Discussing Daniel Dennett on the competence to sign a contract as “the kind of free will worth having” in class today, I couldn’t resist bringing up this scene from A DAY AT THE RACES (1937)…is “indoctrinating students with Marxist ideology” really so bad? youtu.be/dbUDSxJFsDA?...

“Nobody does corruption like FIFA” you say? Let me tell you about the guy who used to run FIDE, the World Chess Federation. A 🧵. Between 1995 and 2018, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: - Claimed to have been abducted by aliens on two separate occasions (this one’s to hook you in - he’s quite the character!);

Whoever wrote in the blurb for this edition of Edward Said’s Out of Place that the book reveals “an unimaginably rich world of colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes” desperately needs to read some Edward Said

In @yougov.co.uk polling of the trans community, to the best of our knowledge the first of its kind ever conducted, an astonishing 84% said Britain is “fairly unsafe” or “very unsafe” for trans people. goodlaw.social/ncfw

Want to read some rad queer philosophy, in the form of short snazzy personal essays? Check out the most recent issue of the APA Studies in LGBTQ+ Philosophy, cheekily titled "Make philosophy queer again!" which I've edited! 1/

The documentary I made with Miss Major 10 years ago is available to stream free on Vimeo. If you want to spend some time with her and her loved ones, and learn some abolitionist trans history while you're at it, updated streaming link is here: vimeo.com/whatdowewant...

🆕️🚨 After painstaking research, dozens of FOIs and months of analysis we release the Gender Clinic Files which reveal waiting times for every GIC in the country. They lay bare, how far off the mark the Health Secretary's estimation of the average wait is 👇 www.wearequeeraf.com/gender-clini...

"Why would it bow to antidemocratic pressures by placing a professor on leave without their request, consent, or involvement? That any university would do this is beyond comprehension and is cause for alarm about the future of academic freedom in Canada."

New issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly is out, and it's a symposium on Katharine Jenkins's book 'Ontology and Oppression', guest edited by Susan Brison and @jennysaul.bsky.social:

📣🏳️‍⚧️ Call for Papers We are inviting papers for our special issue, “Feminist Responses to the Regression of Trans Rights: Strategies, Alliances, Hope.” The issue will be dedicated to trans-inclusive feminist legal analysis that addresses attacks on trans rights & lives. Details below. Please share.

It’s my last week in Montréal/Québec/Canada and ngl, I’m really going to miss it! Feel very lucky to have had the chance to live and work here these last two years A photo thread:

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

Nonbinary writer K.C. Johnson soon learned that behind bars, even their underwear was subject to deliberations. Read their Life Inside essay ⬇️

Don’t think I’ve ever seen a photo of a philosopher with stronger sexy murder poet vibes than this, what say you @lastpositivist.bsky.social?

Ane Engelstad has a cool new paper in Hypatia on epistemic hopelessness as a vice oppressed people in particular may be liable to develop: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Went to this last night and it was so so good, 50 mins of heartfelt complex thoughts and feelings about trans visibility in the current moment: youtu.be/cqhiup5qSY8?...

*personal news* For the 2025-2026 academic year I’ll be a Departmental Lecturer in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy at Oxford, starting next month - excited among other things to get to teach my first graduate class!

"Of course, I am not K, but I find myself uncannily identified with his predicament." Judith Butler's open letter to UC Berkeley.

Every week I get an email from PhilPapers saying there’s a new item in my topics of interest and every week it’s some bizarre bullshit by this super weird AI bot, e.g. “On the Nature of the Perfumed State Social Scientist Sippenhaft Critical Race Theory (CRT) Jackal”: philpeople.org/profiles/cog...

Judith Butler on being named to a list of UC Berkeley faculty & students provided to the Department of Education to be investigated for anti-semitism, w/ zero transparency about what they're being accused of or by whom. Pure McCarthyism & totally indefensible. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I watched Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels last night and the opening shot is just so so good: youtu.be/41CH8c3yq1Q?...

An old piece on Malcolm Gladwell www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

Launch day is finally here! New podcast all about surprising ideas on #ethics and political values. Tune in for philosophers' hottest takes! 3 launch eps to choose from here: surprisingethics.buzzsprout.com

“A woman with an urgent need to right a historic wrong loses the ability to ground herself in everyday rationality—and writes a book that captures the situation so graphically it elevates her condition to the status of metaphor.” Vivian Gornick on Shulamith Firestone:

New issue of Hypatia, 40.3, is now published: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A cool new paper by Miranda Young in Hypatia, bringing James C. Scott to bear on the hermeneutical injustice literature in the name of a feminist abolitionism: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The thing that will make me become the Joker is people talking about increased energy outputs from renewables as if it entails decreased energy outputs from fossil fuels when (a) it evidently doesn’t and (b) it’s the latter that’s the *whole game* viz. mitigating climate change

A v cool thread that reminded me of this duck-rabbit kettle-whistle someone posted on the Other Place a few years back

I reviewed Talia Mae Bettcher’s fantastic new book Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy for Philosophical Quarterly: academic.oup.com/pq/advance-a...

