Identity and Conflicts of Interest
Regardless of his or her identity or politics, it is always the lecturer’s responsibility to ensure that students know that they can speak freely.
Earlier this month, The Conversation published an article with the title, “Are trans women ‘biologically male’? The answer is complicated.” But the answer is not complicated—a transwoman is a biological male making an identity-based claim to womanhood. The existence of this article in a magazine whose charter is “knowledge-based journalism… supported by evidence” therefore requires some explanation.
When the author’s photo and bio popped up online, it became clear why the author wrote the article and why The Conversation published it. A man who insists that he is a woman is likely to be motivated to find ways to deny that he is male. A left-leaning publication is likely to want to let minorities speak for themselves, while remaining relatively impervious to any implausibility in what they have to say.
Amid the wash of Twitter ridicule that ensued, one comment captured my interest: “I think when pieces like this article are published it should be the duty of the publisher to highlight that the author themselves is… trans so that the reader can judge for themselves if the article might be biased.”
This commenter conceives of the writer’s identity as itself a potential source of conflict of interest. To me, that seems true in the case of the trans author: revelation of the author’s identity undermined the article’s credibility. It would have had more authority had it been written by an academic biologist who wasn’t trans-identified—although to be fair, it would probably still have come in for ridicule.
But the idea seems false in other cases. Suppose I write an article arguing vehemently against the researchers who think that there are ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains in a sense meaningfully predictive of attitudes, preferences, and behaviour, and at the top add a disclaimer noting that I myself am female. That would appear to signal that women are susceptible to motivated reasoning when arguing against their own inferiority—which assumes that we are in fact inferior. On the contrary, my femaleness should be taken to reflect nothing more than the fact that those treated as inferior have a comparatively greater motivation to prove that treatment unwarranted.
Whether one’s identity can be the source of a conflict of interest in general, and whether it is one in the case of trans people in particular, became salient in another domain recently: the classroom.
The Telegraph recently reported that an undergraduate at the University of Leeds, UK has been suspended from hosting a student radio show, and is under investigation by the Leeds University Union (the student union) for, among other things, failing in “a duty of care to all society members.” The student—Connie Shaw—wrote a blog post late last year, published on gender-critical comedy writer Graham Linehan’s Substack, criticising what she called “academia hijacked by gender ideology.”
Shaw is a third-year student in Philosophy, Ethics and Religion. She enrolled in a course called “Feminist Philosophy,” and before the first lecture learned that the lecturer was “a man who identifies as a woman.” Trans issues were disproportionately represented among the essay questions for the course, which included the following: “What are gender identities?”; “Is it true that, in an important way, trans women in transphobic societies, are not women?”; “Is having a female gender identity necessary to be a woman?”; “Should gender be decertified?”; “Pick a particular sport that has sex/gender restrictions. Should there be sex/gender restrictions and divisions in that sport? If there should be such restrictions, what exactly should they be and why?”
In a Twitter thread, Shaw commented, “Here I was thinking feminism was about women, but no—according to the University of Leeds, a large proportion of it is about men.” She expressed particular frustration with the question asking ‘whether trans women in transphobic societies are women,’ saying that it “makes it clear there is only one correct way to answer.”
Almost 40% of these questions are about gender identity. Here I was thinking feminism was about women, but no — according to the University of Leeds, a large proportion of it is about men.
— Connie Shaw (@_ConnieShaw) October 10, 2024
Should the University of Leeds philosophy department have told students in advance that “Feminist Philosophy” would be taught by a transwoman? That is, is a transwoman teaching feminism comparable for these purposes to a transwoman writing an article about whether transwomen are biologically male?
Here’s a reason to think the answer is ‘no’: feminist philosophy is overwhelmingly trans-inclusive, regardless of who teaches it. Shaw herself noted that her “previous experiences in the Philosophy department… revealed it to be entirely dominated by gender ideology.” Of course, there are feminist philosophy courses taught in ways that do not displace sex/gender with gender identity—Kathleen Stock taught one at the University of Sussex before she was pushed out, and I teach one at the University of Melbourne. But these are rare exceptions and unlikely to appear in a department that is already dominated by one perspective on the debate. Most feminism classes these days centre men, but plenty of such classes are taught by women, and it’s possible in principle (if unlikely in practice) that a transwoman could teach a feminism class in a way that does not assume the trans-inclusive position.
There’s also reason to suspect that Shaw may have jumped the gun. The UK’s autumn semester begins around the start of October. Shaw’s Twitter thread went up on 10 October, and her blog post appeared on 30 October. Some of her criticisms of the essay questions indicate that she was not familiar with the philosophical positions involved, which would have been covered as the course unfolded. She had not had much time to get a sense of either the lectures or the lecturer, and even less time to test the waters in class discussion to see how much gender-critical ‘heresy’ would be tolerated, since tutorials in the UK don’t usually begin until the second week of the semester. It would have made more sense for Shaw to speak out after being silenced rather than in anticipation of being silenced.
Still, Shaw must have known that gender-critical ideas often meet with a chilly reception at universities. And the episode does raise questions about the responsibility of academics when tensions arise between their politics, their professional obligations, and aspects of their identities.
