Gender Trouble at SPEP

Last week, I began my second year on the LGBTQ Advocacy Committee for The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). This organization and this committee are important to me, personally and professionally, and I take my service responsibilities to both very seriously. Contrary to the general demographics/trends of professional Philosophy writ large, SPEP has consistently proven to be a broadminded, forward-thinking, and progressive organization in my experience. I’ve seen a lot of turf-battles fought in my almost 25 years (gah!) with SPEP– ethical, political, social, economic, philosophical, and more than a few uncategorizable WTF spats– but the overwhelming majority of those conflicts have resulted in the kinds of changes that make space for more thinkers doing better thinking.

That said, this past year was a particularly difficult one to be on the LGBTQ Advocacy Committee, in no small part because we– all of us, nationally and globally– find ourselves in a lacuna with regard to how we want to proceed in the deciphering of “gender” identities. Inasmuch as the credit (or fault) for the widespread, at least academic, uptake of “gender” as a socially-constructed category belongs to philosophers, one might reasonably expect that we philosophers ought to have been more prepared for the consequences of our insights.

We were not.

Let’s cut right to the chase: professional academic philosophy is still reeling from the 2017 Hypatia scandal, which played itself out in the public media as a literal dumpster-fire of philosophers’ (many and varied, often idiosyncratic, and more often pathological) issues, but still somehow managed to result in the very fortunate consequence of bringing to the fore legitimate conflicts between commitments of trans* philosophy scholars and those of (broadly-construed) “gender critical theorists” (which sometimes included, but not in all iterations, TERFs). What was salvageable from the post-war detritus was a host of important and interesting questions– social. political, moral, even metaphysical– but I sometimes worry that, in the fray, uncrossable lines were drawn and we haven’t yet managed to get out of “crisis” mode with respect to the actually important matters. We’re still snuffing out fires where we find them.

[Perhaps I’ve overstated the case a bit. The truth is that the vast majority of (non-SPEP) “professional academic Philosophy” is not still reeling from the substantive content of the Hypatia scandal, nor did it ever reel so. If it reeled at all, that phenomenon is entirely attributable to Brian Leiter’s troll-farm cultivation, and not comparable to the serious philosophical conversations that are happening in the SPEP-world.]

In my last year serving on the LGBTQ Advocacy Committee for SPEP, one thing has become abundantly clear to me, namely, that the existence and insistence of trans* philosophers among the SPEP ranks, as well as the re-appearance and renewed-insistence of gender critical theorists (broadly construed), is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. The conflicts between their commitments are not easily negotiated or assuaged. And, as a consequence of many conversations with the SPEP LGBTQ constiuency, what I’ve realized is that whatever the “advocacy” part of the SPEP “LGBTQ Advocacy Committee” means is very, very difficult to determine.

We’ve got some serious gender trouble at SPEP. And we need to deal with it post haste. 

It came to my attention during the Business Meeting last week that the SPEP Executive Committee (EC) still delivers a report of the “acceptance rate percentages” for men and women who submit papers to the annual conference each year. I think it is long past time for SPEP to seriously reconsider this practice and, as a representative on the LGBTQ Advocacy Committee, I think it is my responsibility to call attention to it. 

As far as I can tell—and as has been confirmed to me by the SPEP old-timers—the original purpose of this report was to mitigate the over-representation of men and the under-representation of women on the program each year, which was (of course) a very real problem when the practice was initiated. However, for at least the last 15 years or so, I’ve noticed that relative parity has more or less been achieved and, moreover, that the numbers have remained surprisingly constant. (Roughly 35-40% of both men’s and women’s papers are accepted, as reported each year.) That’s a good thing, given that women are underrepresented in philosophy for a host of reasons having exactly zero to do with merit or the quality of their work, and it is evidence in support of my claim (above) that SPEP as an organization is both proactively progressive and actively making space for a diversity of thinkers and thinking.

At this point, though, I worry that it’s not entirely clear to what the “gender parity” numbers that the SPEP EC reports at its annual Business Meeting actually correspond. As we all know, there is a not-insignificant number of SPEP members who do not self-identify according to the “men/women” gender binary. How are those members being represented in this report? How ought they be represented in the future? How does the LGBTQ Advocacy Committee advocate on behalf of an unrepresented population?

