Are Radishes Red? Are Men Women?

An MIT philosopher takes on gender ideology in the Trump Administration's report on how "gender affirming care" flunks “medical ethics 101" for risk/benefit.

Alex Byrne is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of philosophy at MIT who is the only one of the nine anonymous co-authors of the Trump Administration’s report Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices who has been doxxed so far.

He has an op-ed in the Washington Post:

I am one of the authors. As Health and Human Services said upon publication, the review is going through the peer review process, for which anonymity is preferred. My co-authors and I discussed additional reasons for anonymity, including that disclosure might distract attention from the review’s content or lead to personal attacks or professional penalties. Those who have raised concerns about the field of pediatric gender medicine are well aware of the risks to reputations or careers.

… I was familiar with the other authors — there are nine of us in all — and I was confident that we could produce a rigorous, well-argued document that could do some good. Collectively, we had all the bases covered, with experts in endocrinology, the methodology of evidence-based medicine, medical ethics, psychiatry, health policy and social science, and general medicine. I am a philosopher, not a physician. Philosophy overlaps with medical ethics and, when properly applied, increases understanding across the board. Philosophers prize clear language and love unravelling muddled arguments, and the writings of pediatric gender specialists serve up plenty of obscurity and confusion.

As I’ve mentioned before, way back in the 1990s I wrote an op-ed making gentle fun of the profession of philosophy for, among other things, tackling historically insoluble questions for the pleasure of participating in a conversation with Plato and Kant.

In reply, I got emails from professors of philosophy who proceeded to crush me in argument. People who get paid to do philosophy tend to be really smart.

Professor Byrne usually publishes in traditional philosophy of mind fields, such as philosophy of color (i.e., not race, but: Are radishes really red?):

The target article is an attempt to make some progress on the problem of color realism. Are objects colored? And what is the nature of the color properties? We defend the view that physical objects (for instance, tomatoes, radishes, and rubies) are colored, and that colors are physical properties, specifically types of reflectance. This is probably a minority opinion, at least among color scientists. Textbooks frequently claim that physical objects are not colored, and that the colors are "subjective" or "in the mind."

But it turns out that philosophers’ 2700 year old set of well-honed logical tools are useful in undermining fashionable new sets of sophistries, such as Judith Butler’s ideology of “gender” that suddenly swept moody adolescent girls after Keeping Up with the Kardashians featured Bruce Jenner declaring himself to be Caitlin Jenner.

Back to Byrne’s WaPo op-ed:

Paywall here.