Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey (guest post)

Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey (guest post) “State, provincial, and national policymakers in Canada, the UK, and US have pursued controversial proposals regulating access to gender affirming care, public bathrooms, and competitive sports… Many trans and nonbinary philosophers find themselves forced to make difficult decisions about where to apply for graduate school or jobs, without reliable information about conditions on the ground.” Obtaining information about that is one of the aims of the “Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey.” The research team behind the survey, Dan Hicks (University of California, Merced, USA), Catherine Stinson (Queen’s University, ON, Canada), Jingyi Wu (London School of Economics, UK), Ray Pedersen (University of Oxford, UK), and Sofie Vlaad (Queen’s University, ON, Canada) discuss the survey, which you may have received an invitation to complete, in the following guest post. Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey by Dan Hicks, Catherine Stinson, Jingyi Wu, Ray Pedersen, & Sofie Vlaad Many readers of this blog have recently received an invitation to participate in the Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey. Because we all receive many requests to participate in surveys, as the creators of this survey we wanted to write this blog post to explain our motivations and encourage participation. Debates over trans and nonbinary identities and the metaphysics of gender are less heated today in Anglophone philosophy than they were around 2019. But these issues have become even more socially salient and politically polarizing. State, provincial, and national policymakers in Canada, the UK, and US have pursued controversial proposals regulating access to gender affirming care, public bathrooms, and competitive sports. Philosophers have provided expert testimony and formal comments supporting or challenging definitions of gender. Many trans and nonbinary philosophers find themselves forced to make difficult decisions about where to apply for graduate school or jobs, without reliable information about conditions on the ground. We developed the Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity research survey to improve the profession’s understanding in three areas: - The prevalence of trans and nonbinary individuals among academic philosophers; - The distribution of philosophical views on the metaphysics of gender; and - The local climate for trans and nonbinary individuals at institutions of higher education. After your responses are collected and analyzed, we plan to share our findings with a blog post here on Daily Nous, a public data dashboard, and a more traditional journal article. We hope the philosophical views information will be of broad interest, and that the climate data will be useful for job seekers, grad school applicants, and departments themselves. You might be wondering how we got your email address; or, why you didn’t receive an invitation despite having an established position in a philosophy department. For one thing, due to the complex logistics of multinational ethics review, we confined our scope to just the US, Canada, and the UK. It simply wasn’t feasible for our small team to also include Australia, New Zealand, and of course the many European and Latin American countries where scholars publish regularly in Anglophone philosophy. While we initially approached professional organizations for philosophers in our three focal countries—the idea being that they could send the survey out to their members—the responses were uneven, and we were worried about adequate coverage. Instead, we ended up retrieving names and email addresses for articles published in the last 5 years in the 71 most popular philosophy journals on PhilPapers. We then used the email domain (e.g., @ucmerced.edu) to identify institutional affiliations, and filtered down to institutions in the UK, US, and Canada. We also included gmail.com addresses to cover recent graduates and academics in term-limited positions. While this approach was efficient for a small team doing a large project without any funding, it did mean we weren’t able to include colleagues who have not published recently in those journals. If you were not contacted directly, you may participate in the survey using this open participation link. We emphasize that your email address will not be linked to your responses. Indeed, because the members of the core research team are all philosophers, to protect confidentiality we are working with two biostatisticians at UC Merced—a professor and one of his graduate students—who will be the only people who handle the raw data from Qualtrics. Most of our research team will not even have access to the data after it’s cleaned and de-identified. If you have any questions or concerns before filling in the survey, please contact the project lead at [email protected]. I think this sort of thing is a good idea and have just completed the survey. Here is some unsoliticied feedback: Given the wide net cast, some more explanation of the positions at the beginning would have been useful. One early questions asks what I think of: I reckon I have a fair idea what this means: the claim is that whether one is a man (say) is determined, but not entirely determined, by how you feel about your own gender. But I’m a philosopher of language and *exactly* what the view is was beyond me. Two or three sentences on each view would have been helpful. I found this question poorly worded: I believe that trans people are neither more nor less promiscuous than heterosexual men. Should I put disagree' ( no, they are not more promiscuous, they are (roughly just as promiscuous’) or should I put `neither agree nor disagree’ (no they are not more, but neither do I disagree that they are less).This too: My affiliations in the last five years are KCL, UT Austin and Cambridge. Neither of the British institutions really has a campus in the sense of single large area with everything on it (KCL has several separate ones). Even if they did, I would never have been able to visit all of the buildings (as I was unable at UTA); this question seems only answerable by a very wide-ranging maintenance person or a faculty at quite a small institution. In light of the wording concerns, perhaps a ‘can’t answer’ or ‘don’t know’ option would have been helpful. I know this is a software thing, and software is hard (perhaps institutionally mandated) but there was no back button (or support for the browser’s back button). I