Thoughts on the Hypatia affair

I was impressed by the distinction between the two accounts of the case laid out in the opening paragraphs, and how it lays bare the issue that, stipulating we have a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable, we must determine who the most vulnerable are.

But one point is elided here; if we accept Tuvel’s argument, then we have a new group of vulnerables to protect, namely, the transracial people whose existence as a type is unacknowledged – even bitterly denied – by Tuvel’s detractors. If they exist, they are most vulnerable of all, and – I’ll assert – most in need of protection, which at the least would seem to require that their defenders need to be given a respectful hearing, even if those defenders are relatively privileged.

All of which is to say, I’m grateful for the two accounts, but the first one seems more persuasive.

Jesse Singal’s article on this points out that the four enumerated falsifiable criticisms in the letter to Hypatia are either plainly false, or at best, misleading. Why did more than five hundred philosophers feel it necessary to endorse such a dubious condemnation?

Also relevant: a condemnation from someone (Lisa Guenther) on Tuvel’s thesis committee: Tuvel’s article “toys around…with no evidence in the article of an awareness of the context, power dynamics, or stakes of these issues for trans people and people of color”. The open letter was therefore “…a critique of white feminist ideal theory as transphobic and anti-black ideology.”

Hypatia may be the nominal target, but in their apology for the article, they characterized the attacks on Tuvel as “heated critique that was both predictable and justifiable”. Tuvel writes about the attacks: “I have received hate mail. I have been denounced a horrible person by people who have never met me. I have been warned that this is a project I should not have started and can only have questionable motivations for writing. Many people are now strongly urging me and the journal to retract the article and issue an apology. They have cautioned me that not doing so would be devastating for me personally, professionally, and morally.”

Thanks for this. I had read about the controversy but hadn’t considered the significance of the article’s being published in Hypatia. They’re a journal of scholarship, not activism (and I have been out of university libraries for a while so my information may be dated), but still I’d expect them to support the communities whose lives are the reason for being (arguably) of gender studies and related subjects. I’d be shocked if they’d published something explaining, in the voice, of reason, why the culture taken broadly considers women to be less-than or (as I think Singal quotes) “disgusting.”

That said, I’m not a philosopher and I do worry that the farther the discussion gets from the philosophical community, the more it will look like an Internet mob shaming. You give reasons why the extension of the discussion was appropriate here, but those reasons don’t really apply to me.

Is it really normal to argue “we shouldn’t argue for such and so, even if it’s true, because of the possible political consequences of arguing for such and so”?
Or better, is it *possible* to argue such a thing, and to be a scholar (instead of a hack?).

Moreover, is it Hypatia a scholarly journal (and as such the above argument should be disqualifying for a critic)?

So let me see if I understand.

I write a paper which a journal’s editor, editorial board and referees agree is of the high quality to merit publication there, so they publish it. Some people then write to the journal’s editor to say my paper is offensive and incompetent. The journal’s editor is now wondering what to do. Does she rubbish my moral and professional reputation by making a public apology, endorsing the complaint? (And of course it is my reputation first and foremost that suffers here. It may have been the journal and not myself at whom the anger was targeted – “directed” – but it is me that gets the bullet as everyone concerned could very readily anticipate.) Or does she stand by me and my paper and tell the complainants to get lost?

Some will say the former. Some the latter. But here is a third view. What she needs to do is write back to the complainants and seek further information. What, she must ask, are your, er, demographics? Are you male, female, black, white, cis, trans, gay, straight, able-bodied, disabled, employed as philosophers, not so employed, whatever? Only when I have correctly put you and all others concerned in the right identity politics boxes will I be clear what would be a right or wrong course of action here. Give me one answer and hanging Lenman out to dry would be a shocking wrong and an affront to the basic norms of our profession. Given me another and doing so would really be no big deal and there would be nothing much here to make a big fuss about, “no particular need to rally in defence of our professional norms”. Because it’s really not such a big deal to kick someone in the teeth so long as you have, or the person or persons urging you on has, a special pass saying ‘marginalized group’ and they don’t.

No. Surely, that can’t be it. Can it?

(On the importance of ignoring Žižek, I am in agreement with Holly.)

Following on from Ronan(rf) at 5

On the already much discussed Hypatia/Tuvel case from another place which include many embedded links as well as comments from philosophers among others:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/thought-crimes-watch-comparing-trans-racialism-to-transgenderism-verboten.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/the-defamation-of-rebecca-tuvel-by-the-board-of-associate-editors-of-hypatia-and-the-open-letter.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/philosophers-speak-out-about-the-unprofessional-conduct-of-the-hypatia-editors-and-the-defamation-of.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/philosophers-signed-the-open-letter-about-tuvels-articles-on-transracialism.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/more-on-the-transgendered-and-the-transracial.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/philosophy-department-at-rhodes-college-speaks-out-in-support-of-prof-tuvel.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/bermudez-on-the-tuvel-case-and-the-loose-talk-about-harm.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/haslangers-comment-on-the-hypatia-affair.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/a-thread-for-further-comments-on-the-misconduct-by-the-hypatia-editors-and-the-defamation-of-prof-tu.html

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/need-for-a-petition-or-open-letter.html

It may have been wrong, or foolish, but it couldn’t have been transphobic could it? That would be like saying that a trans rights push was homophobic because it might have weakened the case for gay rights.

1. The defense begins with the cant that is now typical of so much (il)liberal discourse, namely, establishing just where the relevant party stands in the hierarchy of marginalized groups. (pre-tenure woman in philosophy: good!; but pre-tenure white woman in the world at large: bad!). No real reason is given for this exercise, other than “protecting the vulnerable means different things” in different circumstances. As if defenders of Tuvel are suggesting otherwise.

2. According to Lawford-Smith black people might worry that Tuvel’s conclusion will legitimize more Dolezal-type cases, which “they” find problematic “for a whole host of reasons.” She doesn’t give us any numbers here; she says she’s “taking others’ words for it on the demographics of those initially angry and the open letter’s signatories.”

The black folks who signed the letter, regardless of their number, obviously do not represent the views of all black folks. LK McPherson, at Daily Nous, a black individual who has written much on the philosophy of race, suggests that Tuvel has done nothing wrong in her paper. Black individuals I’ve spoken with privately have also criticized the reaction to Tuvel.

Obviously the question is: if black folks (and other individuals) find Tuvel’s arguments “problematic,” do they have sound reasons for doing so? Maybe, but maybe not. Finding out would require the presentation of such reasons, perhaps in a forum like Hypatia; but this has been effectively thwarted by the mob outcry.

Let me also note that Lawford-Smith is not herself black and is every bit as privileged as Tuvel. This is also typical of contemporary (il)liberal discourse. Somehow the privileged “allies” find a way to take up all the air in the room in their expression of concern for the marginalized, even though the marginalized themselves often disagree as to whether or not this concern is warranted. As a trans person of color writes at Daily Nous: “we are not babies who need to be protected from the harms of disagreement.” How unfortunate that Lawford-Smith silences these voices.

3. Another argument Lawford-Smith presents, as noted above, is that the transracial case might, to some, constitute a reductio of the transgender case. She writes: “Many people find ‘transracial’ claims absurd, so drawing a parallel between the two might have the effect of weakening the former rather than strengthening the latter.”

Any philosopher any moral common sense can see that discriminating against an individual on the basis of their trans identity is morally impermissible. The question, as Tuvel raised, is whether or not these same reasons apply to so-called transracial individuals. If a philosopher finds ‘transracial’ claims absurd, but not transgender claims, then they need to articulate why, which, again, is the sort of thing one does in a philosopher paper.

Lawford-Smith’s concern, however, seems to be not so much with philosophers as with the public at large. Of course, the public at large does not read philosophy journals. To that point, she writes: “Somewhat ironically, the probabilities [of the paper being widely read] were incredibly low before all of this blew up online. They’re probably a lot higher now. Perhaps it’s too quick to suggest that the correct response to an offensive paper is to ignore it, rather than to draw attention to it.”

Of course, she misses the true irony, which is that this “blew up” online because of the hyperventilation of the signatories to the open letter. But more to the point: if philosophy papers now must be written such that no member of the public will misconstrue the arguments involved and act foolishly, then philosophy will cease to exist as an intellectually worthwhile enterprise.

Let’s take just war theory as an example: just war theorists have considered whether or not terrorism is ever permissible, with some arguing that it is. Other just war theorists have considered whether torture is ever permissible, with some arguing that it is. Still other just war theorists have defended the claim that ‘fragging’ (or murdering one’s military superiors) is sometimes morally permitted. None of these arguments should have been presented if we are supposed to worry about how members of the public at large might misunderstand them.

And that’s just within just war theory. As has been noted above on this blog, there are many, many arguments that philosophers have considered that might cause offense, disgust, or misunderstanding. The only philosophically relevant standard is whether or not such arguments generate intellectual progress.

4. The bulk of the rest of Lawford-Smith’s is, essentially, “Hypatia is different.” I believe this is a point on which all can agree. Hypatia *is* different, and especially more so after this controversy: it is not a philosophy journal. Accordingly, I would hope that philosophers who wish to do cutting edge feminist work will refrain from submitting work to Hypatia. I would also hope that hiring committees take this fact about Hypatia into account.

The second paragraph of Jimmy Lenman’s reply is hilarious but also tragic: What was once expected to be intelligent debate has become ad hominem self-righteousness.

The author here speaks of “the epistemic limitations imposed by privilege” and writes of Prof. Tuvel, “Perhaps if she’d done more to hear the opinions of black people opposed to Dolezal’s claimed ‘transracial’ identification, the content of the four arguments would have been different, and more importantly, better.”

The problem is that, even though this assertion has been made at numerous places, I haven’t seen anyone explain how this would be the case in this specific situation. Help?

Tuvel’s Native American, her grandfather is Choctaw.
Nah, just kidding. Shows you the problem with basing this on demographics, though.

I’ve always found these kinds of worries to be exaggerated, because of the extremely low public readership of papers in Philosophy.

I find this a bit unsatisfactory as a defense, as it only works if you can persuade people that your entire academic discipline is irrelevant and worthless … do you really want to be running that argument?

(Though, sure, academics often overestimate their own importance).

There have been some notable figures in academic philosophy that have had an impact on the political activists (Judith Butler, etc. etc. Maybe even something much longer ago like Plato’s Republic influenced political thought :-)) Sometimes the influence is indirect, as activists who haven’t read the original research are still influenced by the retelling, popularisation, and so on of the ideas. If philosophy occasionally has a success and influences politics, we might care about what the effect is going to be.

Here is a paper (or, rather, a reference to a paper no longer available via the link included) which argues that *if* the pro-life position is correct, then it is permissible to assassinate abortion providers. The author, I believe, intended it as a reductio of the pro-life position. Still, should this idea not even be publically discussed as it *might* be taken by a pro-lifer to justify murder.

https://whatswrongcvsp.com/2016/03/16/does-the-pro-life-position-entail-the-permissibility-of-killing-abortion-providers/

The impression I get from the “associate editors”, etc., is that Dr. Tuvel should never have publicly stated the conclusions she did, because the act of a professional scholar dignifying these thoughts through the act of publication could be used against the trans* community at large to diminish their claims for status as a “marginalised group”. It would give the enemies of those wishing to normalise these identities a justification to consider marginalised identities as not “real”, but rather label those individuals as simply acting through personal choice (or less charitably by right-wingers, delusion or mental illness.)

