Over at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Alex Byrne (a professor at MIT who works in part on gender and sex), has written a tale of rejection that’s both amusing (in how it’s written) and depressing (in what it says).
Alex was invited to write a book review for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an online site that publishes only reviews of philosophy books. Because reviews are invited (sometimes after a prospective reviewer offers to write one), they are rarely if ever rejected.
But not so with Byrne. Because he wrote a critical but not nasty review of a book on gender by a trans-identified male, Alex’s contribution was rejected—without the site even giving him an explanation.
Click the screenshot below to read Alex’s sad tale. Actually, it’s not really sad because his review will be published elsewhere, and this rejection does him no profesional damage. But the way he was treated reflects yet another academic taboo like the one I discussed in the last post. In this case, the taboo involves saying anything critical about gender science or, in this case, philosophy, particularly about a book written by a trans person.
Some excerpts:
last October, I saw that Rach Cosker-Rowland’s Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters had just come out with Oxford University Press. “Philosophically powerful,” “excellent, important, and timely,” and “fascinating, well-argued,” according to blurbs from well-known philosophers who work in this area. Timely, for sure. I thought reviewing Cosker-Rowland’s effort myself would be worthwhile, since I’ve written extensively on gender identity, in my 2023 book Trouble with Gender and other places.
Many readers will be aware that the topic of sex and gender has not showcased philosophers on their best behavior. It is almost ten years since Rebecca Tuvel was dogpiled by colleagues for writing about transracialism, and—incredibly—things went downhill from there. Dissenters from mainstream thought in feminist philosophy have been subjected to name-calling, no-platforming and other extraordinarily unprofessional tactics. As a minor player in this drama, I have had OUP renege on a contracted book and an invited OUP handbook chapter on pronouns rejected. My recent involvement in the Health and Human Services review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria has done little for my popularity among some philosophers.
I was not hopeful, then, that an invitation to review Cosker-Rowland’s book would spontaneously arrive. But NDPR welcomes “proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers” (see above), and I had reviewed three times for them before. So, I emailed the managing editor in October. I was pleasantly surprised when Kirsten Anderson wrote back to me in December, “Good news! After consulting with the board about it, we’ve decided to move forward with your review.” OUP and NDPR were keen to get the book to me—I received a hard copy from both, and OUP also sent a digital version.
By mid-January I had finished, and sent the review to Anderson with the following note:
Review attached. It’s a big and complicated book but mindful of your guidelines I tried to keep the main text as short as I could—it’s a little over 2200 words. However, the review is very critical, and (again mindful of your guidelines) I need to give reasons for the negative evaluation, so I put a lot of the supporting evidence in the lengthy endnotes.
To which she replied:
Thanks for the review and the extra explanation! Your review will now go through the standard process, starting with being vetted by a board member covering the relevant area. If the length is a problem, I’ll let the board member weigh in along with any other revision requests that may arise. Otherwise, it’ll go straight to copyediting. After that, it’ll be published.
As I said, Alex’s review was not nasty but it was critical (there’s a link below), and he found a number of simple errors that Cosker-Rowland made. Here’s one:
I kept it clean and the overall tone was well within the Overton window for philosophy book reviews, which (as noted at the beginning) is wide. Terrible arguments in philosophy are common; more remarkable was Gender Identity’s slapdash scholarship and glaring factual mistakes. Here’s one example (from the review’s lengthy endnotes):
Gender Identity would have greatly benefited from fact checking. One particularly egregious error is the allegation that “in March 2023 there was a rally outside the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne at which neo-Nazis and gender critical feminists campaigned against trans rights and held up banners proclaiming that trans women are perverts and paedophiles” (158). The two groups did not campaign together and the feminists held up no such banners. The feminists’ rally, including banners and placards, can be seen in one of Cosker-Rowland’s own citations, Keen 2023. Cosker-Rowland even manages to misdescribe the neo-Nazis: their sole banner read “Destroy Paedo Freaks” (Deeming v Pesutto 2024: para. 100); although hardly well-disposed towards transgender people, whether the neo-Nazis meant to accuse them of pedophilia is not clear (para. 114).
I documented some other obvious errors and scholarly lapses in the review—by no means all the ones I noticed. “OUP should note,” I wrote, “that quality control in this area of philosophy is not working.”
