What should count as trauma, and what gets lost when the word expands to cover ordinary distress? Why do some frightening events leave lasting psychological injury while others fade into ordinary memory? Is trauma best understood as the event itself, or as the enduring failure of the mind to recover from it? What is the difference between being influenced by the past and being imprisoned by it? Can a society acknowledge real harm without teaching peIf progress is real but uneven, what metrics actually matter—outcomes, perceptions, or lived vulnerability? How do we rigorously separate descriptive claims about human tendencies from normative claims about how people should behave? What evidence would genuinely change our beliefs about gender differences, and are we even asking falsifiable questions? If most differences are small but outcomes at the extremes are large, how should policy and culture respond to tails rather than averages? And when injustice affects both men and women differently, what framework avoids turning that into a zero-sum argument?

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Kate's Research
Kate's Latest Book Unshrinking: How To Face Fatphobia

Kate is a Professor of Philosophy at the Sage School at Cornell University who specializes in moral, social, and feminist philosophy, and has written three award-winning books decisively exploring topics such as misogyny, male privelege, and fatphobia. In 2024, she was awarded the APA's Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution for her work on the reasons to be skeptical about dehumanization as an explanation for misogynistic violence and other forms of human cruelty.

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