For those in any academic field who wish to utilise these techniques to define “correct” thoughts and behaviour, I recommend the works of Eric Blair, a masterful philosopher who passed on much too soon, especially since it didn’t allow him to expand and comment on the volume of works he left behind. I think the concept being advocated by the attackers of the Tuvel paper would be perfectly described by his term “crimestop”.

In passing, I note that “race” is not a genetic but a social construct, witness the varying definitions of “black” — a label applied to disparate populations originating in Africa, Australia, and even southern India (wherefore the Hindustani language was once colloquially called “Moors”, yes, as in the former black rulers of Spain) — and even “African American“, such that some descendants of pre-1860s American slaves resent applying that label to [descendants from] more recent immigrants from Africa, who lack that particular shared ancestral-yet-nongenetic heritage… thus, among others, Barack Obama (with a Kenyan father) has been called “not really African-American”. (Although Obama’s “white” mother may have had distant ancestors in slavery. Go figure.)

One young woman who was in the news in the last year, as “transracial” I suppose, was “white” but raised in a “black” family and identified herself as “black” — and why should that even be surprising? To the extent that’s a culture and speech pattern etc., it’s no different than an orphaned child of English parents adopted by German or French et al. parents and picking up and identifying with that culture and language by immersion. (Make the examples “Chinese” or “Japanese” or “Maori”, and there’s the “racial” component again; how simple that was!) We’ve seen that assimilation into the English-speaking USA (thus identifying as “American”) over generations of immigration; is it so hard to understand that it can work in other directions too?

And though the dates may differ, ultimately we are ALL from (if not still in) Africa….

LFC @ 31: If I understand you correctly, the peril is this: anyone at all may be attacked, mercilessly and relentlessly, merely because someone else read (or TL:DR, even skimmed) their work carelessly, perhaps hungover and on too little sleep, and drastically [conceivably maliciously?] misinterpreted what they saw, relaying that distorted version on to an echo chamber for the enragement and reactions of others. That’s entirely too plausible a scenario, on the ’Net.

A: I see your most recent paper mentioned both Smythe-Jones and Reticule, thus clearly you agree with both these retrograde pestulant nitwits; accordingly, I’ve moved to have all your qualifications withdrawn wherever I have influence.

B: No, in fact I conclusively rebutted both; that was the very point of the paper. Did you not read it?

A: I don’t have time to read retrograde pestulant papers. I’m blocking any further correspondence from you.

self @30: “Make the example[] ‘Chinese’…, and there’s the ‘racial’ component again….” — Though in fact “Chinese” is only a nationality, and contains within it many different ethnicities, e.g. Han, Zhuang, Hui, Manchu, Uyghur, Hmong, Yi, Tujia, Tibetan, Mongol,…. — so again let’s be careful what we label a “race”.

Chris Bertram @ 35: As (inter alia) a quondam academic and a Wikipedian, I’m accustomed to the latter site’s “neutral editing policy” wherein editors try to fairly portray ideas and people with whom they themselves may not agree. I wish that were wider practice, and I did in fact take that to be what Holly Lawford-Smith was going some lengths to do. (Particularly since there were two bitterly opposed sides represented, and no-one could simply agree with both.)

Like others, I’m struck by the “this is what I thought happened… this is what actually happened” opening, which is rhetorically effective – but clearly problematic. At least some elements of the first version do not obviously cease to be true even if the second version is accepted; most obviously, Tuvel’s privilege in relation to some groups in a wider context does not negate her relatively marginal status in the context of academic philosophy. This may be considered less important, of course; but it emphasises that we’re faced with different accounts of events which each have claims to validity (depending on assumptions, prior commitments etc), not with an obviously correct account superseding an obviously incorrect one. Indeed, a lot of the debate seems to be around who gets to establish “what really happened”, to set the terms for debate about how this should then be interpreted.

In attempting to articulate what the two sides are thinking, I think the OP is obscuring the fact that there are 3 important actors here: the author, the letter writers, and the associate editors.

Lumping together the letter writers and the editors is unfortunate because although the letter writers are free to get angry and sign letters (letter writers gonna letter write
– although its not what I’d hope for in academia) the editors have a responsibility to act professionally with respect to the author of a paper their journal has chosen to publish. This is true *whether or not the arguments of the paper are intrinsically good or bad*.

The points the OP raises (Hypatia has special commitments, some ideas are dangerous, articles in Hypatia should be inclusive) are all fine (or maybe fine – I don’t like the middle one) standards to apply *during peer review*. Remember a Hypatia editor and two (I assume 2 – standard in my field) reviewers selected by Hypatia thought the the article was exactly the sort of thing Hypatia publishes and went ahead and published it. After that, and absent evidence of gross academic misconduct like plagiarism or the fabrication of data, there is no grounds to write a Facebook post on the journal page saying things like that the criticism the author received was both “predictable and justified”.

I mean, imagine going through the whole rigamarole of submitting, revising and resubmitting an article to a journal. Refraining from submitting to another journal during the (I assume because this is the norm in academia) long editorial process, and then after the journal finally says “we like your article we’re going to publish it” having them add a public statement on their website to the effect that your article is terrible and you are an idiot. Even if the article is bad, or even damaging to other groups (in ways that have not been clearly articulated in my view), there is specific damage here to the author stemming from gross misconduct by the editors. Their behavior strikes me as far more reprehensible than the behavior of the letter writers because they have professional responsibilities, and not excusable by any of the explanations raised by the OP.

*** Journals that are explicitly interdisciplinary are bound by the norms of all of the disciplines they include, so whether a retraction of the paper is warranted is not settled by the fact that it wouldn’t be warranted in Philosophy. ***

This sentence puzzles me.

Firstly, it’s because I’ve never thought that Philosophy has different norms from those of other disciplines concerning this kind of thing, and I’m wondering which are supposed to be the academic disciplines where this kind of call to retract would be treated as normal. (I suppose the implicaton is that it is Women’s Studies or Gender Studies, but I haven’t myself ever heard of this happening before, and if it does happen, I’d be interested to learn about examples both of calls to retract being made, both when they have been successful and when they have been unsuccessful.)

Secondly, interdisciplinary journals can only plausibly be bound by the norms of all the disciplines they include if those norms don’t come into conflict with one another. If one of the disciplines has a norm that published papers aren’t retracted unless something of the magnitude of plagiarism or falsification of data is going on, and the other one doesn’t, you just can’t be bound by both norms, but need a method for adjudicating which one is to govern the situation at hand.

Four parties, not three: the actual editors of the journal have stood by their initial decision, despite the letter from the associate editors

There have been in fact instances of published peer-reviewed articles in (supposedly) less “soft” fields than philosophy which have been editorially retracted, or had disclaimers appended to them after publication in recognition of a failure of peer review to identify substantial theoretical (i.e., not experimental/methodological or ethical) problems that should have precluded publication, often in response to readers’ reaction. Some articles supporting, more or less stealthily, Intelligent Design/Creationism come to mind (recent example: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0146193 ).
So, without getting into the merits of this specific case, it’s not like peer reviewed acceptance is or should be deemed sacrosanct. As anyone in academia knows, the peer review system is as flawed as its human participants.

@Lastuniversalcommonancestor Agree that peer-review is not sacrosanct (and flawed in many ways), but in the case you link to there was some sort of investigation and review: a procedure of some sort (text reads “the PLOS ONE editors have carried out an evaluation of the manuscript and the pre-publication process, and they sought further advice on the work from experts in the editorial board”). Given that, as has been pointed out upthread, the journal’s editor disagrees with the statement the associate editors released, this clearly did not happen in this case.

@praisegod barebones: agreed more groups than 3. I guess the point I want to emphasize is that explanations for the behavior of the signatories to the letter carry less weight when applied to the associate editors. The associate editors have a responsibility stemming from their position to not endorse the position of the critics without review of some sort.

I wrote above that “Hypatia” had acted wrongly in backing down. Now I see it was only the associate editors who did that. Well, they were wrong. I’m glad to see that the actual editors are holding their ground. If the editors stick with her, Tuvel has a good chance of emerging from this undamaged, with her professional reputation deservedly intact.

Could someone please provide some links to the evidence for Holly Lawford-Smith’s version two? Like a lot of folks upthread, I’m a bit skeptical of the conclusions that she draws from version two, but in the midst of thinking about this I realized that it was offered without evidence and I am having trouble locating the extra-academic anger that version two suggests preceded the letter. I’m honestly not doubting its existence. But I would find it helpful to know the specifics of it.

a group of philosophers were angry about the paper

or

a few philosophers together with a great many more non-philosophers from marginalized groups within society at large were angry about the paper

…or neither? To read the open letter to Hypatia and the (partial) editorial board’s response, anger wasn’t at issue; indeed, it could be taken as demeaning and undervaluing those involved to ascribe their intervention to an emotional state. Rather, the open letter focused on harms done.

Specifically, The open letter indicts Tuvel’s alleged failures of scholarship; it adds “these failures of scholarship do harm to the communities who might expect better from Hypatia”, but without specifying what form that harm takes. A postscript adds a disclaimer: “The statement is not an exhaustive summary of the many harms caused by this article.” This is unilluminating, given that the statement doesn’t identify any harms caused by the article; the statement identifies problems with the article itself and is highly critical of Tuvel’s scholarship and Hypatia’s review process, but says nothing about the harms that have been caused by publication of the article.

There’s a similar lacuna in Hypatia’s response, which opens by apologising “for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused”. The next sentence opens “The sources of those harms are multiple” – a statement which is followed by the enumeration of some of Tuvel’s alleged failures of scholarship – but, again, without identifying what those harms have been. In the second paragraph we have the harms that have ensued from the publication of this article and even a reference to the harms listed above – again, without any suggestion that any individual or group has been harmed by the publication of this article.

I don’t for a moment deny that exclusionary and discriminatory social practices cause harm, or that discriminatory practices are underpinned by discriminatory belief structures; Tuvel’s article may be extremely problematic, particularly in the context of Hypatia. But maintaning that it has caused harm – or arguing on the basis that identifying an objectionable argument is tantamount to identifying harms done by publishing it – strikes me as difficult to accept. I wonder if this rhetorical inflation – or conflation of harm and offence – is related to the denial of anger with which I began.

praisegood barebones:

The letter writers aren’t from outside academia: most of them have given an academic affiliation alongside their signature. And while some of them may be ‘less privileged’ than the author of the piece they are criticising, not all of them are – the signatories seem to include – among others – two members of the author’s dissertation committee.