stopped at the first question because I didn’t understand the statement of the view I was supposed to be taking a position on. For transparency, UK academics may wonder if this is GDPR compliant. Work email addresses count as personal data since they are personally identifiable information. The study went through ethics review in the UK, as well as the US and Canada. I’m not familiar with the GDPR’s requirements, and GDPR compliance wasn’t discussed as such in my work with the IRB staff here at Merced. But I expect professional ethics review staff would be familiar with GDPR. Reviewing my institution’s GDPR guidance, the primary concern would indeed be email addresses. These are collected exclusively for the purpose of identifying duplicated or multiple responses from a single individual, and will be removed as part of the data cleaning process. The raw responses in Qualtrics will also be destroyed at that time. If anyone is more knowledgeable than myself about GDPR’s requirements, and has specific concerns they’d like to discuss, they can either contact me directly (email at the end of the blog post) or one of the ethics review boards (contact info on the informed consent page). I filled out the survey and answered the questions because I wanted to be helpful, but I was second guessing whether I (a cis person) was supposed to be filling it out while doing so. It’s a bit strange, I think, to ask cis people about what an environment is like for trans people (it doesn’t even ask us for what our perception is, just what it is like). A lot of the questions seem addressed to trans people specifically, but when I started the survey I was under the impression it was something you wanted anyone to fill out. It might be good to clarify whether you only want input from trans/non-binary philosophers or from everyone. I think the demographic info at the end reflects that they want everyone to fill it out. If cis people and trans people give different answers to what the experiences of trans people are like, that would valuable data. Yes, that’s correct. Because we didn’t have an ex ante list of trans and nonbinary philosophers — and have no interest in assembling one — we had no way to contact all and only the trans and nonbinary folks. In addition, it seems likely that many if not most departments will have no or at most only a single trans or nonbinary member. I’ve spent a lot of my research time over the past year developing a statistical approach that can make use of data from respondents of all genders. I can’t understand the value of putting one sentence declarations of elaborate nuanced views on an emotionally charged/highly politicized subject in a Likert scale survey. The study feels like it was designed by individuals who are deep in the political muck (I don’t envy them, even where I might admire their fight for a cause…) and who have subsequently forgotten that most people around them are sitting on the sidelines, so to speak. When the subjects are anodyne (e.g., “Electrons exist”), sure why not. But it’s difficult to imagine this data as anything but a tool to be weaponized one way or another by all partisans and never in all that epistemologically responsible a way. I agree with the sentiment above that many views cannot be simply answered with agree/disagree; for instance, someone can disagree with Haslanger’s view because it risks being trans-exclusive, or it fails to include Queen Elizabeth, or because they are critical of the concept of gender altogether. I was initially eager to participate, but I couldn’t even answer the first substantive question. There is no option to record one’s epistemic uncertainty with respect to any of the single-sentence statements of what are incredibly complex, substantive philosophical positions, which strikes me as a pretty serious design flaw and one that will undermine whatever lessons one hopes to draw from the results of this survey. I’m not sure this is a design flaw. But supposing it is, it’s not obvious that it’s avoidable. Allowing respondents to author substantive responses, convey nuanced takes, or flag their degree of uncertainty (and surely one might also wish to note the basis of their uncertainty) might generate results that are difficult to aggregate and analyzed statistically. (It depends how things are set up, of course. There are better and worse ways to go here.) Separately, there’s also the practical issue of ensuring participation. The harder it is to complete a survey, the fewer responses the survey will receive (generally). There are thorny trade-offs here, and I think the designers mostly struck a decent balance. I think some of the pushback in the comments here is not quite on the right track. One of the main aims of the survey — 2 — is to record the distribution of respondents’ views about the metaphysics of gender, not the reasons for their views (at least, not in the first instance), which is a separate issue. If one disagrees with Haslanger 2000 because the view is trans-exclusive while another disagrees because it excludes the Queen of England, both responses belong in the “disagree” bucket, regardless of the differences in the respondents’ reasons for their disagreement. One might wish that the survey aimed to measure something other than what it aims to measure. That’s fine, but that’s obviously not a reason to think the survey is poorly set up to measure what it in fact aimed to measure. On the issue of not including the option to say “I don’t know,” “I’m uncertain,” and so on, it’s worth noting that there can be good methodological reasons for not including such an option. There’s a fairly sizable literature on this issue in survey design, which has found that adding a “don’t know” option can lead many respondents to “satisfice,” selecting that option in order to offload cognitive effort and complete the survey quickly, even if they do have recoverable judgments or preferences. (Although, there’s also evidence that not including such an option can lead some survey respondents to select options more or less at random, to be sure.) So, the omission may well have been intentional rather than an oversight. Finally, we would do well to remember that philosophers disagree endlessly with each other about how to formulate virtually any substantive thesis—an issue that arose for the PhilPapers survey from years ago and which seems destined to arise for any survey of philosophers’ attitudes about any substantive theses at all. For my part, I struggle to think that outlining any of the views about which respondents were asked in two or three sentences would appease