Francesca Minerva is an Italian philosopher and anti-transgender activist. Minerva is a co-founder of the anti-trans “academic” publication The Journal of Controversial Ideas.
Background
Minerva earned an undergraduate degree from University of Pisa in 2005. After visiting scholar study at University of Oxford, Minerva earned a doctorate from University of Bologna in 2010.
In 2012, Minerva published an academic article in the Journal of Medical Ethics giving a moral defense of infanticide. The response led Minerva into fighting against “cancel culture.”
Anti-trans activism
Minerva’s social media follows on X are a who’s who of conservative and anti-trans activists, including Jesse Singal, Steven Pinker, Geoffrey Miller, Michael Shermer, Jonathan Haidt, Brian Earp, Iona Italia, Helen Pluckrose, Cathy Young, Melissa Chen, Hazel Appleyard, Holly Lawford-Smith, Jerry Coyne, Louise Perry, “Phil Illy,” Ray Alex Williams, Brianna Wu, Marcus Dib Jensen, and Prisha Mosley.
Minerva seems much more concerned about negative reaction from left-wing critics. When discussing the foundation of The Journal of Controversial Ideas, Minerva cites as inspiration two articles criticized mostly by people on the left — Bruce Gilley’s “The case for colonialism” and Rebecca Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism.”
It’s true. The paper I co-authored, most people reacting negatively to that were conservative people, religious people, right-leaning people, and non-academic people. That’s not to say that people on the left agreed with us. We managed to upset everyone, probably.
We didn’t have the kind of very negative reaction from within academia that Tuvel and other people had, and that seems to be more from progressive left-leaning academics. I don’t think Tuvel had a lot of hate emails and death threats from people in the public. Tuvel’s article is about transgender people, comparing them to people who want to change their ethnic origin. She was comparing people who change gender to people who want to change their ethnicity. That paper actually has ended up attracting a lot of hostility from the academic community– not much from the outside, as it happened instead when I published my article on ‘after-birth abortion.’ That seems to be a topic that attracts more controversy than I would have expected. (Matthews 2018)
In an interview with Turi Munthe, Minerva was asked about an example of topics in The Journal of Controversial Ideas. Minerva gave just one example:
Minerva: Yes. We had a couple of papers arguing about issues related to transgender questions, whether a woman is an adult female, or whether a woman can also be a trans woman. So there is this debate whether trans women are women or not. We had two papers arguing the opposite phases actually. It was very interesting because in a sense, both of these are controversial, but it depends from where the perspective. Obviously in academia to say that only adult females are women is controversial, but outside of academia, I think it is more controversial to say that–
Munthe: Trans women are women.
Minerva: Yeah, you don’t not have to be born a female to be a woman. (Munthe 2021)
References
Munthe, Turi (June 23, 2021). The Journal of Controversial Ideas, with Francesca Minerva. On Opinion: The Parlia Podcast
Wallach, Eric (December 6, 2018). An Interview with Francesca Minerva, Co-Founder of The Journal of Controversial Ideas. The Politic https://thepolitic.org/article/an-interview-with-francesca-minerva-co-founder-of-the-journal-of-controversial-ideas
Matthews, Dylan (November 19, 2018). The Journal of Controversial Ideas is already, well, controversial. Here’s a founder’s defense. Vox https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/19/18101600/journal-of-controversial-ideas-censorship-politically-correct-academia
Giubilini A, Minerva F (2012). After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? Journal of Medical Ethics (Vol. 39, Issue 5, pp. 261–263). BMJ. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2011-100411
Resources
Francesca Minerva (francescaminerva.com)
Università degli Studi di Milano (unimi.it)
- Francesca Minerva
- unimi.it/en/ugov/person/francesca-minerva
- Francesca Minerva c.v.
X/Twitter (x.com)