Fair enough. I looked at the letter again and agree that it’s trying to do too many things at once. It seems like as far as the relevant discipline is concerned, writing a better article that obviates the points that Tuvel is making (or failing to make), would be the right response. I also agree that a member of the dissertation committee’s loyalties to their former student should only be overridden by some more obvious failing. But still, there seems to be a feeling against the open letter as a general way of addressing someone one hasn’t normally access to. Compared to Twitter mobs, a rather more venerable and established genre…

@ GFGM #48: “Agree that peer-review is not sacrosanct (and flawed in many ways), but in the case you link to there was some sort of investigation and review: a procedure of some sort (text reads “the PLOS ONE editors have carried out an evaluation of the manuscript and the pre-publication process, and they sought further advice on the work from experts in the editorial board”). Given that, as has been pointed out upthread, the journal’s editor disagrees with the statement the associate editors released, this clearly did not happen in this case.”
Well, that cuts both ways. It is unclear whether the editor-in-chief has thoroughly evaluated the objections to the published paper and carried out such review, and instead she seems to just have decided to stand on principle:
“I firmly believe, and this belief will not waver, that it is utterly inappropriate for editors to repudiate an article they have accepted for publication (barring issues of plagiarism or falsification of data). In this respect, editors must stand behind the authors of accepted papers. That is where I stand.
But that – to me at least – seems like a meaningless hill to choose to die on: peer reviewers can be careless or intentionally make bad decisions, and so can editors. I wonder whether the associate editor’s decision to go public with their reply happened before or after the editor-in-chief’s decision that a published paper could not be retracted except in case of grave malfeasance.

Again – I am utterly unqualified to professionally comment on the merits of the case (I have my own lay opinions on the issue, but they don’t matter in this regard). As an academic in a different field, I think vulnerable junior faculty deserve some elasticity and protection in the evaluation of their work, but of course there are some limits that each discipline can and should be allowed to impose.

“If basically the whole community of people of color takes one look and says “nah, are you crazy? this isn’t a thing!” it’s worthwhile to pay attention.”

I don’t have a settled opinion on whether or not I believe trans-racial is a thing, but this can’t be the standard because a similar response could easily be applied to trans-gender.

Part of the problem with believing that trans-racial is a thing is that most of us don’t believe that “race” is a real enough thing that you could have it mis-assigned to you. But that is the crux of one of the problems trans-gender activists have with earlier waves of feminism–very recently much of feminism was committed to the idea that gender wasn’t enough of a real thing in that sense.

My approach is that psychology and sociology aren’t advanced enough that I can feel safe dismissing very much lived experience for the sake of theory. It isn’t like physics where if someone says they came up with a perpetual motion machine you can dismiss it out of hand until they can really deeply show it. When I first heard about the Dolezal case, I thought she was some kind of huckster. After reading more about her, I still think she is troubled, the way it expressed itself was in a deep interest in protecting her black siblings and then really living their experiences with them, so much so that she identified more with them than her ‘native’ culture in (perhaps) the same kind of imposter way that trans-gender people experience.

Re Salviati’s point: Rachel Tuvel has simply gone in for the sort of logical thinking that extends a logical variable into new fields — like, for instance Peter Singer’s extension of racism and sexism to speciesism. There are reasons why sometimes ‘x’ is not intersubstitutable, but these reasons need to be argued. Surely Rachel Tuvel can’t be impugned for applying this sort of ‘if x there, then why not x here?’ reasoning. Why does she have to rely on previous research in order for her logical speculations to be valid?

Although I only know of one white person who thinks she is black (Dolezal) , I believe it is not entirely uncommon for white people to think that they are actually Native American in some important way.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/10/cherokee_blood_why_do_so_many_americans_believe_they_have_cherokee_ancestry.html

If , in order to successfully assert that you possess a certain personal identity, all or most people who are acknowledged to possess that personal identity have to agree with your assessment, this could be taken to suggest a similar test for whether a person is really a man or a woman. Do most women think that Caitlyn Jenner really is a woman? I don’t believe we do or ought to consider that in evaluating Ms. Jenner’s assertion of identity.

That was a very cogent analysis, Salviati, and tracks well with my own feelings on the matter.

The best part of the open letter is where its own authors thank a fellow scholar for pointing out that they’ve committed a “dangerous erasure of anti-Blackness and the erasure of the Black labor on which the rhetoric of our own letter is built”. I really think a discipline (or interdisciplinary journal) can thrive if its contributors are forced to tiptoe around unintentional slights of identity to quite that degree.

Sebastian H, Heliopause and dave heasman:

It’s one of the criticism to argue from this one case. There are so many other examples of how self-identification comes into racial identity. Take the SF writer Tobias Buckell, who is Caribbean, bi-racial, but by the accidents of genetics and schooling usually reads as white. I know two highly visible people in the Alaska Native community who identify as both Native and Black (and are of mixed-race ancestry with dark skin). You have people of Mediterranean ethnic background whose physical types are all on a rather narrow continuum, but depending on their country may be racially classified as North African or European white, and the latter may be taken for the former by racists and Islamophobes and experience discrimination. Etc. Etc. But all the other examples I’ve encountered have one thing in common: that they’re all arguably, at least in some sense, non-white beyond mere self-identification. And one wonders, why now blow this up big, with the lone example being a woman who, if she isn’t black, would be white? Isn’t there some sort of hegemony going on?

In a larger sense, nothing of this is really new. From my time on LGBT usenet, there are still people around for whom the name Sally Picketfence evokes memories of the longest flame war in history — from the eponymous fictional woman who identifies as bisexual, is a married (to a man) suburban stay-at-home mother with 2.5 children. None of these attributes of course precludes her being bisexual, but the questions revolved around, in what practical sense is she? What if she’s never had sex with a woman? Never actually engaged in any same-sex dating/making out? After 25 years in suburbia, with no LGBT friends or involvement, can she be called straight without doing her a horrible injustice? Conversely, does she have to be given as much room to speak on behalf of LGBT people as, say, someone who’s same-sex partnered? Or sexually active with members of the same sex? Or a celibate gay activist? (Another examples are the “political lesbians” that appeared for a while in feminist circles, and who turned out not to actually be lesbians, sometimes to their own chagrined discovery. There’s the concept of lesbian until graduation. Without claiming they were imposters — mostly just misguided, and sometimes engaged in youthful experimentation — it is still possible to point to harm done by straight people barging into the lives of people who don’t have the option of reverting to the straight setting if things don’t work out. ) These things are genuinely complicated to sort out.

Salviati: “I think few will dispute that the vast majority of minority and disadvantaged studies programs are primarily concerned with advocacy for their subjects, and are focusing their academic research in directions designed to support a priori theories. ”

I admit I’m an outsider in these fields, so can’t claim expertise, but I’d dispute this, unless you also accept that this is what happens with just about every applied scientist, academic engineers, most ecologists, volcanologists… I’m and earth scientist and work on wildfires. The paper from the revision of which I’m taking a break to type this comment is based on solid data analysis, but the motivation is to provide better tools to manage and understand wildland fire hazards. I may even advocate for certain approaches and attitudes, or for spending society’s resources on certain measures, and protecting vulnerable communities or ecosystems may play into this. There’s no reason the quality of your research should suffer just because you think it has a societal benefit beyond pure intellectual exercise (and contingencies like training students for jobs).

The problem is that until recently nobody realized (or more probably, never said aloud) that these arguments create an opening for (and in theory encourage) new identities to be discovered or created, and that those identities need to be accepted as a matter of principle by society.

Isn’t that pretty much what people at _that_ end of my facebook feed have been running on about for some time. As witness the growth of the LGBTQ acronym. We just do a ‘+’ now?

will cause the exposure of these arguments to the public

That horse has left the barn. cf “snowflake”

It seems to me that “African American” is itself a trans-racial identity, given how Africa is not a country or a race. “Person of Colour” is also cobbled together from a bunch of different racial backgrounds.

The idea that transracialism is possible seems uncontroversial to me. Much of government policy about race and migration is built on various forms of it, for good or ill. For good, for example, Australia’s multicultural policy is built on the idea that our identities are mutable and race is irrelevant to them. For ill, for example, Australia until 1972 had a policy of raising “half” Aboriginal children in white families on the explicit assumption that they could be made white, and today Australian society is full of people who know they must be to some extent racially Aboriginal but are culturally “white”. My own mother was half Spanish but is completely white, and her racial identity is as English even though her own mother thinks she can’t be (and anyone with any sense knows that “English” is not a race).

And what in any case is wrong with creating new identities? Have at it, I say!

Addressing the issue of Tuvel’s argument, rather than the subsequent mess and doing so rather naively perhaps, it seems to be that there are at least three ways one might become a member of a group associated with some aspect of identity. Either you decide for yourself, or the group decides whether to treat you as a member. Or as under apartheid for example, where some outside authority defines a group and assigns people to it whether or not they agree. Indigenous status in Australia has elements of all three
https://aiatsis.gov.au/research/finding-your-family/before-you-start/proof-aboriginality

So, if I understand it, Tuvel says that
(a) Gender identity depends on self-identification
(b) Race and gender identity are similar in important ways
(c) So, self-identification should be considered as a basis for racial identity

Put that way, I can’t say I’m convinced. But I haven’t read the article only the commentary.

I’ve read the article and I feel it’s fair to say that JQ’s summary is basically accurate.

Joseph Brenner @57

Then, if we have to repudiate and we cannot allow the dissemination of Tuvel’s ideas because of the possibility of the harms they may cause, we’re going to have to start butchering the philosophy curriculum.

We accept that much more significant harms — everything up to genocide — has come out of people who were influenced by Marx and Nietzsche.

Gone.

We need to keep some perspective here. The “harms” that this article can create are small potatoes compared to the nastier business in the world. Or do we give out extra points depending on who the victims are??

Utilitarianism, as I pointed out: someone could easily find license in that to do some hideous things.

Gone.

If you really believe that the harms created by people led on by this article are that significant, then you’re going to have to gut moral and political philosophy. Very little can survive.

There is this Hypatia quote, that seems to apply to the situation at hand: “Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.”

Is it truly hers, or apocryphal?

>Because if we are going to not publish anything that might be (or might not be!) slightly harmful, then we are going to not-publish a lot. Most of ethical philosophy, for starters. That seems right to me.

I personally think it’s at least a bit more than just slightly harmful, because the piece itself ignores entire fields and comes off as completely ignorant to even people who are minimally versed in these subjects. (i have more to say but my cubital tunnel is acting up, talk later)

Let’s take it that Tuvel’s arguments have the potential to support social practices whose effects are likely to be harmful. Does that make Tuvel’s article harmful? Does it license us to say – as both the open letter & Hypatia’s response do say – that it *has caused harms*?

>Because poor scholarship – in at least some folks’ opinion – is everywhere.

Absolutely, but the argument is generally that the standard is lower for white/cis/whatever privilege people to publish good scholarship. If anyone is interested, several trans and Black feminist scholars have written about this whole thing on Twitter and I do suspect at least a paper or two are forthcoming.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/861340772850966528

https://twitter.com/TransTheory/status/861331441875013637

https://twitter.com/JuliaSerano/status/861250622208696320

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/858033675673489409

@Manta #82: apocryphal. We have virtually no sources for the life of Hypatia, let alone her ideas (we have a number for her death, which is what interested various ancient writers). However, we do have a load of very creepy fictionalised versions, e.g. by Charles Kingsley. This quote comes from an odd and almost entirely fanciful essay by one Elbert Hubbard – and in fact it’s put into the mouth of Hypatia’s father Theon, who’s credited with her education in these terms.

While I have little to add to this discussion other than to express relief that I’m not an academic philosopher, with regard to racial identity, I can recommend a marvelous book, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire by Karl Jacoby. Read this a couple months ago and loved it.

