dragging trans people into things.

Alex Byrne is determined to drag trans people into things. In 2022 he attempted to contribute a chapter on pronouns to something called an Oxford Handbook (a collection of snapshots of current research in a discipline). In the proposed chapter Byrne argued that pronouns are used in English to convey information about biological sex. This is extremely stupid, as anyone who’s ever referred to Dora the Explorer as a she could tell you. Also, boats exist.

The fact that it is trivially easy to dispense with the idea that pronouns are used to convey information about biological sex without even mentioning trans people is a good indication of the quality of Byrne’s arguments.

Another indication is that his colleagues thought that Byrne’s ideas were dogshit. The MIT prof is very upfront about this in his punishingly long Quillette thingummy. He quotes a colleague who said, of his book, “It is of extremely poor quality.” He also quotes the explanation from the publisher on their decision not to move forward with its publication by saying, “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.”

Sounds like a really bad, superficial, unserious book that maybe didn’t merit publication! But Byrne, of course, believes he’s being unfairly silenced by a profession in the grips of groupthink. Luckily, he includes a brief excerpt from an early article to help us judge this. The publication, which represented his first serious foray into the philosophy of gender, argued that a woman is an adult human female. Here’s his example of the quality of his own argumentation:

screenshot from Quillette

The gist is this: In a short film where gender roles are swapped, the men are still men and the women are still women, because Byrne says so. As such it reads as a shallow “nuh uh” to the ideas of feminist philosophy, which have long held that biological differences alone are insufficient to explain the unequal positions men and women have in society, and since they’re insufficient it’s more useful to think of what womanhood is in terms of that power relationship. Agree or not, the excerpt isn’t not engaging with that work, it’s holding up a middle finger at it.

Byrne is professor in a discipline with a reputation for being very dense, wordy, and difficult for laypeople to follow, and the excerpts of his work seem not just simple to read, but easy even for a layperson to poke huge holes in. If we assume that Byrne has done a lot of philosophy in order to reach the august position of MIT professor, this suggests he isn’t some sort of thumb-sniffing fartass. If that’s true, if he’s not just an idiot who thinks he’s being smart, then the sort of paragraph where Byrne suggests that because a film showed reversed gender roles therefore gender is biology read less like an attempt to do philosophy and more like he’s intentionally trawling for the sorts of annoyed, dismissive reactions that he’s now writing about indignantly, and at great length, on a conservative culture war website.

One of the most tedious ploys of modern conservatism has been the insistance that outmoded ideas from the far right aren’t realy being dismissed because they’re shoddy, mean-spirited tripe that was dispensed with ages ago, but because they’re so danged dangerous and transgressive. If you engage with them in depth you end up wasting precious time on people who weren’t seriously trying to have an argument in the first place. If you ignore them, you provide fuel for the claim that you’re suppressing them unfairly.

There is, perhaps, one other way. You can engage with this sort of conservative, but lightly. The existence of Dora the Explorer, a non-biological she/her, refutes the idea that pronouns are biological. A movie short with swapped gender roles has no bearing on whether womanhood is primarily a power position. There’s no need to read further or engage with every equally shallow gambit. Come back when you’ve actually made an argument instead of just pretending to have made one in order to pretend that you’ve been cancelled.