Those questions are the most pressing for me as a LGBTQ Advocacy Committee member, but they only barely begin to peel back the complicated, nuanced, tangled (and often untangleable problems) with how the SPEP EC currently thinks about, reports, and records gender representation.

What follows are (just some of) the problems, as I see them, with the SPEP EC’s current practice. I’m genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts about any or all of these, as well as any other problems that I may not have considered below. (You can comment on this post, email me at [email protected], or email the SPEP LGBTQ Advocacy Committee at [email protected].) It would help if you would let me know if you are a member of SPEP when you comment/email, but that isn’t necessary.

Here are the problems with the SPEP EC “gender equity” report:

1. As mentioned above, the current practice of the SPEP EC is to report the percentage of men whose papers were accepted and the percentage of women whose papers were accepted for presentation at the annual SPEP conference. (For more than a decade, those percentages have been between 30-40% for both men and women, with a ≦ 5% margin of difference between men and women.) SPEP members who identify as non-binary are not included in this report, or are included as part of one of the binary gender designations without their consent.
2. The current practice for determining these percentages is for the SPEP Secretary-Treasurer to either (a) “guess” the gender of the author from the name listed on the paper submitted or (b) Google the author and then “guess” their gender from an image search, from published pronouns in reference to them, or (if the Secretary-Treasurer is lucky) by finding some statement by the author indicating their gender. So, basically, this report is junk science.
3. The original purpose of the report may be undermined by the ad-hoc data collection described in (2). That is, there is good reason to suspect that the percentages reported at the annual SPEP Business Meeting are artificially inflated/deflated, and thus are useless for measuring (their original purpose of) greater gender equity. Consider the following hypothetical: a SPEP member who positively identifies as a woman, who has adopted a proper name for professional publications (e.g., “Lee”) that is regularly read as either gender-neutral or masculine, who regularly refers to themself using gender-neutral pronouns, and who “appears” (for example, in a Google image search) to be a man, has their paper accepted to the annual SPEP conference. Under the current SPEP data-collection protocol, Lee would no doubt be included in the SPEP Business Meeting report as a man, thereby “inflating” the percentage of men who were accepted and “deflating” the percentage of women who were accepted that year.
4. Given not only the possibility, but the very real (and increasingly common) actuality of (3), we ought to conclude that the annual Business Meeting report concerning gender equity in SPEP paper submissions is neither accurate nor informative. In fact, it may be misleading.
5. Now consider that “Lee” in (3) does not self-identify as a woman, but rather positively identifies as a man. There nevertheless remains a not-insignificant number among the SPEP constituency, including many LGBTQ SPEP members, who might object to Lee’s being included in the Business Meeting report as a man for “gender critical” reasons, i.e., reasons that reject the deep, metaphysical or philosophical “reality” of gender identities (and their concordant moral/political obligations for agent-determined respect) in favor of something like Butlerian, performative theories of gender (which do not carry with them the same sociological, scientific, or moral obligations).

   (5a) Let me be abundantly clear: in giving consideration to the “gender critical” position, I do NOT mean to defend the reductive and uninformed positions of transphobics, transmisogynists, or so-called TERFs that we so frequently, and unfortunately, see online. Most of those are truly vile arguments, not even worthy of being considered as serious philosophical positions. One can, in my view, be critical of the contemporary metaphysical, philosophical, moral, and political uptake of the socially-constructed category of “gender,” while at the same time positively affirming that trans* persons are really the gender by which they self-identify and also positively advocating for the existential safety, political representation, and moral respect of trans* persons.

   (5b.) I consider myself a “gender critical” philosopher, by which I do not mean that one’s gender identification is not “real,” but rather that gender is (a la Judith Butler) through-and-through performative. (Or, to borrow from RuPaul, it is my considered philosophical position that “you’re born naked and the rest is drag.”) I can’t speak for the entire SPEP membership, of course, but this is a passionately-contested debate within the LGBTQ SPEP constinuency. What I have learned over the last year on the LGBTQ Advicacy Committee is that members of our constituency are deeply committed to what are. quite often, mutually-exclusive positions. To wit, we better have some collective conversations about how SPEP is going to treat, consider, report, and talk about gender post haste.

6. I am, perhaps for the first time in my life, genuinely stymied by how to best advance a “progressive” platform with regard to SPEP’s gender trouble. I am sincerely soliciting your  feedback.

Allow me to recap the general problem, before I offer some possible strategies for resolving it.