I take it that the main argument of Tuvel’s detractors is that one shouldn’t write about marginalised groups without referring to their own lived experiences, i.e. without citing their auto-ethnographies and other similar literature. This would follow from a version of standpoint epistemology, which says that failing to attend to marginalised people’s lived experiences will inevitably contribute to reinforcing their oppression by the dominant culture, or something like that.

Now the cynic in me says that the people who believe in the existence of “philosophical gentrification” are prepared to viciously attack others for the sake of a methodological monopoly on some topics and a healthy citation count, as I couldn’t resist observing on Daily Nous. Add to those detractors those who are heavily invested in the identity politics camp in the current philosophy culture wars — a faction that has repeatedly shown its unselfconsciously self-righteous ruthlessness, even in the face of strong evidence against their previous claims. But only a minority of the detractors can be that nasty, so we should consider the argument on its merits.

Philosophers ask: if one can show that Tuvel’s article contributes to reinforcing the oppression of trans people and/or people of colour, why not do so? Well, the detractors may reply, we have done so: don’t you see the outrage felt by so many trans people and PoC? Their lived experience tells you that the article was harmful and should never have been published! And there’s the rub. It seems as though both sides can’t see the force of the other side’s argument unless they give up on their own methodological commitments. Yet some work in epistemology has been trying to bridge this gap. But then why give up on that project and jump on the e-mob bandwagon instead? Why renounce argument in favour of power politics? It could be exasperation, or lack of confidence in one’s own arguments, or both.

Still, arguments are a two-way street, and we can’t expect all the bridging work to be done by those speaking from or on behalf of the position of the marginalised. While the profession has every reason to support Tuvel on procedural grounds, it would be good to also see some more philosophical critique of the sort of standpoint epistemology that underpins the detractors’ reaction.

So, if I understand it, Tuvel says that
(a) Gender identity depends on self-identification
(b) Race and gender identity are similar in important ways
(c) So, self-identification should be considered as a basis for racial identity

John (Quiggin+Holbo who concurred), you said you were convinced by the argument, but you didn’t specify which part was unconvincing to you. As I assume the logic is pretty uncontroversial, I guess you are unconvinced either by (a) or by (b) (or by both). But which is it?

A biographical anecdote: as my physical appearance (especially my melanin rate) and my cultural heritage (North African) point towards a racial and cultural identity which is very different from my actual social one (given by my name and surname, for instance), upon the occasions I have had to state my racial identity (usually when filling a diversity form for an Anglo-American institution), I had a very strong feeling that, insofar as I had one, self-identification was indeed the basis of my racial identity.

Julia Serano implies that it isn’t academic freedom?!? There are a lot of red state legislatures who are going to be excited to hear that!

Would it be appropriate to analyze trans-studies literature as potentially harmful to academic freedom because publishing it might be used by certain legislators to attack academic freedom?

Maybe what we really need is a way to sort minor and major harms rather than acting as if “potential harms” is enough.

Quiggin and Holbo 76 and 78:

I haven’t read the article, but I’ve read quotes, and (a) and (c) don’t seem to fit the following quote, which suggests that racial identity cannot be based on self-identification alone, but something like reasonable self-identification based in broader objective criteria of cultural knowledge and experience.

“Charles Mills identifies at least five categories generally relevant to the determination of racial membership, including “self-awareness of ancestry, public awareness of ancestry, culture, experience, and self-identification” (Mills 1998, 50). If ancestry is a less emphasized feature in some places (for example, in Brazil), then Dolezal’s exposure to black culture, experience living as someone read as black, and her self-identification could be sufficient to deem she is black in those places. And because there is no fact of the matter about her “actual” race from a genetic standpoint, these features of Dolezal’s experience would be decisive for determining her race in that particular context. The crucial point here is that no “truth” about Dolezal’s “real” race would be violated.”

pomo queer theorist: “I’ll assume you’ve read the article then, and are totally convinced?”

Why assume reading = being totally convinced?

Yan: “I haven’t read the article, but I’ve read quotes, and (a) and (c) don’t seem to fit the following quote, which suggests that racial identity cannot be based on self-identification alone, but something like reasonable self-identification based in broader objective criteria of cultural knowledge and experience.”

Here is the conclusion from the paper: “I hope to have shown that, insofar as …
arguments that render transgenderism acceptable extend to transracialism, we have
reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play
a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized.”

So she isn’t arguing that it’s same-same but that there are significant parallels.

John Q was careful to say self-identification is ‘a basis’ not ‘the basis’ in his original thumbnail summary. That’s the right way to put it.

Do we really know the family history of Rachel Dolezal’s parents?

The cable-TV genealogy program Who Do You Think You Are? recently featured actress Liv Tyler uncovering that one of her ancestors (through rocker dad Steven Tyler) was a Civil War veteran who had both retired and died while identified as “white”… but had earlier in his life been identified as having mixed parentage “half black and half white” — which made him “black” under the rules of the time. [Reports say dad ST loved the news, as helping explain his successful rock career….]

As an academic scientist and associate editor of a couple of scientific journals, I find this affair opaque. As near as I can understand no one is alleging misconduct of any kind on Tuvel’s part. I have difficulty even phrasing my bafflement without it sounding snarky (which it’s not intended to be) but once a process has been followed with editor, associate editors, peer reviewers, and the authors, does not the article become part of the academic dialog and should be treated as such? And for the associate editors to go outside the bounds of the academic dialog is to treat their own journal and the peer review process with complete disrespect? If they feel like the journal’s standards were violated through the process, then it seems to me that the right thing to do is to resign as an AE, but from what I can gather that hasn’t happened either.

Is it assumed that the threats stem directly from the open letter? Possibly they might have occurred anyway?

Many things are technically possible, but I would consider that to be extremely unlikely.

The social media storm accompanying l’affaire Tuvel followed the familiar pattern that these things generally follow, and threats, hate mail & etc. are standard parts of the package. Sometimes the obvious explanation is the correct one.

Tuvel absolutely could have had – and could still have – her career ruined by this controversy. In this academic job market? Absolutely. So I think the commenters who are suggesting this is all no big deal are being, at best, callous and dismissive.

Many things are technically possible, but I would consider that to be extremely unlikely.

Could you clarify which is unlikely, in your opinion?

I assume it isn’t academics making the threats. It’s the kind of people who ordinarily make those threats, having found out about the situation through social media, probably Twitter, after the situation was discussed publicly by people seen as activists, who in many cases aren’t academics (but may follow discussions in places like Hypatia). The alternative is that academics’ social media, probably Facebook, includes people who make threats, or more likely, that the open letter was discussed also on Twitter by academic/activists whose posts were seen by trolls.

@70
“And one wonders, why now blow this up big, with the lone example being a woman who, if she isn’t black, would be white?”

I guess it blew up big because society considered it unacceptable, if not outrageous. She lost her job, her position with the NAACP, many friends, and so on. The other examples you cite all receive some measure of understanding from the rest of us, I suppose, but Dolezal has gotten very little.

I tend to think that Dolezal is operating on a continuum rather than as a type. We place a great deal of emphasis in this society on declarative statements about identity which don’t necessarily line up neatly with the way we live our lives or perceive ourselves. We’ve all seen, for example, the many white teenagers immersing themselves in hip hop culture, listening to the music, adopting the accoutrements, the mannerisms, the jargon. It’s marginally acceptable behavior to the larger society, they’re allowed to do it if they want but we tend to make fun of them, or we decry it as cultural appropriation. But when Rachel Dolezal ticked the “I am black” box that was a bridge too far.

pomo queer theorist @84:

I personally think it’s at least a bit more than just slightly harmful, because the piece itself ignores entire fields and comes off as completely ignorant to even people who are minimally versed in these subjects.

How does this make it harmful? Or rather to whom does this make it harmful? A cursory consideration of your assertion here suggests that the only parties harmed by the particular actions you cite are academics within the disciplines that were undercited… which is a very different thing than what is being implied by essentially all invocations of the concept of harms alleged to arise from the paper.

Mark Engleson@80:

What I’m trying to say is that neither of the obvious answers on this issue actually works terribly well:

(1) Yes, if thinkers need to second-guess social effects of what they write, this would make it hard to work. If pursuing a line of logical thought leads into territory that feels dangerous, do you have to drop it?

(2) But then: are we to take intellectual workers as inhabiting a pure, abstract realm divorced from any practical concern? Isn’t what they say supposed to have some importance, some real-world implications? How is this work supposed to proceed if it doesn’t pay any attention to it’s supposed purpose?

Take the example of Bret Stephens first column for the New York Times: are we supposed to embrace it as a welcome addition to the diversity of opinion on the OpEd page, or are we allowed to object that it’s “skepticism” is a pernicious under-mining of the fight against global warming?

See, if you answer is “that’s different, it’s not academic, it’s the New York Times!” you’re implicitly embracing the idea that academic writing doesn’t matter.

@110
Perhaps we could say, then, that merely raising the possibility that this is no big deal has caused harm.

bianca steele:

I assume it isn’t academics making the threats.

Why do you make that assumption?

bianca steele:

Also, some people who’ve weighed in on this (not on CT) have been less than careful, in my opinion, in distinguishing between “Usenet or Twitter mobs”, online criticism by large numbers of people that doesn’t attempt to direct itself to the person criticized, and professional kerfuffles that involve people taking sides and doing so vocally.

Such careful distinctions are almost never made. Traditionally, the line between “stern criticism by many people” and “online abuse by a mob” is drawn according to sympathies and agendas. The character of a set of critics is traditionally chosen from among its worst members, if you disagree with those critics, and its best, otherwise. Why should it be any different here?

b. steele @103
So either philosophy doesn’t have to worry about the political and social effects of its publications, or those effects can never be bad.

Has anyone in this thread endorsed that view?

My view, fwiw [I realize, based on our past interactions, that you don’t care what my view is, but in case someone else might] would be something like: Various fields might “have to worry” about the political and social effects of their publications, but the way to address that worry is not to call for retraction of an article that (based on what seems to be general agreement) does not plagiarize or falsify data/sources. IOW, there are certain grounds for retraction and if those grounds are not met, retraction is not an appropriate ‘remedy’.

Moreover, bad effects can’t always be laid at the author’s door; depends (at least to some extent) on whether the piece has been read fairly, etc.

at least to my knowledge, it is extremely uncommon that people come across philosophy papers in sub-field specific academic journals and decide on their own to send threats and hate mail to the authors.

You may be right. The coming-across part seems relatively common to me, though. Activist types on Twitter are constantly sharing links to academic papers that support their political work, or that they think are wrong. And though I don’t know of systematic proof of this, I think it’s at least widely believed that trolls and who-knows-who often follow their political opponents’ feeds and hashtags, just so they can start things like this.

Some people in this comment thread (e.g. pomo @124) are claiming that some harm by the piece (and I suppose by people claiming to be trans-racial): can you please clarify what is the harm and who was harmed?

I don’t see this harm (and other commenters also didn’t): it may be privilege on my part, but I don’t see:
a) how an intellectual argument can ever be harmful. at most, it can be wrong (or “not even wrong”)
b) how a person choosing his race can harm you with that choice.

Manta @129

can you please clarify what is the harm and who was harmed?

