Journal of Controversial Ideas

The “dominant gender narrative” in science holds that bias against women is pervasive and occurs in every domain, including tenure-track hiring, letters of recommendation, awards, grants, journal publications, authorship assignment, citations, salaries, promotions, and teaching evaluations. Many of these claims are repeatedly broadcast despite their nullification by larger, stronger studies and meta-analyses that do not find gender bias. Because these stronger studies are cited less often, there exists a false belief among many faculty that gender bias is omnipresent in the tenure-track academy. As an example of this false belief, 248 U.S. faculty were surveyed about their beliefs regarding gender bias. They overestimated the extent of such bias in every domain. We illustrate this misalignment of beliefs by focusing on just one of the many domains in which bias against women is alleged but has been nullified by stronger studies: tenure-track hiring. We show that the dominant narrative of pervasive bias in favor of hiring men is not supported by the evidence. The reality is the opposite of what is believed, with women preferred over comparable men: multiple sources of evidence demonstrate that in tenure-track hiring in the United States and many European countries, women have an advantage over equally-accomplished men. Yet, the claim of bias against hiring women faculty continues to be widely cited in the premier science media. Challenging the gender narrative should be part of normal scientific discourse; however, doing so often evokes a backlash—as documented in testimonials by researchers who have been attacked. Full article

When most states in Europe and elsewhere responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with the “lockdown” of much of economic and social life, this was heralded by many, particularly the political left, as the end of neoliberalism, an era in which market and efficiency imperatives predominated. This article argues that, on the contrary, lockdown itself shows the imprint of certain, less commonly apprehended yet equally “neoliberal” precepts, including authoritarianism, technocracy, a modicum of global governance, and an exalted sense of security. However, this is not to deny the importance of other factors in the making of this historically novel pandemic response measure, in particular, the “precautionary principle” in a context of great uncertainty. Full article

Group differences in average cognitive ability are often considered the most controversial topic in psychology, and various attempts have been made to suppress research in this area. Supporters of these measures have justified them on the grounds that such research is socially harmful. However, in recent years the assumption that all demographic groups have equal average ability has been a major cause of racial discrimination in the United States. This discrimination has most frequently been directed against high-achieving groups, on the grounds that they have not legitimately earned their success. Separately, within the American criminal justice system the same assumption has resulted in racial discrimination with respect to which defendants receive the death penalty. In order to uphold a non-discriminatory society consistent with the principles of liberalism, research about group differences should not be suppressed, and should instead be used responsibly to oppose these forms of prejudice. Full article

I critically assess ^{Simpson and Srinivasan}’s (²⁰¹⁸) defense of some instances of no-platforming at universities. I raise, and then analyse, three questions: What does it mean for a once-controversial issue to be “settled”? What should be done when two or more academic disciplines come to different judgments about the competence of a scholar or the admissibility of a set of ideas? Which fields of inquiry qualify as genuine academic disciplines? In all three cases I contend that epistemic criteria must be paramount, and sociological criteria secondary. I illustrate, with explicit examples, some of the ways in which purported judgments concerning “disciplinary competence” or appeals to “settled science” can be employed to disguise what is in fact the suppression of dissident views on nakedly ideological grounds. Full article

Proponents of gender transition procedures argue that parents have a moral obligation to support and facilitate a child or adolescent in the decision to transition medically. In this paper, we challenge this idea. We contend that parents of children and adolescents have a moral obligation to oppose medical transition. To argue for this claim, we present and draw conclusions from a series of cases that are similar in their morally relevant details to cases involving medical transition for children and adolescents. Given such similarity, we contend that, on pain of irrationality, one must issue the same judgments across the board. If one does not make the same judgments about the cases, then the onus is on the defender of medical transition for children and adolescents to highlight a morally significant asymmetry. We argue that no such asymmetry exists. Full article

This paper argues that it is justified to exclude male people, and only male people, from certain spaces—sports teams, leagues, events and competitions—set aside for female athletes. More generally, it argues that it is justified to organize sports around the biological distinction between male people and female people. The first part of the paper argues that the problem of how to organize sports is not sui generis, but rather an instance of a more general philosophical problem to which the consideration of which categories are the more natural is relevant. Having offered some initial motivation for the methodological appropriateness of considerations of comparative naturalness, the paper argues that the category female enjoys greater comparative naturalness than any other in the vicinity. The paper concludes that proposals to exclude males reflect no special animus against cross-sex-identified males. This paper is based on an amicus brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court in September 2025, ahead of a landmark civil rights decision concerning the status and scope of the provisions that Title IX makes for women’s sports. Full article