those who don’t understand or object to the survey’s one-sentence formulations, nor do I think there obviously exist *superior* one-sentence formulations of any of these views that every respondent would both claim to understand and regard as adequate representations of the views. In short, survey design is tough — perhaps especially when it’s a survey of philosophers’ attitudes. (1) Why should the population be expected to have views about the metaphysics of gender? (2) Granting an answer to (1), why should survey instruments be expected to be adequate to measure them? (3) Granting an answer to (1) and (2), why would responses elicited to the questions on this particular survey be expected to measure the population’s views? My earlier pushback was a mixture of (1) and (3). Others’ earlier pushback, at least as I have read them, have also been (1) or (3) or some mixture. Your reply seems to be a defense in answer to pushback (2). I’m a trans graduate student in the US, but decided not to fill out the survey. I wanted briefly to describe why, since I assume many people will be in the same position as me. I transitioned in my early 20s, and am stealth in my professional life (i.e. people in the profession don’t know that I’m trans, bar a few close friends). Given this, my threshold for filling out an online survey linking my institutional email address to my trans identity is extremely high. I felt like the current survey didn’t reach this threshold, for two broad reasons. (1) I had some worries about the way the data was tracked, stored and presented. I understand that email addresses are not stored, but it did seem like specific institutional affiliation is tracked, meaning the final reported data might look like “University of X: 10 cis respondents, 1 trans respondent”. In a small department, this is the kind of thing that can lead to people being outed. (2) I was honestly pretty confused about what the purpose of the survey was. When I received the email, I assumed it was to get a sense of trans people’s experiences in the profession, which seemed like a worthwhile goal. When I started filling in the survey, though, it seemed to be first and foremost about one’s philosophical views on the metaphysics of gender. I don’t work on the philosophy of gender, so I don’t really have an opinion here. Moreover, I was pretty surprised to see that the viewpoints on offer included those from anti-trans activists, such as Kathleen Stock (who basically every trans person I know regards as a bigot). My read is that the survey’s authors would be interested in a final statistic like “40% of philosophers are gender-critical”, and I had no desire to legitimise this by being part of the 60%. I’m confident that the survey’s authors are acting in good faith, and will probably be confused by my reaction. I also get that some people reading this might think that this is overly paranoid. Given the current political situation in the US/UK, though, I think many potential trans respondents will feel the same way, so I thought it was worth sharing. (To give you a sense of the level of thought that goes into this stuff: I was even on the fence about posting this comment, since one was required to use an email address to post it.) “Moreover, I was pretty surprised to see that the viewpoints on offer included those from anti-trans activists, such as Kathleen Stock (who basically every trans person I know regards as a bigot).” Could you share the survey’s description of this viewpoint, please? I don’t have access to it. Thanks for sharing your concerns. We are extremely aware of the complexities with deciding to out oneself, even in a survey. 1. When we report respondent demographics, it most likely will be aggregated across the entire dataset (“50 trans respondents”). We might also report aggregates at the provincial or state level (“12 trans respondents from California”), but not at the department level, for exactly the reason you identify. 2. The survey has four main parts: philosophical views on the metaphysics of sex and gender, “social attitudes” towards trans and nonbinary people, department/institutional climate assessment, and reporting one’s own gender. The first two parts are ordered randomly, so about half of respondents will start with the philosophical views and half will start with the “social attitudes.” I didn’t write the philosophical views section, but the idea was to fairly cover the array of views espoused by professional philosophers, which include Stock as well as Alex Byrne. The views were not chosen because we agree (or disagree) with them, but because they’ve received significant scholarly discussion and, in some cases, social impact. Here are all of the items from that section. They’ll be presented in random order on the survey. * (Social Constructionism) Gender is a social class position: S is a woman if and only if S is systematically subordinated along some dimension, and is marked as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction (Haslanger 2000) * (Dual Concepts Account) Two equally necessary target concepts of “woman” serve feminist aims: a gender-as-class concept (tied to social subordination, along Haslanger’s lines) and a gender-as-identity concept (tied to norm-relevancy: standing in a certain relationship to a set of norms associated with a gender class) (Jenkins 2016) * (Gamete Account) Women are adult human females (Byrne 2020) * (Subjectivity Account) Gender identity is constituted yet underdetermined by gender subjectivity (Ashley 2023) * (Deflationism) Gender identity is a superfluous concept (Hernandez and Bell 2025) * (Conferralist Framework) Gender is conferred onto people on the basis of how the base property of sex is contextually interpreted (Ásta 2018) * (Natural Sex Binary) There are two sexes (male and female), that are naturally, pre-given, and observed at birth (Stock 2022) > (To give you a sense of the level of thought that goes into this stuff: I was even on the fence about posting this comment, since one was required to use an email address to post it.) If it ever helps, in cases where an institutional email isn’t required (like this page), DuckDuckGo makes it very easy to generate one-off email addresses that remain active as long as you’d like and interact seamlessly with your main email address you use. The company can connect the one-off address to your main email address (and could be compelled by law enforcement, etc), but other than that it’s fairly high marks on both ease of use and privacy. There are other services that are comparible—DuckDuckGo is just the one that I am familiar with.