Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters to Feminism has its virtues. The book is well written, and compared to the levels of vicious vitriol normally accompanying work on transgender issues, it is generally even handed and fair minded, if a bit sharp and sarcastic at times. As one of the most visible and beleaguered defenders of the ‘gender critical’ take on transgenderism, Stock is known for wading into the most contentious online debates imaginable and she had been the occasion for some appalling attacks on academic freedom as result. In Material Girls Stock laudably tries to defuse things as she plays the analytic philosopher of her training, arguing with rigor and restraint, considering her opponents’ arguments with care, and searching for as much common ground as possible. Keep reading…

The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex by Hida Viloria and Maria Nieto purports to show it is unscientific to believe there are only two biological sexes, that believing this is of a piece with bad things like eugenics, and that the world needs to do much better in how it thinks about and treated intersex people. In the first two of these goals I think the book fails. Oddly, it barely argues for the “spectrum” of its title, and the authors never explain what they think it would mean for biological sex to be a spectrum. While it repeatedly claims intersex constitutes a third sex category, its most impressive parts work against that conclusion. The authors also regularly abandon their project for the much more modest and less controversial goal of showing sexual expression—in physical traits and in gender—falls along a spectrum. For their part, the moral and political parts are mostly unsupported assertions even if its renunciation of mistreatment of intersex people is obviously sound.

That’s the bad news…Keep Reading.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—And Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay.

This book had little chance of succeeding. It is too ambitious, trying at once to be a history of postmodern thought, an account of its influence on contemporary political and legal discourse, a refutation of its philosophical underpinnings, and a defense of the liberalism it challenges. Its authors also made their names provoking and antagonizing the corners of the political and academic worlds they target here. Most readers will pick up this book already loving or hating it. 

I went into it with my own bias: there is, I think, is a lot wrong with what the book calls ‘Theory’ and what they identify as its contemporary political offsprings, but I’ve found Lindsay especially to be strident and superficial in the online polemics for which he is now mostly known. I expected a book that I would sometimes agree with, but which would be drearily reliant on caricatures and stereotypes. Perhaps because Pluckrose’s more moderate demeanor prevailed, the book is more fair minded than I expected, and reasonably if unevenly well documented and substantive in its arguments…Keep Reading

Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works starts with a plausible and succinct definition of fascism—“ultranationalism of some variety…with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.” It then identifies the features of “fascist politics”, or “fascist tactics as a mechanism to achieve power.” These “strategies” are “the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and a dismantling of public welfare and unity.” Fascists deploy these tactics, Stanley suggests, to exploit existing or manufactured insecurities about or fears of parts of a country’s population in order to justify oppressive policies targeting political opponents and troublesome political minorities so that they can take control. Each of these is the focus of a chapter, followed by a brief Epilogue. Keep reading…