Sean Masters
The University of Melbourne includes “perceived conflict” as one form of conflict of interest for the purposes of its “Managing Conflicts of Interest Policy.” They say, “a perceived conflict of interest occurs where it could reasonably be perceived or give the appearance to another person that a conflict of interests exists, whether or not an actual or potential conflict of interest exists.” I was made to declare a potential conflict of interest caused by my feminist activism, on the grounds that someone could believe that my feminism motivated or distorted my research. The university didn’t require me to declare being female as a potential conflict of interest, however—which (if we applied my university’s requirements) implies that the University of Leeds lecturer would only have to declare a conflict of interest on the grounds of his trans activism (if he were a trans activist). And in any case, such conflicts of interest only apply to research, not to teaching.
Because there’s no official curriculum in philosophy, and courses therefore tend to be a matter of who’s on faculty and what they happen to be interested in, there’s no real scope for students to complain about political bias. The perspective from which the course is taught, the topics that are covered, and the readings that are assigned, are all up to the individual lecturer. But a student could complain about the way the discussion of a set topic was conducted. In general, when it comes to arguing about a topic in philosophy—whether in lectures, tutorials, or essays—anything goes. Had Shaw, for example, attended a tutorial on transwomen in sport, argued for the blanket exclusion of biological males from women’s sports and been shut down, she would have a complaint. Had she written an essay arguing that there’s no such thing as a gender identity, that what’s necessary and sufficient to being a woman is being female, or that gender should be abolished because achieving women’s equality is more important than validating men’s identities, and been marked down, she would have a complaint.
Does a lecturer owe it to their students to make it clear that their academic freedom will be protected, where there might be some reasonable doubt? I think so—given that it is so often not protected, at least on politically sensitive topics, it can no longer be taken for granted. I teach an Honours-level class “Free Speech and Hate Speech,” which covers topics like racist and sexist speech. Ideally, the course would also cover transphobic speech, because it’s a topic of current interest that has been salient on our campus in recent years. Nonetheless, I chose not to include it, because I reasoned that it would be many students’ first personal interaction with me, and that some of those students would already be aware of my politics. Such students might feel unable to discuss the topic freely—in particular, if they wanted to defend the claim that gender-critical speech is hate speech. A student who doesn’t know me at all cannot be expected to take it on faith that they can implicate me as a hate-speaker and my only interest will be in the quality of their arguments. Some people are sensitive about being accused of hate speech; and some people expect others to agree with their political opinions. The students cannot know in advance whether I am a person like that. It is my responsibility to build an atmosphere that will encourage them to feel able to express their views, whatever they are, and whether they are distasteful to me personally or not.
Readers sympathetic to trans activism may be thinking that the transwoman’s case is different: the transwoman is a beleaguered minority dealing with a prejudiced student, while the gender-critical academic teaching about hate speech is herself a prejudiced person—a “transphobe”—dealing with a student who wants to speak for a beleaguered minority. The relevant power dynamic is beleaguered/prejudiced.
I reject that framing. The relevant power dynamic is the same in both cases: student/teacher. That is so regardless of any further aspects of identity in play. (A white student, for example, is not “the oppressor” of a black lecturer). It is always the lecturer’s responsibility to ensure that their students know that they can speak freely. I also teach a course on feminism, and make sure that students know they can express anti-feminist, feminism-sceptical, men’s rights advocate, and other feminism-critical views. In a perfect world, students would not know about certain aspects of their teachers’ identities or politics; but some of these aspects—like race, sex, and sometimes sexual orientation—can’t always be easily hidden and sometimes the lecturer’s politics have been made public whether the academic in question wanted that or not (e.g. if they have been subjected to a public cancellation attempt). My students can see that I am female, and learn from Googling that I am a lesbian, gender-critical, and routinely accused of transphobia or trans-exclusion. Did the transwoman lecturer at the University of Leeds wonder whether his visible transness would make students feel less free to put forward the full range of perspectives on feminism and the place of gender identity within it? Did he think about the gender-critical students in the class at all? And if he did, what did he do to signal that their views were welcome, and would be protected or respected?
These questions also apply to research. At an event at MIT earlier this year—held in retaliation against my ‘platforming’ and that of fellow gender-critical philosopher, Alex Byrne—the keynote speaker was a transwoman who tried to close off one line of questioning of the talk he’d just given. In particular, he said:
I have been really uncomfortable all day long. In fact I’ve been really uncomfortable since I came to MIT. And the reason I’ve been really uncomfortable is because… there was a very good possibility that some people, who are not particularly trans friendly, were going to show up. Philosophers, in particular. … It made it really difficult… it made it hard for me to be present. … I was worried, like, is someone going to come here and say certain things, and like misgender, or is it going to be something that they wouldn’t do to my face, they would merely like, tweet when they left me? … I don’t know.
The speaker, under the guise of expressing vulnerability and connecting with his audience, makes sure any questions or objections that wouldn’t count as “trans friendly” (i.e. trans-affirming) are taken off the table. For who would be so unkind as to ask the sort of question that has been making the speaker “uncomfortable all day long”? Certainly, the view that pronouns should refer to sex and not gender identity becomes unsayable, having been redescribed as the moral infraction of “misgendering.” This speaker fails doubly in his responsibilities to his audience: he does not reassure them that robust disagreement will be welcomed and respected; he does not even remain neutral on the matter, leaving them to assume that the normal rules of academic debate will apply. On the contrary, he makes sure that only certain types of questions will be asked.
Academia has not yet fully grappled with the idea that faculty who have identities that are implicated in current political debates, and/or who take strong positions in those debates, have a responsibility to protect their students’ and colleagues’ academic freedom, even though that is the crucial value of both teaching and research.
