ch on sex-differences in plants respond with blank stares.
Among those who can overcome the trauma of having the issue raised, one favored gambit is to act as if it is an unreasonable expectation for academics to know whether or not there are male women. Relatedly, the idea that the academy generally might be held to account in some way for the things that it says – or more likely, fails to say – about the various trans-related controversies that have taken up so much bandwidth in recent political debate is treated as unfair: a political distraction, or perhaps a trap designed to lure sophisticated thinkers onto an unseemly political battlefield. Isn’t it just irrelevant what academics think? is one way that these academics sometimes try to defer answering the question, in the spirit of reticence to which they have spontaneously converted. If that doesn’t work, they might point out how many more important issues there are besides “trans”, as if the sheer number of questions competing for their attention means they simply haven’t got around to deciding whether there are male women yet.
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