Academic philosophers have finally found a line they’re willing to hold against the discipline’s social justice contingent.

They hadn’t reached the line yet when bloggers started brigading against conferences where only male invitees had accepted invitations.

They hadn’t reached the line yet when critical theorists derided top programs as “hostile to women” while making excuses for covering up sexual harassment in purportedly more progressive departments.

They hadn’t reached the line yet when the American Philosophical Association advised professors at the University of Colorado not to criticize feminist philosophy on campus or at off-campus department events.

They hadn’t reached the line yet when academic “advocates” cowed prominent philosophers into writing struggle-session apologies or including phrases like “I think I am a good ally” – in papers about fundamental metaphysics.

But now Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy with explicitly activist goals, has seemingly disavowed a paper comparing claims about racial identity to claims about gender identity, and philosophers seem to have had enough.

Rebecca Tuvel

Rebecca Tuvel is an assistant professor at Rhodes College; she received a bachelor’s degree in 2007 and a doctorate in 2014. Her essay “In Defense of Transracialism” (Hypatia 32.2 [Spring 2017], pp. 263-78) is, to be fair, not consistently scintillating, creative, or convincing. However, few philosophy papers have any of those qualities, and almost none have all three. What the paper does do is lay out relatively clearly the motivation for a fairly intuitive argument. I’ll give my version of it here:

1. We have compelling reasons to accept the identity claims of transgender individuals.
2. Transracial identification is relevantly similar or analogous to transgender identification.
3. The reasons commonly given for not accepting transracial identification are either not compelling or not relevant.
4. From 1, 2, and 3, the balance of reasons compels us to accept the identity claims of transracial individuals.
5. If the balance of reasons compels us to accept something, we should accept it.
6. From 4 and 5, we should accept the identity claims of transracial individuals.

Tuvel offers some support for premises 1, 2, and 3; premise 5, I think, is left as an assumption.

Other philosophers wrote and signed an open letter calling for the paper’s retraction. At the Daily Nous, Justin Weinberg shared (and critiqued) the letter as well as an apology from the editors of Hypatia and a response from Tuvel herself. (Disclaimer: I participated extensively in the comments section there.) Jesse Singal has also responded pretty effectively. But it is wrong to give the letter too much weight. It would not survive legal “summary judgment”: even accepting all its claims would not spur a normal academic journal to retract the paper. We must figure something else is at work—something visible, for example, in the Facebook posts of Nora Berenstain, now removed, but available on Twitter:

and of Lisa Guenther, a member of Tuvel’s dissertation committee, whose public, interpersonal betrayal in this case is simply execrable.

The letter’s most important point is hidden in the first complaint: that Tuvel “uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” In the Daily Nous comments, academics in these subfields struggled to identify precisely which arguments Tuvel failed to cite or address, or where her thinking might have gone wrong on a more than superficial level. Indeed, many philosophers of both gender and race have come out against retraction. But “the relevant subfields” are not really the academic studies of gender and race. They are the political interests and values associated with a certain conception of those topics. The real complaint is that anyone who publishes in a journal like Hypatia, itself a blatantly activist organ, ought to share those politics. In turn, the necessary politics are built in to the “vocabulary and frameworks” used by the academics. This is ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise.

The paucity of other critiques of the paper makes this clear.

Tuvel was criticized for not citing enough black or transgender scholars. Such a complaint could be leveled at virtually any philosophy paper. But Tuvel’s critics think it is especially relevant here, because they believe black and transgender scholars would have alerted her to the problematic elements of her work. In her response, however, Tuvel cited both Julia Serrano and Adolph Reed, Jr., who seem to share her methods or contentions; and black and transgender philosophers alike have come out in support of Tuvel in the face of the mob. We are back at a standard paradox of identity politics: its most fervent practitioners often seem most trapped in the delusion that marginalized groups are homogeneous. (Compare, for example, Alexus MacLeod’s confusion in the comments section of a Feminist Philosophers post about the controversy, where he finds himself in the middle of a lecture about the racist “white ignorance” inherent in not knowing that the name “Becky” is used as an insult.)

Rather, it is Tuvel’s critics who don’t seem to know the feminist literature. Trans-exclusionary positions are actually quite popular among the reigning generation of feminist philosophers, who often hew to Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum that “gender is the social meaning of sex.” Sally Haslanger, the most notorious feminist metaphysician and a leader of several online mobs in her own right, gives an account of gender that both explicitly analogizes it to race and seems to have trans-exclusionary implications. (Tuvel adapts her theory in one part of the paper.) One wonders why the purported opponents of power would attack a young assistant professor at a small school in Tennessee rather than the most prominent writer in the field and a fixture on the faculty at MIT.

Similarly, Guenther suggests that Tuvel gives “no evidence . . . of the awareness of the context, power dynamics, or stakes of these issues for trans people and people of color.” It is not clear why this criticism is relevant, but regardless it is certainly not true. Tuvel’s starting point is support for transgender identification, and it’s obvious that she thinks such support has high moral stakes. And she makes frequent reference to anti-black racism and to possible objections that concern it: for example, she explicitly considers that transracial individuals didn’t experience racism as children (268), that their identity claims harm the black “community” (269-70), and that transracialism is an exercise of white privilege (270-2). But in each case she gives us reasons to think that these objections are not debilitating. It is Guenther, in fact, who gives no evidence of having read Tuvel’s paper!

Indeed, Guenther’s criticism in this regard seems to be something close to circular. She says we should be cautious about mounting arguments in favor of transracialism because of the high stakes it has for people of color. However, if arguments in favor of transracialism are correct, then white-to-black transracials are people of color. But if this is right, then it’s Tuvel’s opponents who are unaware of the possible effects their arguments might have: in particular, their arguments might convince people not to accept claims of transracial identity, which Tuvel suggests would be a significant harm. So it is only from an a priori rejection of transracialism that we can see Tuvel as the exclusive threat to people of color here. The analogy to the transgender case holds.

In the same way, Tuvel was criticized for not focusing on “lived experience”—the idea being that testimony from the lived experience of black and transgender people would have spurred her to a different conclusion. Guenther similarly but not equivalently talks of Tuvel’s commitment to “ideal theory” rather than “the network of power relations that shape particular historical contexts and meanings.” But to someone who hasn’t rejected out of hand the possibility of transracialism, Tuvel will seem exquisitely attuned to a certain kind of lived experience: the transracial experience. She writes about this experience with great empathy and imagination, but her opponents offer it only ridicule and opprobrium. What then could we say about the reactions of Guenther and others? Well, we might say, for example, that they are themselves unknowingly agents of a network of power relations which we might call cisracial privilege, and that their critiques here serve not only to mock and deride transracial individuals but to marginalize, silence, and erase transracial narrative and experience. The fervency of the reaction we might call evidence of cisracial fragility. For example.