Let’s reflect on Cosker-Rowland’s claim about the Melbourne rally for a moment. As a footnote in Gender Identity confirms, she knows that the gender-critical philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith was at the event. Cosker-Rowland believes, then, that Lawford-Smith, a philosophy professor employed by Melbourne University and an OUP author, is happy to attend—indeed, speak at—a rally at which fellow-feminists joined forces with neo-Nazis, both holding grotesque banners about trans women and pedophilia. Perhaps Lawford-Smith waved one of these banners herself! No one with a minimal hold on reality would find this remotely credible. Even more astounding is how this managed to get by the OUP editor and multiple referees—it’s not buried in a footnote, but is in the main text.
He found other errors that he didn’t mention in the review but gives in this piece (you can see his entire review here, in Philosophy & Public Affairs). Here’s Byrne’s summing up given in the last two sentences of his review:
Back in the day, we knew what it was to be transsexual. Transsexuality’s contemporary descendant, being transgender, is decidedly more nebulous and deserves an explanation. Gender identity as Cosker-Rowland conceives of it is of no help, and neither is obstetrical paperwork.
Some weeks after submitting the review to Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Byrne got a rejection that said only that the journal site was “not moving forward” with publication. No reasons were given. Alex wrote back to the editor asking if they would be so kind as to answer two questions:
1. Who was the board member who initially vetted my review? This is not blind reviewing, I take it. The board member knew who wrote the review. Seems only fair that I should know the identity of the board member. If the board member had reasonable concerns, then there should be no objection to making everything transparent.
2. What, exactly, was the reason why you have decided not to publish the review?
Well, reviewers aren’t always entitled to the names of those who vetted a review, but certainly reasons should be given for a rejection. None were, except that one board member declined to vet Alex’s piece and the other “recommended strongly that it be rejected outright.” That was the only feedback he got. Byrne isn’t moaning about this, but his essay does have a serious point about the infection of the publication process in his field by ideology:
The philosophy profession has shown itself to be an institution of fragile integrity when put to the test. One can only hope spines will eventually stiffen, and academic law and order is restored. Meantime, we cannot solely rely on the fortitude of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I suggest that the Journal of Controversial Ideas starts publishing book reviews.
Amen!
Hi Jerry, Really pleased to see this detailed and sympathetic summary of Byrne’s TPM essay. Tiny thing: You write “He [Byrne] recommended rejection [of Cosker-Rowland’s book]”. I think that’s a slip; it was an ordinary critical review of the book post-publication, so “rejection” is neither here nor there.
Oops. My bad. I was thinkng he was a reviewer of a paper, and that was just dumb. I’ll fix it, thanks!
This excellent article is marred by that atrocious AI-generated cartoon. You can see what the prompt was and how AI still struggles to match what a competent human artist can do. You can also see that whatever human was in charge of this publication either never bothered to look at the cartoon that AI garfed out or has some sort of visual impairment.
In some ways this is evidence of a silver lining of the otherwise depressing outlook of AI decimating jobs….because nobody with any sensibility sees this slop as art. If you do, you have the visual equivalent of being tone-deaf. Every one of these AI generated cartoons looks the same…it’s as if only one very mediocre cartoonist is allowed to draw anymore.
Whenever I see this stuff on LinkedIn (it has spread like a virus on that platform) I think “Wow, this person a) has no artistic eye whatsoever and b) sees art as nothing more than a crude tool to hawk their product/service/brand, rather than an end in itself.”
Unfortunately, it validates the stereotype that many people who are successful in business have the inner life and aesthetic sensibility of a lump of coal.
Since when did a review have to be a hagiography? Do they think their readers are incapable of making up their own minds? They should print reviews from different angles and allow readers to judge.
Alex is married to the excellent Carol Hooven (of “Testosterone” book and other TERFY famous stuff). He is an author of America’s Cass Report of last year, by HHS.
What a couple – I’d kill to get them at my dinner parties!
D.A.
NYC
It would be interesting to come up with a thought experiment which pitted “criticism of gender ideology” against “advocating research on race and IQ.” If modern academics were forced to condemn one but give a pass to the other — which one would “win” the Stifle-the-Wrongthink Award? Which one would progressive extremists consider worse?
Maybe that could even be an actual experiment. Then when journals suppress it, the irony would be extra delicious.
It seems that the author has not done any real exploration of the Melbourne rally, as Moria Deeming, an ex Victorian Liberal member of parliament won a defamation case after a politician made a similar assertion. Deeming was portrayed as a nazi sympathiser for speaking at a gender realist rally, described as an anti trans rally by our press.
Byrne actually mentioned in a footnote, which was cut from the essay (though I expect that by “the author” you meant Cosker-Rowland).