We endorse Hypatia’s stated commitment to “actively reflect and engage the diversity within feminism, the diverse experiences and situations of women, and the diverse forms that gender takes around the globe,” and we find that this submission was published without being held to that commitment. It fails to seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color) in its discussion of “transracialism”. It misrepresents leading accounts of belonging to a racial group for example, the author incorrectly cites Charles Mills as a defender of voluntary racial identification Ĥ. It mischaracterizes various theories and practices relating to religious identity and conversion for example, the author gives an off-hand example about conversion to Judaism ģ. It uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields for example, the author uses the language of “transgenderism” and engages in deadnaming a trans woman Ģ. The authors then list five main reasons they think the article is so dangerously flawed it should be unpublished: 1. In the letter, the authors ask that the article be retracted on the grounds that its “continued availability causes further harm” to marginalized people. A note at the top of it reads “We have now closed signatories for this letter in order to send it to the Editor and Associate Editors of Hypatia.”) (Update: As of the morning of May 3, all the names had been removed from the letter. That letter has racked up hundreds of signatories within the academic community - the top names listed are Elise Springer of Wesleyan University, Alexis Shotwell of Carleton University (who is listed as the point of contact), Dilek Huseyinzadegan of Emory University, Lori Gruen of Wesleyan, and Shannon Winnubst of Ohio State University. The biggest vehicle of misinformation about Tuvel’s articles comes from the “open letter to Hypatia” that has done a great deal to help spark the controversy. The journal has already apologized for the article, despite the fact that it was approved through its normal editorial process, and Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation by sharing all sorts of false claims about the article that don’t bear the scrutiny of even a single close read. But that isn’t what happened here - instead, Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt, abetted in part by Hypatia’s refusal to stand up for her.
Usually, an article like this, abstract and argumentatively complex as it is, wouldn’t attract all that much attention outside of its own academic subculture. It’s clear, from the way Tuvel sets things up, that she’s prodding us to more carefully examine why we feel the way we do about Dolezal, not to question trans rights or trans identities. Her argument is not that being transracial is the same as being transgender - rather, it’s “that similar arguments that support transgenderism support transracialism,” as she puts it in an important endnote we’ll return to. Tuvel’s article rebuts a number of the arguments against transracialism, and it’s clear, throughout, that Tuvel herself is firmly in support of trans people and trans rights. This sort of article is abstract and laden with hypotheticals - the idea is to pull up one level from the real world and force people to grapple with principles and claims on their own merits, rather than - in the case of Dolezal - baser instincts like disgust and outrage. The goal, often, is to provoke a little - to probe what we think and why we think it, and to highlight logical inconsistencies that might help us better understand our values and thought processes. Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept the following premises about trans people and the rights and dignity to which they are entitled (2) we also accept the following premises about identities and identity change in general (3) therefore, the common arguments against transracialism fail, and we should accept that there’s little apparent logically coherent reason to deny the possibility of genuine transracialism.Īnyone who has read an academic philosophy paper will be familiar with this sort of argument. The point of the article, as the title suggests, is to toy around with the question of what it would mean if some people really were - as Rachel Dolezal claimed - “transracial,” meaning they identified as a race that didn’t line up with how society viewed them in light of their ancestry. In late March, Hypatia, a feminist-philosophy journal, published an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, as part of its spring 2017 issue.
Rebecca Tuvel, a philosophy professor and the target of a protracted online pile-on.