True things can cause harm. Arguing for atheism might provoke an existential crisis in a believer, and while it's proper to take that...
Suppose it were true Tuvel's article has caused harm. In and of itself, that doesn't seem a good enough reason for its retraction.
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into account before making the argument on any particular occasion, often it won't be the decisive moral datum.
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This particularly applies if (a) you're doing philosophy; & (b) you're making your arguments in a journal, where the whole point is to get
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to the truth about things. It's got to be possible to say true things that are harmful. Otherwise, philosophers - and sociologists - might
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as well just give up and go home.
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Part of what people don't like about Tuvel's article is that her thesis can easily be flipped: (a) arguments for transgender identities...
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can be used to support trans-racial identities; (b) there are no such things as trans-racial identities; (c) therefore, there are no such
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things as transgender identities. But even if the argument can be flipped like that, and even if it causes harm, if the argument meets the
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normal standards for publication in a philosophy journal, then tough luck. Religious people in the (early) Soviet Union were harmed by anti-
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religious sentiment, but in and of itself, that doesn't mean one can't argue for atheism. Or similarly that one cannot point out that the
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doctrinal claims of Islam are complete nonsense, because there is anti-Muslim sentiment and violence.
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You have to take the possibility of harm into account - to trans people, to Muslims, or whoever - if you're going to make an argument, but
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even if you judge that the consequence of the argument is more harm that's not necessarily decisive, because truth matters.
End of conversation
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