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Jesse Spafford is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the project REAL – Rights and Egalitarianism. His research is focused on ethics and political philosophy with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state.
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I was talking to someone last night. I won’t say who, but someone fairly well known, known for taking part in public debate, robust, intense debate, debates where people are strongly committed to their side of the argument, and aren’t afraid to let you know that.
They’d been listening to the podcasts that I did a while back on trans rights and the associated issues with Aoife Gallagher, and they said to me that although they had talked publicly about a number of thorny political topics, they had steered away from what is called the trans debate. I don’t think that’s a very good name for it, but I don’t have a better one, so I’ll go with that. They had steered away from what is called the trans debate, not because they don’t have opinions on it, not because they don’t think it’s interesting, but purely because they were afraid of the potential backlash if they said the wrong thing, and they didn’t really believe the ‘right’ thing, so they said nothing.
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