Absolutely. Let me try my best.

a) Because it can give a false legitimacy to bad ideas that allows people who hold them to justify themselves. See Charles Murray for an extreme example of this. Tuvel’s piece is already being used by TERFs (see the comments on the Facebook post with the apology) as a reductio against trans rights, i.e. being transracial is clearly wrong, and being transgender is similar so therefore it’s also wrong.

b) I think this is explained by a), but I’ll go a bit further. Their choice in isolation cannot harm me as a trans person, but equating their choice to do so with mine makes it a lot harder for me to fight for my rights and trivializes my struggle.

This is why I say you need a damn good argument. If you’re going to do that to me and make my identity’s authenticity that much harder to argue for, you need a damned good reason why. For me, Rebecca Tuvel does not provide such a reason. As I said earlier though I haven’t read the whole piece so if you think she does I encourage you to share it, this article is apparently not open access.

LFC,

I’m just laying out what the possibilities are, logically. Does that seem objectionable to you?

Either there is no effect on the real world, either in this case or because philosophy papers can’t cause those effects, or there are effects but it would be worse to try to prevent them by not publishing, or not publishing could prevent them but it isn’t philosophy’s responsibility to worry about those things.

If philosophy papers can’t affect the real world, one reason might be this possibility of refuting them. But that seems unlikely to me, because a lot of time can pass until that happens. (Above and beyond arguments that philosophy is consistently bad at refuting certain kinds of arguments.) No one has explicitly made this argument, but it is suggested in the emphasis many have put on the importance of refutation.

The arguments around calls for recall sound persuasive, but I’m honestly stunned that a journal with claims to support activists wouldn’t think the article would be found offensive, and it’s difficult not to wonder if they would be so cavalier if the issue were around one of their more traditional topics, and not trans rights.

Kiwanda:

As I said, the assumption overall on this thread appears to be that the threats come from some Internet world beyond academia, where they just don’t understand about academic processes and aren’t as well behaved as academics are presumed to be. Certainly I agree that the idea of physical threats, as other women have received, coming from academics, is improbable.

Mario, you’re quoting a defense of the validity of transgender transition as mocking trans people. How does that work?

The only way that this article can mock or harm trans people is if being transracial is always and everywhere wrong. Such a position has to be both historically and culturally ignorant and deeply conservative, if not openly racist and/or grounded in some very scary concepts of race that have long been discredited. The open letter doesn’t specify what the harms are or from what social dynamic they derive but it seems pretty clear that the heart of the objection is that transracialism is ethically wrong, at least in any case where a person from a non victimized race does it (see the serano tweet above). This is exactly the view that a bunch of second wave feminists took of transgender people 20 years ago, and we know that that view is still around (see e.g. Greer). Has the academic feminist community learnt literally nothing from those vicious debates?

I can think of many examples of transracialism that are ethically right and completely normal (see my blog for specifics) and I think the onus is on the critics of this paper to explain how transracialism is wrong (and not just through reference to one case or one form of transracialism in one country) and how comparing it with transgender is harmful to trans people. Otherwise this letter is breathtakingly ignorant as well as a textbook example of academic bullying and gate keeping.

I think I raised this subject here a while ago, but it’s good to see a consensus of a kind has developed. I am mightily pleased to be in such vehement agreement with every line in faustusnotes, and glad as always to read from Lupita.

I wonder, how would we line up in a debate regarding Obama’s consciously becoming African-American? True, Obama’s journey in self-determination is part self-propulsion, part interpellation but it is very similar to Diallo’s (I shan’t be deadnaming).

It could be argued that both are founded on familial connection (siblings, marriage), sympathy with a marginalised community (developed through college and enlightenment that education away from the tethers of home often delivers), the limited options available in the US’s embrace of Linnaean taxonomy, and even an entrepreneurial apprehension of the possible opportunities available. Neither claim is based on decent.

Z@96

My problem is with (b). It seems to me that my gender is primarily relevant to me, and therefore what matters is my own perception of the question not that of other members of my self-ascribed gender (bathroom bills notwithstanding).

By contrast, my membership of a racial or ethnic group is relevant in important ways to that group.

But, I should stress again, I haven’t read Tuvel’s article and I haven’t thought a lot about this, so there may well be strong counterarguments.

OK, one more response to pomo queer theorist, then I’m giving it a rest:

“I do find the implication offensive myself and the piece itself is strewn with bits of stuff to the effect of “we can’t accept transgender people unless we except Rachel Dolezal as black,””

I don’t know whether you know this but that isn’t a quote from the article. That’s important. You shouldn’t make up quotes to make the article sound worse than it may be. I expect you’ll say that you are just exemplifying what you take to be the tenor of the argument but it’s not ok to invent apparent quotes that may then wander around on blogs or twitter and be taken, wrongly, for actual quotes. (You want a case of real harm through undercitation? There’s your likely suspect – invented quotes.)

The invented quote substantially twists the argument. Tuvel takes the acceptability of transgender people as a moral axiom, more or less. That is not in question at any point in the paper. It is quite clear the author does not regard it as a point on which there is reasonable doubt. So there’s none of this ‘we won’t accept transgender people unless we accept Dolezal’ stuff. That sounds too much like ‘we won’t accept transgender people until we accept Dolezal’. And it is flatly inconsistent with the paper’s opening: “It is not my task in this article to decide the Dolezal case one way or the other. Nor is it to discern whether she sincerely identifies as black, as she continues to insist, or whether she claimed this self-identification to mask what was really an appropriation of black identity to serve her own ends.” To be fair, the conclusion of the paper is rather confused. The final two sentences articulate a weak conclusion then a very strong conclusion, without really deciding between them. “I hope to have shown that, insofar as similar
arguments that render transgenderism acceptable extend to transracialism, we have
reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play
a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized. I
conclude that society should accept such an individual’s decision to change race the
same way it should accept an individual’s decision to change sex.” That last sentence is a clunker. It’s way too strong and loses all the tentativeness of what goes before. But the rest of the paper is more conditional and tentative and qualified. That’s important because we don’t hang people for writing bad sentences. Also, at it’s clunkiest, the paper never says what you say it says. Namely, it’s an open question whether we will accept transgender people.

@131
Arguendo, let’s say that you and I accept Dolezal’s right to self-identify her race, that society should be accepting of this, but at the present time society is not accepting of it. How would we go about arguing for this acceptance?

Lupita that’s what I think too, and if so then in my opinion that’s just too bad. You don’t destroy a young woman’s career because the political consequences of her theory are uncomfortable for you, even though the theory is correct.

In response to Orange Watch, you’ll note 84 was cutoff hastily and I did not mean to imply that the only real harm was undercitation. My apologies for that, I hope the posts underneath it gave a more “particularly concrete explanation of harms.”

I’m sorry, John Holbo, I really did not mean to seem like I was trying to wind you up or anything, nor did I want to “make the article sound worse than it may be.” I realize it’s not from the article, I did indeed make it up. I’ll refrain from putting in quotation marks what’s not a direct citation in the future, it’s a bad habit of mine from arguing in less formal venues. I promise I was not trying to be uncharitable with that quote, and I still don’t think it’s difficult to derive that from her argument, but again I might have her argument completely ass-backwards as my university does not subscribe to Hypatia.

Thus, I’ll admit that what I have read of it I read from the linked Twitter threads and what else I could find of people arguing about it online, which I realize is exceedingly vulgar from an academic point of view but I do trust the people writing there at least as much as I trust anyone here. Trust me, I’ve tried to read it. If there’s any other way to read it, I would really love to so I could evaluate it more completely. Obviously, if what I say is completely not worth listening to until I have read the piece cover to cover with my own eyes, you can stop reading here, because I haven’t read the whole thing yet.

That being said, this is what I take Tuvel’s argument to be based off of prior experience and what you pasted in from the conclusion, roughly speaking:

If we accept transgender people on the basis of their self identification, then we should accept “transracial” people on the basis of their self identification.

Is this right? It could be completely wrong in a million different ways, but it seems consistent with the conclusion and intro you posted. If it’s wrong, we can stop here, and I’ll apologize for having wasted everyone’s time, but if not, I’ll say that it is the contrapositive of the above that I find harmful and which I previously put in quotes.

“If we accept transgender people on the basis of their self identification, then we should accept “transracial” people on the basis of their self identification.”

That’s basically right, with the caveat that it isn’t necessarily so one-factor. Sorry to be a bit exasperated-sounding in my above remarks.

If there’s any other way to read it, I would really love to so I could evaluate it more completely.

https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/in-defense-of-transracialism-rebecca-tuvel/

Right, and if we’re doing analytic philosophy here, taking the contrapositive should preserve her argument, and the contrapositive is (correct me if I’m wrong) “If we do not accept transracial people on the basis of their self identification, then we cannot accept transgender people on the basis of their self identification.” She might not say this, and in fact I’ll assume she doesn’t even believe it, but it’s not an invalid conclusion from what she does say as far as I can tell.

As regards comment 150, if the paper is really not setting up such a strong implication and is instead more timid and tentative and hedgy exploration of the idea of transracial people as it pertains to the transgender people, then this is the exact sort of situation where undercitation is damaging, and this is I think the piece everyone is missing. It’s not most damaging to people outside the realm of philosophy, and if what I have said makes it seem that way, I apologize. The problems with it and the harm it causes are pertaining to who has the most voice in academic philosophy and who has been historically excluded. I read the letter as speaking up for Black people and transgender people in academic philosophy, whose relevant works on this subject Tuvel seems to have ignored for the most part. That her work could become more well known than theirs without dealing with it properly is what people object to, if you want to be cynical about it. The attitude here seems to be that bad scholarship is nothing to get up in arms about because it happens all the time, but when that bad scholarship comes to conclusions that can be harmful, is that not when you might consider retraction? I’ll admit I don’t know, because I don’t have any experience whatsoever with academic publishing aside from understanding the publishing system from a technical standpoint.

bianca @ 103
“3. Someone who hasn’t been present on this thread has, not long ago, discussed her own practice when writing about groups she doesn’t belong to (I believe public health, in an Australian context). I don’t know how many commenters on this thread were aware of that discussion.”

I think this may be me? I’ve been reading the discussion here and at Feminist Philosophers, but haven’t read the article so can’t comment. I’m trying to finish my thesis, which is giving me plenty of headaches at present.

As a general principle, I think if you are writing about groups you don’t belong to, as you say, you have to consult with them and you have to accept that they may disagree (sometimes very strongly) with your interpretation. My background is in history, not philosophy, but maybe I’m a bit with the anthropologists on this one – there are times when just arguing on the principles can be wrong (in terms of evidence as well as ethics).

However as I haven’t read the article, this is only a general comment, and I would certainly also sympathise with the view that even if the article was misguided in some ways, withdrawing the article (let alone potentially ruining her career) is also wrong. Maybe I’ll have time to look at it when I finish my thesis, as it’s a very interesting discussion, if it’s still going then.

The chronicle article second paragraph implies the letter was written by white, cisgender authors “on behalf of” trans and black scholars. Is that why authorship is anonymous? Also what are they going to do if the reviewers come forward and turn out to be major black/ trans theorists?

And why should she have taken on the critical appraisal at conferences? Maybe it was as low quality as the reasoning in the letter?

