> trans women are "real" women.
That's not a false claim but rather a meaningless one; if people are debating that they have other problems. But, I guess, less serious ones; everyone makes meaningless statements occasionally, after all. One should avoid debating meaningless propositions, yes, but that's a mistake you can learn to avoid given good norms of discourse; getting those good norms of discourse is the more fundamental problem. (And of course it's not always obvious in advance what statements are meaningless; that's something that requires discussion to determine.)
Also, please don't put words in my mouth. Which you initially avoided doing, presenting your example purely as an example; but then you attempted to rebut this example as if this were an argument against my claims, which, obviously, makes no sense.
> I can make a guess at what thinkers you may be following
Would you care to make that explicit, since it sounds like you can?
In any case I'd be a little cautious of identifying me too closely with anyone established. If you want to know what I think more generally... well, you can find my writing scattered throughout the comments sections on such places as Slate Star Codex, Shtetl-Optimized, and Thing of Things. :P I've been meaning to write some of this up in a more visible form but, uh, I think I might want to get a new handle first...
> Which tribal effects do you think dominate?
Um, the usual ones? Do I really need to go over how tribalism works? Well, OK. Here are some characteristics, briefly:
Norms of free inquiry weaken and eventually vanish. Arguments are not evaluated by their reasoning, but by a combination of their conclusions (and their conclusions are evaluated by whether they support the tribal creed and the tribe's supremacy over its outgroups) and the social status within the tribe of the person making it. Everything becomes personal; principles are stated but ignored, in that they are applied selectively -- if a principle would be applied in a way that restrains someone in high standing in the group, or help someone in the outgroup, a reason for an exception is found. Agreeing with the tribe becomes considered as essential to personal ethics. Even just asking for clarification about a particular principle marks you as an evil outsider, because if you were a good person you would already understand. The group becomes taken over by those who only know how to politick and ceases to be about anything except its own dominance and the dominance of those who have taken it over. Group beliefs become more and more detached from reality.
I mean, I could go on, but I'm hoping that's sufficient.
This process is, of course, constantly happening everywhere, because it's human nature. But with a good negative-feedback loop, with good defenses against this, you can keep this positive-feedback loop in check, avoid the disastrous later stages, and (over the long term) keep yourself aligned with reality. Cut the negative-feedback loop and disaster is inevitable, even if its particular form is unpredictable.
("Tribalism" may be the wrong word here; I tend to use it as shorthand since these things tend to go together with tribalism proper. But the important thing is the phenomenon being described -- where the nominal purpose of a thing becomes completely corrupted by social considerations and interpersonal politicking -- not what we call it.)
We do have good defenses against this, if perhaps not on the mass scale. But certain people keep trying to toss out those defenses as unnecessary...
> Are there other specific beliefs in these fields that you're more concerned about?
I think this is a bad way of framing things. My concern here is with the meta-level, not the object-level. I'm not concerned not primarily about particular claims I see as wrong -- which, after all, may be correct (determining the truth of many of these claims does require large-scale data, something I'm not in a position to collect or trained in evaluating), but rather the norms of discourse surrounding them. Sure, a few might be correct by coincidence, but being reliably right requires good methods. Happening to get a few things right in your tribal creed is worth no credit.
To the extent I'm concerned with particular object-level claims it's primarily about how they're defended, about the reasoning given for them, not with the claims themselves. (The exception, of course, is those object-level beliefs that most directly justify this illiberalism and warped norms of discourse. I say "most directly" because oftentimes other claims are stated as justifications for this, but aren't actually doing the heavy lifting, or are even correct, and the real key assumption is left unstated.)
Or perhaps I should instead say, when it comes to particular claims, what concerns me is less often the claims that they accept than the claims they don't accept. I say "don't accept" rather than "reject" because they don't seem to explicitly reject these ideas but rather say things that contradict them while basically ignoring them and not engaging with them, despite their fundamental nature. I mean, OK -- these days you are starting to see more explicit rejection of the idea of free speech (for instance), rather than just attempting to ignore it or weasel around it. But there's a lot of just things like, people just ignoring the idea that espistemic rationality is essential to instrumental rationality, you know?
(And oftentimes there's the problem that what they're claiming may actually be a strategic equivocation. You've read "The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology", right? I won't bother repeating what Shackel has said better.)
> I often find that criticisms of these fields lack a nuanced understanding of the actual content and behavior of the fields, and instead come from a malformed reading of the field that is readily accepted by the reader.
So, OK. It's entirely possible that I've misidentified the problem, that it has less to do with these academic departments than I'd thought. But that's very different from there being no problem. The problem is very real and very visible. You don't need to go to the departments it's most famously associated with to see it -- you can see at Google; you can see it among Linux kernel developers; you can see it in the math department (my own field). It certainly does seem to me like it's being pushed by these departments and segments thereof it's most associated with, but, hey, I'm an outsider, maybe I'm mistaken there (although the tales I've heard of them are not encouraging). But the problem is apparent even if I am mistaken there and must be addressed all the same. Left unchecked it could seriously damage our ability to find correct answers and build new things (I mean, more than it already has).