Quick Facts
Biography
Rupert Read (born 1966) is an academic and a Green Party politician in England. He is Chair of the Green House thinktank, Green Party spokesperson for transport, East of England party co-ordinator and a Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia.
Read comments regularly through the Eastern Daily Press 'One World Column'. In his regular appearances in the local and national press, he speaks on sustainable transport, green economics and social justice.
Academic career
Read studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Balliol College, Oxford, before undertaking postgraduate studies in the United States at Princeton University and Rutgers University (where he gained his doctorate). Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy, his PhD involved "a Wittgensteinian exploration of the relationship between Kripke's 'quus' problem and Nelson Goodman's 'grue' problem."
He is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, specialising in philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and environmental philosophy, previously having taught at Manchester. He has contributed to many books, including, in 2002, Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution, on the work of Thomas Kuhn, and, in 2005, Film As Philosophy: Essays in Cinema After Wittgenstein And Cavell. His book Philosophy for Life: Applying Philosophy in Politics and Culture, was released in July 2007.
Political career
Read was one of 13 Green Party councillors in Norwich, where he was first elected in 2004 to represent Wensum wardand re-elected in 2007 with 49% of the vote. He sat on the Joint Highways Committee of the city and county councils, and was spokesperson on Transport for the Green Party city councillors. Read stepped down from local politics in 2011 and Wensum was retained by the Green Party.
Having held a number of officer posts for the Eastern Region Green Party, at the beginning of 2007 Rupert Read was selected as Eastern Region Green Party's lead candidate for the European Parliament elections in 2009 and again in 2014. The East of England is one the Green Party's stronger regions in terms of support, and under the proportional representation system on which the European Elections operate, the Party was optimistic that he would represent them in the European Parliament. However, he was beaten to the last of the seven seats in the constituency by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in 2009, and similarly in 2014. He stood in the Norwich North by-election, 2009, as the Green Party candidate, and returned the biggest by-election vote share in Green History with 9.7% of the vote.
Read stood as MP candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 general election. He came fourth, having received 8% of the vote.
Political Journalism
Read was a regular contributor to the One World Column in the EDP, focussing on international development, poverty, globalisation, peacemaking, human rights, international relations and the environment.
Transphobia controversy
In January 2015, Read apologised for tweets in which he was interpreted as describing trans women as "a sort of 'opt-in' version of what it is to be a woman", though he denied he did or ever had believed this and further stated: "I do not and never have believed that trans-women are not real women, or are any less women." He said he did not consider being a trans woman a choice. He said he did not stand by everything he had written two years earlier and did not consider being a trans woman a choice. His comments caused concern within the LGBTIQ Greens, who invited him to "engage with LGBTIQ Greens and listen to our deep concerns over his comments on trans people and of the phenomena that is trans."
Read took up this offer and spent time with trans people in an effort to fully understand their lives. In his subsequent apology, Read said that "most of the offence caused by my tweets is a result of misunderstandings generated by the fragmented and angry nature of so much debate on Twitter" and reiterated that "it is up to women, not anyone else – and certainly not me – to decide who gets let into women-only spaces ... All women have a right to be involved in making those decisions." He also said he "reject[s] transphobia completely". In a separate article he stated Read made a further apology in the Independent in which he said: that "trans people ... need our active engagement in the issues they face" and referred to some of the difficulties trans people face and his meetings with trans Greens. Peter Tatchell and Mary Beard were among the signatories to a letter to the Observer which criticised the "censorship and silence of individuals", and explicitly mentioned Read. Tatchell says he received thousands of critical comments in response to this, some of which were hateful or threatening.
Selected bibliography
- (Co-authored with James L. Guetti) Meaningful Consequences, The Philosophical Forum, Volume XXX, Issue 4, December 1999, Pages 289–315.
- (Edited with Alice Crary) The New Wittgenstein, London: Routledge, 2000.
- (Co-authored with Wes Sharrock) Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution, Oxford: Polity, 2002.
- (Co-edited with Jerry Goodenough) Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (2005).
- Philosophy for Life: Applying Philosophy in Politics and Culture (2007).
- "The Tale Parfit Tells: Analytic Metaphysics of Personal Identity vs. Wittgensteinian Film and Literature," in Philosophy and Literature 39.1 (April 2015): 128-53.