Lupita @150

Thanks, I’ll look over it in the morning. Bit concerning that it’s being hosted on a hardline TERF site, though no?

Exactly, the trouble with an anti-transracial politics is that it argues for the racists. White supremacy both supplies the originary violence that made and forces people to be ‘black’, and now orders political possibility so that there’s no way to mobilise against this oppression but through racial identification.

No one polices the boundary more strictly than those who seek to permanently exploit the allegiance of this class as leaders and spokespersons. This valorisation of a durable difference is, as Paul Gilroy argues, a shared feature of the perspective of the skinhead and the racial nationalist.

—
Even as an abolitionist, I am persuaded by the argument that those of us who aren’t racialised in these ways should be sensitive about making such arguments. Reading emblackened radicals on social media offers much encouragement.

P.S. Isn’t it a little rude to insist on called Diallo by their old name?

Bianca @132 & others
” Certainly I agree that the idea of physical threats, as other women have received, coming from academics, is improbable.”

Have a look at http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/?s=brian+leiter&x=0&y=0

As Gilbert Harman long ago argued, from If P then Q, and P, we are not necessarily obliged to accept Q. If sceptical about Q we might have our confidence in P undermined but we might be led to doubt whether “if P then Q” holds after all . Various choices. Modus ponens, Modus tollens tells you about some logical relationships, it doesn’t tell you what to believe, all things considered.

Chris @163: fair enough.

My point was not to single out someone, but to show that “an academic is better than the average person” is an unwarranted assumption (unless it’s heavily qualified as “in his field, an academic is more expert than the average person”).
Same thing goes for “people on our side” (see Bianca again @112).

@faustusnotes

When I look at those quotes (and other, similar ones in the text) from a perspective in which trans identities haven’t been fully accepted (i.e., The Real World ™) they sound like biting sarcasm. Surely unintentional, but for recognizing that I need to take a breath and say, well, she couldn’t have meant it that way.

Here’s another one:

Indeed, we need an account of race that does not collapse into a position according to which all forms of self-identification are socially recognized, such as one’s self-identification as a wolf.

Mario @168:
you may have heard of furries…

Faustusnotes @169: your criticism is a bit stronger than mine: I don’t doubt that there are colleagues that she should have studied better and cited; but since that’s the only actual criticism to the article it does not justify asking for a retraction (it may have justified it if e.g. they said “this argument has already been presented in [1, 2, …] and convincingly criticized in [3,4…], but the author does not try to address those known problems, most importantly a), b), and c)” etc.).

Moreover, the discussion around this topic has actually convinced me that the article (and most of the objections to it) are quite weak, since it has very few/almost none mentions of actual instances of trans-racialism; this makes the article a bit of intellectual wankery (which I suppose fits in a philosophy journal…)

@John Quiggin By contrast, my membership of a racial or ethnic group is relevant in important ways to that group.

I’ll just note that Tuvel is well aware of this fact. Let me quote (with my emphasis)

“Recall my earlier point that for a successful self-identification to receive uptake from members of one’s society, at least two components are necessary. First, one has to self-identify as a member of the relevant category. Second, members of a society have to be willing to accept one’s entry into the relevant identity category. ”

So in fact, going back to your initial description of the logic of the argument, her argument is closer to

(a) Gender identity depends on self-identification and acceptance by the group.
(b) Race and gender identity are similar in important ways.
(c) So, self-identification and acceptance by the group should be considered as a basis for racial identity.

No big deal, I would say. I guess it is entirely possible that her piece “ignores entire fields and comes off as completely ignorant to even people who are minimally versed in these subjects”. That’s also probably true of the entirety of my own research output…

Faustusnotes @171

1) I wasn’t clear enough. I tend to agree that transracialism is a real thing: therefore, I think that an article that deals with it should give some reference to real examples (e.g. the ones you and others mentioned). And maybe to some famous examples in the literature (Moses, Kim, …). Otherwise, as I said, the discussion verges on the intellectual wankery.

2) I don’t think that the implicit focus on the US experience is a major problem. Or better: it is a major problem for a field that purports to study race and racial relations; moreover, a mention (in the article and on the part of the critics) of other approaches to the question in other cultures would have been an improvement.
However, since race is mostly a cultural construct, it makes sense to write a paper (and read it) focusing on the culture the author is familiar with: in other words, the fact that in other countries/cultures transracialism is a relatively normal thing, doens’t necessarily imply that in US transaracialism is normal, or should be acceptable, or means the same thing as in Australia (if the same word “race” has different meaning in US and Australia culture, not all analysis that fits the Australian context would work in the US one).

I see your point 2 Manta, but it gets kind of cute if you replace “it makes sense to write a paper focusing on the culture the author is familiar with” with e.g. “the gender” the author is familiar with (the excuse of male authors for the past 50 years for writing terrible female characters), or the “race” the author is familiar with (a common problem in public health for much of the 20th century). I also note that many of the signatories of the letter are American, and many of the complaints about who wasn’t included seem to focus on scholars of black American history and culture and struggle, and I think frankly (as I said above and on my own blog) all American cultural studies folks, including black and trans people, need to consider just how parochial they are and maybe – just maybe – occasionally sit down, shut up and listen to the rest of the world. Because this identity politics stuff and all this unique and weird language (transracialism is okay, transgenderism isn’t, deadnaming, just to give a few examples) is all driven by Americans and their weird messed up religious imperialist culture, and its overpowering influence globally is a big problem. I grant you it’s not in my field, in public health we listen to the UK and Europe and Asia and Australia, but in gender and race theory there is a predominance of American voices yelling at each other about things that, from looking in on this debate from the outside of both the country and the field, it appears a lot of people really don’t have much of a clue about. I don’t see this as Tuvel’s problem since she wrote an abstract piece with two specific examples, but it does seem to be a problem for a lot of the people attacking her, who are actually enacting their own “privilege” (which is actually parochial ignorance). As in, for example, the Serano tweet above where she claims that the only person to have ever been transracial is Dolezal. Is she an academic or just some person with an opinion? Because that is really ignorant and parochial. And a lot of the complaints about this article seem to be based on a specific racial conflict happening in one country, and not to do with any broader abstract principles at all. To the extent that this kind of clamour drowns out more reasoned voices (which happens with sex worker health and human rights a lot where American feminists get involved, btw), it’s a real global problem that I wish Americans would pay a little more attention to. /rant.

For anyone who hasn’t actually read the actual article, it is now available for download:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12327/full

@pomo queer theorist

All the examples you give are incongruous to what is actually being argued for here, which seems to be that the acceptability of transgender people hinges on white people’s ability to change race.

I think it is fair to point out that “seems” does a lot of work in this sentence. As John Holbo already pointed out above, a very natural reading of the article is that the fact societies should accept transgender people is taken as a given. Then, the article argues that they should consequently accept transracial people. Maybe you think the argument is unpersuasive, even terribly ignorant, but its most natural reading is that if a society does not accept transracial people, then it is committing an injustice that should be redressed (“we have reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized”), not that this injustice should be made worse by the supplementary injustice of not accepting transgender people.

The single best argument I’ve seen against this paper is that anyone can be transgender but only white people can really choose their race, because white is the default in a white supremacist society.

I believe this argument is fractally wrong. First of all, it seems to me to be factually false that only white people can really choose their race. I am a person of color of North African heritage but my social identity has along my lifetime given me ample opportunities to choose to identify as white, Caucasian or even WASP (the latter, always a funny experience to me).

Now, even if it were true (and to the extent that it is true in the American society for instance), one could similarly argue that male has long been and still is the default gender in patriarchal societies so that, by the same logic, only men can really choose their gender. Of course, this is discussed in Tuvel’s article.

“Americans need to come to terms with the fact that your experience and ideas of race are a) very particular, b) extremely dysfunctional and c) heavily embedded with imperialist and racist ideals. ”

I hate to agree with faustusnotes, so I’m not really going to, but I think this part is mostly correct. However, we are talking about the US specifically, so US understandings of race are important. You cant wish them away by imagining a radical constructivist post race Utopia.

“There is an extensive literature on transracialism (also called passing), which appears to have been ignored in past work by Tuvel’s critics.”

Passing was explicitly a way to escape white racism, and was contingent on acceptance by whites. Passing was an escape from racial classification not an example of the unimportance of race.

“This site, for example, includes a description of an Australian Aboriginal man who adopted a black American identity in order to escape Australian racism – in Australia.”

But look at what he didnt do, adopt a white identity, partly(I would imagine) because he couldn’t. He did not adopt a ‘transracial’ identity by the conventional understanding of the term, but a different identity within the same race.

“to examine the very different transgendered experiences of people in countries like the Philippines or Indonesia, or to engage in any kind of dialogue with the many African feminists and anti-imperialists who might have a critical word or two to say about the cooption of African history and culture for their own use at the heart of their cultural empire. No doubt some have, but I find the arrogance of Americans in assuming that their experience of race is universal to be deeply frustrating, arrogant and very ignorant.”

US discussions* of race can often be parochial, inane and annoying. IMO primarily because of what often drifts into race essentialism(obsession with racial lineages bordering on a leftist version of the one drop rule, imagining all goodness or badness as essentially determined by the racial identity of the person in question etc) But the fact that race/ethnicity/whatever might be categorised differently in different countries doesn’t mean that each country doesn’t have their own series of racial/ethnic/whatever categories, where the boundaries between these groups is still heavily policed.

I don’t know how I feel about transracialism (or now, I guess, transgenderism) It does seem though that undermining the importance of racial and gender categories rather than reinforcing them (ie by making racial identities something that are unimportant rather than something so important someone needs to adopt them** ) is probably the best way to go.

*this is, of course, not specific to the US. Just we’re all saturated in US culture and racial politics.

**this is a very rough, intuitive reaction. Im sure there’s a more logically coherent and informed response to all this.

I realize that it’s not exactly what’s being argued for, but I think I explained above why I think you can draw that conclusion from her argument.

As for Z’s argument about men, I have to again ask why it is taken as a given that you can meaningfully compare race and gender. In some sense, you’re right. It’s really only men that aren’t always forced to live life through their gender due to male privilege, but at the same time, patriarchal notions of masculinity do actually hurt men in a way that I don’t think white supremacist notions of race hurt white people. Additionally, male privilege is somewhat accessible in certain circumstances to women through performance of masculinity and femmephobia, and it is also absolutely accessible to transgender men.

If we’re going to take it as a priori that this paper is at minimum shoddy scholarship, we’re not really disagreeing over all that much from my perspective.

However, I remain unconvinced by Tuvel’s argument and those of everyone who supports her conclusion here. I will concede at this point that it is perhaps an interesting hypothetical but we seem to have lost the reality that we’re theorizing and drawing a swath of conclusions from what seems to be a single case.

It still galls me that people think being transgender is a natural comparison. Call me a standpoint epistemologist if you want to, I just don’t see it. The argument is too unoriginal and clichéd to convince me otherwise.

Either way, I really should be studying for finals so I’m going to have to sign off for a couple of days (watch me eat my words after you respond).

I realize you could make the same argument I did about male privilege for colorism and white supremacist standards of beauty, but Tuvel makes the claim that instead Dolezal is trying to give up white privilege entirely.