Some insist that the feminist movement and the trans-inclusionary movement are engaged in a common struggle against patriarchy. I argue that they are not. The feminist movement is the struggle of the sex class women against the sex class men, while the trans-inclusionary movement is the struggle of the sex/gender nonconforming against the sex/gender binary. The two movements have different analyses of injustice, different goals, different enemies, and different friends. And, I argue, with trans women’s demand for recognition as women, these movements have come into conflict. Full article

Many recent defenders of just war theory have denied that punishment is a just cause for war. Against this consensus, I argue that punishment is a just cause for war. To defend this claim, I appeal to recent work in social ontology and social epistemology (especially the work of Christian List and Philip Pettit) that shows that groups and not just individuals can be responsible for their actions. For this paper, I defend the thesis that an international treaty organization may initiate a war against one of its member-states for the purposes of punishing that member-state. Many critics of punitive wars have taken the war itself to be the punishment, but I consider the war to be merely the means by which one brings an offending state to accept punitive terms. I show that punitive terms can achieve the three aims of punishment: retribution, deterrence, and reform. Finally, I respond to two objections: that no punitive war could be just because victims of aggression are never impartial in judging their aggressors and that widespread acceptance of the justice of punitive wars would return us to a more warlike and barbaric stage of human history. Full article

The transgender child is a familiar and polarizing trope in the present century. Some, such as the writer J. K. Rowling, take transgender children to be cultural fictions: there are no trans kids, as there are no mermaids or leprechauns. Others, including prominent figures in pediatric gender medicine, hold that some children are transgender, just as some children have brown eyes or are naturally outgoing. The only difference is that transgender children require special support, unlike brown-eyed or outgoing children. Instruction manuals are needed, for instance Brill and Pepper’s The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Parents and Professionals. And when puberty commences, medical interventions may be recommended. A third view is that transgender children are examples of “making up people” in the sense of Ian Hacking’s eponymous 1986 essay: transgender children are brought into existence by a social process that involves (in part) naming or classifying children as transgender. This paper defends the third view: there are trans kids, but they are made, not discovered. Full article

Rebecca Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism” argues that many of the reasons commonly offered for accepting transgender self-identification also support (at least some) forms of transracial self-identification (^{Tuvel, 2017}). The paper provoked intense backlash, but the philosophical question it raised has not gone away: If we accept transgender identity claims, what principled grounds remain for rejecting transracial ones? In this article I defend the structural stability of Tuvel’s analogy by examining prominent responses to her paper, especially those by Dembroff and Payton, Sealey, and Botts, and by asking a consistency question: Do the premises of each objection apply to race but not gender, or to gender but not race? I argue that they typically do not. Appeals to intergenerational inheritance, to having lived the relevant oppression, to entrenched social meanings, to collective harms, and to privileged crossing can be made with equal coherence against transgender identities. This does not show that transracial identity claims are always legitimate or should always receive social uptake. It shows that the familiar objections, as stated, do not secure a non-question-begging asymmetry between the two cases. If we want to deny transracial claims while affirming transgender ones, we need a better account of the difference. Full article

Just as black people resisted Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be black, gender-critical feminists (and radical feminists before them) have resisted transwomen’s claims to be women. Their resistance has met with a very different reception: it is characterized as dehumanizing; hateful; transphobic; bigoted; even fascistic. There has been no serious consideration of the gender-critical feminist position—at least, by anyone who isn’t themself part of the small group of gender-critical philosophers—in the philosophical literature. It is usually ignored. In this paper, I want to engage with one of the gender-critical feminists’ most serious normative claims. In their view, it is morally wrong for transwomen to claim to be women (more basically, it is morally wrong for men to claim to be women—but transwomen are the only men doing this). My question is, are they right? This is the first philosophy paper to address the normative claim—and thus one of the central tensions between so-called ‘trans-inclusive feminism’ and gender-critical feminism—head on. Full article

This paper begins with a case study and then makes a broader argument about how the proper exercise of the intellectual virtues is undermined by failures of character and institutional incentives. Our topic is the rise and spread of trigger warnings as a pedagogical tool. In part I, we define them and explain how they spread. In part II, we review the justifications for trigger warnings. In part III, we review the empirical evidence and show how it undermines these justifications. In part IV, we make a broader argument that draws on Aristotle and MacIntyre. Given that there never was any good evidence that trigger warnings work, why are they so ubiquitous? We argue that their adoption and use is best explained by a lack of prudence, which is explained by two other failures. On the one hand, the unwillingness to speak up is due to a failure of character. Pedagogues can read the evidence, but they are unwilling to speak up when doing so is costly and requires courage. On the other hand, educational institutions do not favour virtue because professional success is often at odds with the excellence that is internal to teaching. Full article