Reasonable People Can Disagree

For the last five years of my career at the University of Texas at Austin, I taught a course on freedom, focusing on the tensions between differing definitions of the concept throughout philosophy, history, and law.

For example, both abolitionists and enslavers argued they were championing the cause of freedom. So did segregationists and civil-rights advocates a century later, as do both proponents and opponents of affirmative action in our time.

Instead of avoiding the political conflicts that arise in the debates over freedom, I went toward them, not to proselytize but to explore and challenge whatever ideas students brought with them, in the hopes of finding some common ground. Along the way, we struggled with the meaning of other key concepts—democracy, equality, solidarity, justice. I didn’t hide my own perspective in class, but I tried to fairly represent opposing views, often presenting a case from one side of the stage and then moving to the other side for “on the other hand.”

The unofficial motto for the course was “reasonable people can disagree,” which I apparently repeated so many times that at the end of one semester a student gave me a coffee mug with the phrase printed on it.

Since I retired from teaching in 2018, political polarization in the US has only increased. But I still believe, perhaps naively, that reasonable people not only can disagree but also maintain respectful relationships, and that exploring differences can deepen everyone’s understanding.

That faith was tested this year when working on the manuscript for It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics. My goals in the book are to present a model for intellectual life and explore some of the most contentious issues in today’s politics—race and racism, sex/gender and transgender identity, and the human assault on the biophysical systems of Earth. I come from the political left, but my radical feminist roots and blunt view of the multiple cascading ecological crises mean that very few people—even few of my friends—will endorse all of my conclusions.

Several publishers passed on the project, either because of ideological disagreements or a concern that marketing would be difficult given the book’s politics, which didn’t surprise me. After all, no one has an obligation to publish my writing. So, I was happy when Interlink Publishing, a small press I had long admired, took on the project, fully aware of the potential critique from various political positions.

But eventually the publisher and I did come to a potential impasse. My radical feminist critique of the ideology of the transgender movement was at odds with the views of the staff of the press, to a degree that the editor finally decided he couldn’t publish that material. He suggested I drop or rewrite that chapter, neither of which I was willing to do because I thought the argument was integral to the book’s mission.

At that point, we could have torn up the contract and gone our separate ways. But I enjoyed the working relationship and didn’t want to give up. So, I proposed that Interlink publish the material they felt was important and that I would make the chapter on the trans debate available on my website for free. The publisher agreed. On the page where that chapter would have started in the book, we explain that decision.

We haven’t resolved our differences on the trans issue, and it’s unlikely we will. My arguments didn’t persuade him to change his views, nor did his objections change my position. People often cannot always bridge differing intellectual and political positions, even with people they agree with about most intellectual questions and political issues. Sometimes the disagreements are about how to understand a complex world, other times about how to evaluate evidence, as well as assessing political priorities.

What is unusual in this case was that disagreement on this particularly volatile issue didn’t lead Interlink to denounce me and reject all of my work. In my experience, that kind of scorched-earth policy has been a routine response from many comrades and colleagues—my challenge to the widely accepted progressive position on gender identity over the past decade has meant banishment from a variety of left organizations and projects.

I would rather see the chapter on transgender ideology in the printed book, and Interlink would rather see me cut the chapter altogether. But as I kept telling my students, reasonable people can disagree and maintain relationships.

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