A Companion to Public Philosophy

19Public Philosophy and Trans Activism

VERONICA IVY AND B. R. GEORGE

A popular meme on the trans internet juxtaposes two images. The first, a detail of Plato and Aristotle walking together from Raphael’s “School of Athens” (1509–1511), is captioned “talking about gender with trans people,” and the second, a stock photo of a parent patiently showing a simple toy to a toddler, is captioned “talking about gender with cis people.”¹

This illustrates the painful ironies of trying to do serious work on trans issues as a philosopher: often, discussion in community spaces features the kind of rigorous thought and attention to detail associated with serious philosophy, while “philosophical” spaces on these same issues do not.²

Due to the general level of ignorance on trans identities, trans philosophers doing public philosophy (or, indeed, any sort of philosophy) must often handhold readers through a kind of Trans 101, starting nearly from scratch, without the luxury of assuming any baseline knowledge of trans life. It’s simply unsafe to make assumptions about knowledge of trans identities, particularly given the kind of transphobic comment sections that follow public philosophy interventions. This contrasts with many other areas of public philosophy, where one cannot assume one’s readers have any particular philosophical background but generally can assume a certain baseline familiarity with the realities of everyday life.³

This creates several challenges for those of us trying to produce ...