An anecdote from Roland Barthes’s time in Morocco, as reported in “Incidents”: “You need four things, he says, to be a philosopher: (1) a degree in Arabic (2) to travel a lot (3) contact with other philosophers (4) to be far from real life, on a beach, for example.” - Honestly, sounds ideal.

Insomnia + going through a cruciverbalist phase = writing philosopher crossword clues… 1. Furnish Oscar for pessimistic German (6) 2. Cross the line cycling amidst mystic and Marxist (8) 3. Perhaps Stevens wrote excitable speech (6) /1

Insomnia + going through a cruciverbalist phase = writing philosopher crossword clues… 1. Furnish Oscar for pessimistic German (6) 2. Cross the line cycling amidst mystic and Marxist (8) 3. Perhaps Stevens wrote excitable speech (6) /1

There’s a vibe rn where many of us in the UK are stopping to take stock of what went wrong over the past 8 years with trans ppl, and I do think it’s important to reconsider tactics, but at the end of the day there was only one decisive factor in all of this: money.

Shaimaa has a scholarship to do a PhD on Palestinian literature with me at @uoe-llc.bsky.social, but she's stuck in Gaza because the foreign office won't help. Please share. www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...

Living somewhere (Québec) where (a) air conditioning is ubiquitous and (b) electricity has been 100% renewably generated for decades already, I…really cannot emphasise enough that this is the only way to go

www.translegalproject.org/post/the-ris... 1/3 Our thoughts on engaging with the EHRC through their current consultation. We have submitted our response - and you can access it (and use it if helpful) here. TLDR? Their interpretation of the For Women Scotland ruling is constantly wrong...(cont...)

Le Monde has a livestream of the national philosophy exam 😆 commentator "can we say that these exam questions are difficult this year?" ; expert "no, they are perfectly doable". The breaking news is that RAWLS makes its first appearance in the history of the exam LETSGO

damn, trans income project sounds cool as hell. i bet those trans income project folks are really smart and hot and great at posting. it sure would be swell for this to raise a lot of money for them to dump into replacing the medicaid coverage louisiana just banned!

‘As in other industries, the enormous wage disparity within universities distances the corporate leadership from the concerns of rank-and-file employees: it helps to steady the hand that wields the axe.’ Ed Kiely on Labour’s higher education reforms: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The EHRC Guidance is a wicked exercise in removing rights from trans people - and is bad too for employers and service providers, those outside gender norms, people with disabilities and the economy. We've created a tool to make it easy to respond. Please use and share. goodlaw.social/9e59e9

Raymond Geuss on Alasdair MacIntyre newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

“…precisely what must be discovered is that there is nothing hidden, no words underneath words, no language that tells the truth of language.” - reading Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and the later Wittgenstein vibes are surprisingly strong!

So many great hermeneutic(al) Xs recently, “hermeneutical bastardization”, “hermeneutical sabotage”, “hermeneutical disarmament”, and now “hermeneutic hijacking”: philpapers.org/rec/KEIMIT?r...

The pundits have only interpreted public opinion, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

This week on the #projectEPIC blog is an important and timely piece by @nickclanchy.bsky.social on hermeneutical injustices in gender-affirming healthcare. #epistemicinjustice #philsky #transrights #transidentity epistemicinjusticeinhealthcareproject.blogspot.com/2025/05/tack...

Sebastião Salgado was an extraordinary man as well as an extraordinary artist - worth seeking out the doc Wim Wenders made about him and his work, The Salt of the Earth

Morning all, I've put together a post on my *likely responses to the EHRC consultation* which can serve as guidance if you're struggling to take it all in or understand where to go with it. 1/ sandraduffy.blog/2025/05/21/r...

The biggest mistake I see in discussions of trans people's healthcare is the idea that hormones and the like are some special service just for us when really all kinds of people access the same health care for all kinds of reasons but they are *withheld* from us because we are trans

The EHRC's consultation on the update to its code of practice following the For Women Scotland ruling is live for the next six weeks - you can respond here: www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equ...