Seeing as she’s keeping her name for her book deal along with a few other details though, I don’t think Dolezal even wants to give up white privilege entirely. She wants access to spaces for people of color as a person of color while maintaining her white privilege, which is entirely different from why transgender people transition and why for example I am.

If you were to ask Noel Ignatiev if he thought we should give up white privilege by blacking up, I’m not certain he would agree.

Here are a few more arguments:
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/22/what_we_cant_afford_to_forget_about_rachel_dolezal_a_master_class_in_white_victimology/

Tom Slee @187

Thanks, I get something of a self-defense response when there’s a chorus of voices opposite me and nobody on my side. Unfortunately though I think I’ve failed my side so far because I haven’t been consistent and clear enough and I still haven’t really managed to express my opinion fully. Instead, it’s coming out in shards here and there. Rest assured my opinion hasn’t actually changed, but my adrenaline-fueled posting sprees help no one and I need longer to develop my opinion.

I wouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place, but this is like the first time I’ve seen CT come down so hard on one side of an issue and me so hard on the other, and I really won’t feel good about myself on this until I can fully articulate a developed position. Apologies so far for what I have said because it’s not good enough and I know it.

Look at me, breaking my own rules.

I’m rather amazed that the recent chronicle article author stated explicitly, in writing, that the call for retraction was to more or less send a message to philosophy in general, and feminist philosophy in particular. I sort of got the sense that was the case from other things I read, but the jargon was obfuscating enough that I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting it correctly. But this is a plain-English statement of the intent of the open letter – to call for retraction and (rather cavalierly and without remorse) punish a junior scholar due to the general failures of the field of philosophy. Instead of trying to understand this through the lens of scholarship in a way familiar to the rest of us in the academy, it might make more sense to view this as a ritual purification, with Dr. Tuvel’s paper (and perhaps career) as the sacrifice to cleanse philosophy (and feminist philosophy) of its sins.

Douglas Lain @189
about “3) Tuvel owes an engagement with critical race theory, transgender theory, and the perspectives of trans black people.
This is perhaps the most objectionable claim as it naturalizes or essentializes CRT and Transgender Theory. Theories about subjects are not identical to the subjects ”

I disagree: it seems to me quite standard scholar practice to demand that an article on subject X deals with the literature on X; maybe even to say “all the past literature on X is bullshit, and here is how things should be done”.
It’s not a claim that “literature about X” = X.
(The letter and the chronicle article writers put the complaints about lack of engagement with past literature as slights against black/women/transgender *scholars*).

I agreed that pomo made the thread way more interesting: a bunch of people agreeing with each other is not much interesting to read; the fact that flame wars were avoided is a nice bonus too.

I’d like to make a small but I think important point which undermines what seems to me the main worry Tuvel’s detractors have about her conclusion. (Perhaps Chris Bertram has a point like this in mind @164, but I think it’s worth spelling it out and emphasizing it in any case).

From what I understand (and I haven’t read the article), Tuvel’s main conclusion (or main lemma, perhaps) is the conditional
(C) If we should accept transgender people as having the gender they self-identify with, then we should accept transracial people as having the race they self-identify with.
Tuvel, of course, accepts the antecedent and so thinks we should accept the self-identities in both cases. The detractors worry, though, that by arguing for C Tuvel must thereby be arguing for its contrapositive
(CC) If it’s not the case that we should accept transracial people as having the race they self-identify with, then it’s not the case that we should accept transgender people as having the gender they self-identify with.
And many people find this problematic, since it suggests that those with the widely held view that the antecedent of CC is true should reject the self-identities of transgender people. It’s not that the detractors think Tuvel herself thinks either antecdent or consequent of CC is true (she clearly doesn’t), just that she’s committed to CC, and that’s bad enough. (See the helpful exchange between pomo queer theorist @152 (and elsewhere) and John Holbo’s response @157)

But there’s reason to doubt the validity of contraposition, especially in cases like this (for discussion, see Bennett’s A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals). It’s totally coherent for Tuvel to assert C while denying CC. She can say that while she thinks she’s right about C, she’s not 100% confident in its truth (this is philosophy, after all). And she may be much more confident in the truth of the antecedent of C than she is in the truth of C itself. Then if she supposes the falsehood of C’s consequent (or discovers some very conclusive evidence against it), she would reject C rather than rejecting that we should accept transgender people as having the gender they identify with. In this case (assuming the Ramsey test–suppose the antecedent, then see if you accept the conclusion–is pretty good at tracking acceptance of an indicative conditional) Tuvel will reject the problematic contrapositive CC even while believing C.

The problem here seems to be taking the English ‘if… then’ to be material implication, or perhaps in taking authors to be proposing that we have credence 1 in their conclusions. In any case, once this mistake has been cleared up, I think Tuvel’s concluding C is less likely to offend.

As for Z’s argument about men, I have to again ask why it is taken as a given that you can meaningfully compare race and gender.

I certainly don’t take it as a given myself (in fact, if I were to express my gut reaction, I would probably say something close to Ronan(rf) @182; if I were to adopt a more analytical stance, I would posit critical differences between the two especially in the ways anthropological values respectively deal with one and the other). I’m just of the opinion that the comparison you mentioned, if not a priori obvious and meaningful is also not a priori obviously false and meaningless, that the validity of such a comparison and the consequences one can draw from it in terms of attitude towards transgender and transracial people are legitimate objects of inquiry from a philosophical point of view, that I believe that Tuvel’s article does just that and that consequently it merits no exceptional treatment from the academic community.

I will concede at this point that it is perhaps an interesting hypothetical but we seem to have lost the reality that we’re theorizing and drawing a swath of conclusions from what seems to be a single case.

Really, no. Just like you will find plenty of people throughout history and societies who do not identify with their biological, socially designated or assigned gender, you will find plenty of people throughout history and societies who do not identify with their biological, socially designated or assigned ethnicity. Whether this legitimately compare to gender transitioning is not obviously true (again, I don’t believe it myself) but also, not obviously false.

Raven at 175:

There’s no point fighting about definitions. I don’t think passing is very much like “transracialism” as people talk about it in the context of Rachel Dolezal. The question isn’t whether there are cases in which a person socially categorized as Racial Category X is later categorized as Racial Category Y. The question is whether a strong personal sense of identification with a racial category puts you into that racial category or should get other people to regard you as in that racial category.

So, with respect to the gender case, I would certainly analytically distinguish people who present as a particular gender to avoid negative social consequences (e.g., female authors who use male pseudonyms) from transgender people, who present as a particular gender to align their gender presentation with their gender identity.

I agree that race is a social construct. But that doesn’t have much bearing on this debate. Race being a social construct means that truths about race depend on social facts; you can’t tell someone’s race by looking at their genes or their physiology, you need to know about history, social practice, and so on. But that doesn’t shed any light on which social facts are the ones that matter. In particular, it doesn’t mean that “This person is socially regarded as being such and such race” is the determinative fact. You acknowledge this yourself by adding the “if uncaught” caveat: there would be nothing to “catch” if the only fact that counted was social perception.

pomo queer theorist @ 146, and 152

“If we do not accept transracial people on the basis of their self identification, then we cannot accept transgender people on the basis of their self identification.”

I understand that this contrapositive has seen much response already, and I don’t want to say anything redundant, or fail to acknowledge that what has been said to date has answered some of the concern around it substantially and well.

Alan White @161, Chris Bertram @164, MD @194 have all of them offered an explanation of some of the strictly logical reasons why the undesirable conclusion quoted above needn’t necessarily follow from the argument of the paper. And parse @ 183 has noted that the language of the paper treats a transgender right to self-identification as an axiom from which to argue, and not as an assumption dependent upon or subject to any of the arguments contained within the paper.

The reason I can’t help myself from posting yet another response is that I want to more closely engage with the contrapositive as you have put it, and with the actual structure of the arguments as they are given in the paper.

What I want to argue is that whilst your derived statement is well-put, and does indeed follow from the paper, the way that that conclusion invites us to read it is misleading. What I mean is that the way that the paper is structured makes clear that the emphasis would look like this:

“If we do not accept transracial people on the basis of their self identification,, then we cannot accept transgender people on the basis of their self identification.”

and not like this:

“If we do not accept transracial people on the basis of their self identification, then we cannot accept transgender people on the basis of their self identification.”

That is, if we do not grant that people can self-identify racially, then we do not take seriously the kind of ‘right to radically self-identify’ for which the paper argues. If this is the case, then whatever our ground for accepting transgender people, it cannot be on the basis of the kind of ‘right to radically self-identify’ for which the paper argues. The conclusion then follows that we accept transgender people for some other reason, and not on the basis of a putative ‘right to self-identify’. It does not follow that we needn’t or can’t accept transgender people. You can see, I hope, that this interpretive difference is a very important subtlety.

Not only do I think that that is the correct way to parse the paper, I think that, given its argumentative structure, the paper misses no opportunity to invite the reader to parse it in this way. With each treated objection to the analogy between transgender and transracial people, the paper provides the reader with an alternative ground upon which to accept transgender people without accepting transracial people; i.e. an alternative ground upon which to accept transgender people without granting a general ‘right to radically self-identify’:

1) sex is biologically based – we accept transgender people based on their neurology being congruent with the sex/gender with which they seek to identify, and not with their assigned or birth sex/gender. In this instance, we recognise neither transracial nor transgender people on the basis of their self-identification ; we recognise transgender people and refuse to recognise transracial people because the former have a neurological, ‘objective’ ‘true sex’ which legitimises them, whilst the latter rely solely upon a right to radical self-identification which we have rejected.

2) sex is malleable because anatomy is plastic; race is fixed because it is a factual designation wholly and unproblematically determined by ancestry – in this part of the paper, it is observed that sex is changeable as a matter of physical fact — it is implied that we are not accepting transgender people on the basis of their self-identification, but rather because the sex with which they identify is their sex once they have transitioned; conversely, it is argued (in a bit of a strawman argument) that race, a matter of simple ancestral fact, and nothing intrinsically to do with culture or appearance, cannot be altered.

3) identity is determined at an inter-subjective, and not at an individual level. In this objection, trans people are accepted by society because they are accepted by society; transracial people aren’t because they… aren’t. Again self identification is treated as an insufficient ground for either individual; it is a particular cultural context that legitimises the one practise and delegitimises the other.

Sure, the paper ultimately dismisses all of these alternative grounds as inadequate, but of course it does. The whole point of the argument is that the author thinks that the only satisfactory conclusion is a broad and radical right to self-identification. I just want to observe that in the process of arguing to that conclusion, the author is at great pains to help the honest and well-meaning reader to determine where they no longer grant the argument and why, such that their objection will take the form of an alternative ground upon which to accept transgender people.

Pomo queer theorist, sorry in writing on my phone and being unwilling to scroll up I shamefully miswrote your name, sorry about that! I was misremembering it from someone’s acronym for it, I think (which clearly marks me as stupid as well as rude).

Ronan(rf)@182

But the fact that race/ethnicity/whatever might be categorised differently in different countries doesn’t mean that each country doesn’t have their own series of racial/ethnic/whatever categories, where the boundaries between these groups is still heavily policed.

With regards to race, by “each country”, we actually mean each one of the three countries on planet Earth that ask their population to categorize itself by race in its census. These are:

1) Brazil: white, black, pardo (brown), yellow (Asian), or indigenous.

