Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock interviewed at UnHerd:

A lot of the gender madness comes from a bad philosophical position that everything is constructed through language. And it makes no sense internally and it makes no sense as a satisfying explanation of what is, but it’s looked very attractive to academics — not philosophers, to be fair to philosophers. If they were to be social constructivists, they would have to be very sophisticated ones that really tried hard to address all the objections that seem obvious. Whereas gender studies social constructivists are not philosophers, but they’ve taken this idea that you can construct the world through words and — what a surprise — they have all the words! And they sit writing words all day. So it turns out that they are the masters of the universe. 

Well OK, but Judith Butler is generally seen as a philosopher – as are Foucoult, Derrida, and all the other thinkers who set the whole post-modernist ball rolling. Yes, it's been taken over by academics elsewhere – English departments and so on – happy to wallow in their intellectually gratifying self-important jargon, but I don't think we should let philosophers off the hook quite so easily.