You’ve probably heard of the fracas surrounding the publication of a paper by philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel in the academic organ Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (I discussed it here; see also here). Her paper was called “In defense of transracialism“, and you can get a copy if you’ve downloaded the free and legal application Unpaywall, which you should do. The paper examines the arguments supporting the acceptance of transgender people, and finds them similar to the arguments supporting acceptance of “transracial” people like Rachel Dolezal, who, though of white ancestry, claimed to be black. Tuvel concludes this:

In this article, I argue that considerations that support transgenderism extend to transracialism. Given this parity, since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races.

Now Tuvel doesn’t accept Dolezal’s own narrative, nor does she reject it. She considers it largely irrelevant to her philosophical argument, which is this (my words): “If society accepts gender as a social construct, and finds it permissible to change genders, why is it not permissible to changes races as well—race also being seen as a social construct?”  She considers four objections to society’s accepting transgenderism but not transracialism, and rejects all of them:

I will entertain four objections that maintain that an individual should not be able to change races: first, the idea that it is unacceptable to claim a black identity unless one has grown up with a black experience; second, the idea that society’s current understanding of race places limits on an individual’s (perhaps otherwise) legitimate claim to change race; third, the idea that identifying as a member of another race insults or otherwise harms members of that race; and finally, that it is a wrongful exercise of white privilege for a white person to cross into the black racial category, and that such crossing is therefore wrong.

I find her arguments convincing, though less convincing when she rejects the notion that people should also be able to consider themselves “otherkin” (members of other species) or as disabled when they aren’t disabled. But I have heard no good philosophical or moral argument that finds transgender people acceptable and transracial people unacceptable—so long as you see both race and gender as social constructs. If that is your feeling, then you can’t accept transgender identities and reject transracial identities. (I’ll leave aside the otherkin and “disabled-identifier” arguments.)

Tuvel’s article comprises a philosophical argument, one sympathetic to both transgender and transracial people.  Nevertheless. she was crucified for it, and for reasons having nothing to do with her arguments. (There’s even a Wikipedia article about the controversy.) Tuvel was excoriated for “deadnaming” Caitlyn Jenner (giving her pre-transition name, which Jenner herself does), for ignoring trans scholarship, and for promulgating hatred and violence—even though Tuvel was for transgender and transracial acceptance. Hundreds of academics sent an open letter to the journal, asking for the paper to be retracted.

The editors of Hypatia issued a craven apology, even though Tuvel’s paper passed peer review, with some editors saying they were sorry for causing “multiple harms.” And social justice advocates are tying themselves in knots trying to find ways to reject Tuvel’s paper without coming to grips with her arguments.

I’m sorry, but I totally reject the characterization of Tuvel’s article as harmful. It was a philosophical examination of moral positions, and was sympathetic to the marginalized people it discusses. The howls of outrage came simply from those who had already decided a priori that Caitlyn Jenner was okay but Rachel Dolezal was not, and resented Tuvel for her analysis saying they were both okay.

Bearing on this is an interesting piece in the April 20 New York Times (link below) in which people were asked to self-identify by race or ethnicity, and then were given DNA tests to determine what their genes said about them. (By the way, the results of those tests, which give race and ethnicity as identifiers—identifiers taken seriously by the subjects—suggest that those identifiers are something more than social constructs.)

Here’s Bernard from that article, who identifies as black but was shown by DNA testing to have less than 1% African ancestry. He was outraged because he identified as black. Would those scholars who excoriated Tuvel now tell Bernard that he’s not really black because of his genes? If so, then you’re accepting a non-social-construct definition of “black.” Or, if Bernard’s allowed to self-identify as black, why wasn’t Rachel Dolezal, who may have had more than 1% African ancestry (she wasn’t tested, as far as I know)? Or would they accept Bernard as black because he has 1% black genes, adhering to the “one drop rule” formerly used to promulgate segregation? What percentage of your genes must be black to identify as black? If it’s a social construct, zero.

I suspect that the pack of outraged scholars who went after Tuvel wouldn’t bat at eyelash at accepting Bernard as black, even though there’s no substantive difference between his ancestry and Dolezal’s. (Dolezal, by the way, was raised in a family with four adopted black children and married a black man, so there are also cultural rather than genetic roots.)

Tuvel’s article did what a good philosophy article should: stimulate discussion, and about important social issues. For that she’s been the recipient of hate mail and threats that she would be denied tenure if she pursued similar work. The people who criticized her for “transphobia” and “deadnaming” are reprehensible, and it’s a sad indictment of today’s outrage culture that an inquiry into the bases of our beliefs was deemed taboo.

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