2) South Africa: White, Black African, Coloured, Indian / Asian, or Other.

3) US: White, Black, American Indian, Alaskan Native, or Asian / Pacific Islander.

In the rest of the world, racial boundaries are not heavily policed.

So beyond this “radical self-identification,” there’s actually a pretty solid, biological litmus test for being trans if you’re willing to try hormones. Granted it’s a bit of a trial by fire but it can’t be beat if you’re totally confused and don’t know what to do. If you feel better after starting hormones, problem solved. If you feel worse, congrats. You’ve gotten a little taste of what it’s like to be trans. Don’t worry though, if you like your hormones, you get to keep your hormones! (apologies to President Obama) Unfortunately because trans people are such a tiny minority, there’s not a ton of research around this stuff, but in general it’s well accepted that most cis people aren’t trans.

I’m not saying there needs to be a similar test for “transracialism,” nor do I really think it should be a standard for being recognized as the gender you identify with. But let’s first clarify what I mean by “transracialism” here, because we seem to be juggling a few definitions in this discussion and it’s causing some confusion.

For now, I’m going to bind what I say to the US. I’m not saying it’s not the case elsewhere, but I’m only willing to say it is the case here. When I say “transracial,” I’m only referring to cases which could be considered Dolezal-esque, and here’s why. Passing for white as practiced by light-skinned people of color in the US is done to escape a specific experience of oppression, not because the person passing identifies internally as white, at least to my knowledge. Indeed, what is expected of the person who is passing and what they actually want to do are often incongruous and difficult to deal with. Nella Larsen’s book “Passing” is a good exploration of this topic in the US, and there’s also a lot of very queer (though possibly irrelevant) subtext to it as well. More generally, there needs to be at minimum freedom from conscious coercion, meaning that this is something the person would choose if they weren’t living in a white supremacist society. This is also why I don’t consider sexual minorities who transition in countries where switching gender is acceptable but being gay isn’t to be transgender as we define it in the US. I sympathize with their struggle, and they have every right to the label if they want it, but as far as I know the choice is kind of made for them, and it’s not what they would choose if they weren’t living in a homophobic society. Transgender people do not transition to escape or gain privilege, we do it because we have an internal sense of our gender that needs aligning.

The more widely accepted meaning of “transracial” is somebody who was adopted by parents of a different racial grouping (for lack of a better word), but we also don’t seem to be dealing with that here, so I won’t address it.

As a baseline positive definition of “transracial” for the purposes of this paper and the surrounding discussion, Tuvel’s definition seems pretty good, so let’s stick with that one: “I conclude that if some individuals genuinely feel like or identify as a member of a race other than the one assigned to them at birth—so strongly to the point of seeking a transition to the other race—we should accept their decision to change races.” A transracial person, no quotation marks, is someone who genuinely feels like or identifies as a member of a racial grouping other than the one assigned to them at birth, so strongly to the point of seeking a transition to the other race.

OldJim #200

Reactions to your points:

1) “sex is biologically based – we accept transgender people based on their neurology being congruent with the sex/gender with which they seek to identify, and not with their assigned or birth sex/gender. In this instance, we recognise neither transracial nor transgender people on the basis of their self-identification ; we recognise transgender people and refuse to recognise transracial people because the former have a neurological, ‘objective’ ‘true sex’ which legitimises them, whilst the latter rely solely upon a right to radical self-identification which we have rejected.”

As far as I am aware there is no biological testing that can state with any confidence that someone is transgender. Whilst there are some few studies that imply some brain weirdnesses for *some* of those who identify, the only current path to confirming someone as transgender is if that person says they are. Physchiatric examination is the only “testing” that can be considered applicable, and in the end all that does is back up that the person is saying themselves. Likewise, transracials would logically only be identifiable through their own desire to be so, rather than any biological markers.

2) “sex is malleable because anatomy is plastic; race is fixed because it is a factual designation wholly and unproblematically determined by ancestry – in this part of the paper, it is observed that sex is changeable as a matter of physical fact — it is implied that we are not accepting transgender people on the basis of their self-identification, but rather because the sex with which they identify is their sex once they have transitioned; conversely, it is argued (in a bit of a strawman argument) that race, a matter of simple ancestral fact, and nothing intrinsically to do with culture or appearance, cannot be altered.”

At best, only the outward physical appearance of sex is malleable; every cell in one’s body is indelibly marked with the chromosomal brand XX or XY (except in the obvious extrememly rare cases, which are not part of the point here). However, I readily grant that it is outwardly malleable. Concerning race: it is a phenotype, no more. It is one’s skin colour, physiognomy, hair characteristics, etc. Like sex, it is immutable is the sense that one’s genes cannot be altered to change one’s default appearance. However, like sex the outward appearances can be altered, through skin lightening (or darkening), cosmetic surgery, hair treatments, etc.

3)”Identity is determined at an inter-subjective, and not at an individual level. In this objection, trans people are accepted by society because they are accepted by society; transracial people aren’t because they… aren’t. Again self identification is treated as an insufficient ground for either individual; it is a particular cultural context that legitimises the one practise and delegitimises the other.”

Transgenders are accepted by society because… oh wait, they aren’t yet, at least not universally. That’s the whole complaint and mission of transgender activism: to get trans* accepted by default. Their efforts seem to have picked up a lot of support from non-trans folks encouraging them in their efforts. So, if transgenders can work to change an existing societal opinion to something more to their liking, and it is alright for them to try, then transracials should have the exact same right, and ought to receive the same encouragement and support.

The more I think on it, the more inevitable the logic of Tuvel’s arguments become to me. As I have said elsewhere, that is why I think POC are so terrified of this paper.

At the risk of sounding patronizing – and semi-self-congratulatory – I would like to commend the contributors to this thread for generally being reasonable and not turning it into the shit-show that is every other Hypatia thread around the web the last few days. True, we moderated the thread. But we let little grace notes of vituperation and indignation through here and there – who can resist a touch of the human, all-too-human? – and yet people still contributed in a non-shitty manner! Kudos! Such restraint! (I’m serious.)

Like I said, pomo queer theorist, sticking to that particular example doesn’t change anything because the question remains what is wrong with Dallio doing what she did? And even if it is wrong, why does this invalidate Tuvel’s paper? And how is the reaction any different to past feminist reaction to transgender people? As far as I can tell the logic of Tuvel’s position has not been challenged by her critics and indeed some of the suggestions to improve the paper (e.g. incorporating the literature on passing) simply strengthens her analogy.

The very strong impression I get here is that the critics are arguing from their horror at the implications of the conclusion to the finding that the scholarship is bad. They haven’t given any evidence of the harms that arise from the paper, they haven’t explained what is wrong, they haven’t said what scholars should have been cited or how that would have changed the paper, and they haven’t explained why poor citation is sufficient reason for retraction in this single case and no others. They’re focusing with simple horror on the possibility that transgender okay implies transracial okay, trying to boil that down to a single case (which the Serano tweet above explicitly confirms) and ignoring the consequences of the implicit alternative theory, which is close a civil war era theory of race. I think they have a lot of explaining to do on all these points and they’re very carefully failing to explain any of them.

I’m sorry that I can’t seem to communicate this better but it doesn’t take an expert in critical race theory to explain this, there is absolutely nothing wrong with coming from several different ethnic backgrounds and identifying with some, all, or none of them. To put it bluntly, the opprobrium for Dolezal is about whether a white person can be Black just because they say so. I can’t speak for everyone but the people I know who do work in this area already acknowledge self-identification as you put it. You seem to think we’re rejecting it entirely, but as a white person I really don’t care about it except for when it’s white people demanding that they be acknowledged as people of color. I might be a reverse racist for saying this, but it’s basically free reign for everyone else, and I’ll leave it to those communities to decide who is and isn’t a member, as we all should. White supremacy has hugely damaging repercussions such as far as passing and colorism are concerned, but I don’t make it my business to police what oppressed people do to protect themselves.

@Mark Engleson, 195
There are people who argue for the right to self-identify as any gender whatsoever, or no gender at all, and do not recognize the authority of medical professionals or other transmedicalist gatekeepers. And there are others who think that the former are cis people frivolously inventing or appropriating identities just to look special, threatening the acceptance gained by actual trans people by making gender identities look ridiculous to the mainstream.
ISTM that people with a diagnosable dysphoria have a stronger case for their gender identity (above all, the need for medical care in making a transition is rather more serious than the need for a agender pronouns and names), but my feels do not trump other people’s feels, especially when it’s their identity that’s at stake.

I think the key issue for me isn’t whether Tuvel’s paper is good or bad (‘subpar scholarship’ etc) but how bad it is, if it’s bad. I mean, we’re hearing that it’s bad enough to merit retraction and apologies – something that’s incredibly rare in an academic context, apart from cases of academic malpractice (plagiarism & fraud).

It seems to me that a key element of the argument for it being that bad is the language of ‘harm’: Tuvel’s paper hasn’t just advanced an argument that’s questionable and failed to engage with the appropriate literature, it’s caused harms. But I’m still mostly in the dark as to what those harms are supposed to have been.

PQT (who deserves some sort of medal for their patience and forbearance in sticking with this thread) says @130 that drawing a parallel between transgender and transracialism (a) legitimises anti-trans arguments and (b) trivialises trans people’s struggles – but isn’t the tendency of the paper the reverse, to problematise arguments against transracialism? In any case, even if we could say with 100% certainty that Tuvel’s arguments would be useful to bigots – and would make it easier for them to do harm – would that justify calling the arguments themselves harmful, and saying that harms had been done by publishing the article? I don’t see it, even in that extreme case.

Even dangerous arguments deserve exposure, if the argument itself is good. In fact dangerous arguments need exposure, if only so that they can be refuted. I can’t think of anything more dangerous at the moment than a paper arguing authoritatively that global warming had gone into reverse – think of how the energy companies and their lobbyists would exploit it! But if the evidence did point that way, that evidence would need to be published – if only so that climate scientists could pick over it and find out what was really going on.

I don’t agree with faustusnotes about much, but what I strongly agree about is that only discussing this in (some subset of) the (mainstream) US understanding of race is just inadequate. It ties in what I mentioned above, that race and gender aren’t in the same way universal (to the extent that they are in the first place) across times and cultures. Both transfer in some ways, but race transfers a lot less well. To spin this on, even though in both cases there is a tie-in with supremacy/oppression, male supremacy and white supremacy don’t work the same ways. (Plus, there are cultures where there is a non-white race of maximum privilege, though it would be interesting to hear from a specialist how say Han supremacy and white supremacy are different or similar in various ways.) Racial categories also can appear with surprising alacrity. People can not really think in racialized ethnic categories until some events pull the rug out under a relatively stable situation and suddenly people segregate (sometimes, self-segregate) and civil wars. European anti-Semitism made Jews out of a lot of secular educated middle-class people who had never seen a synagogue from the inside, or were even first to third generation Christians. And in some places, Jewish isn’t considered a race by non-Jews at least. Race is also transmitted differently than gender. Everyone has family members of both (main) genders, but in the Western world, close family members are more often racially homogeneous than not. (To varying degrees, and not everywhere probably. But it’s probably the personal experience of a majority of people on this thread.)

What I don’t agree with him about is the expansive definition of “tansracialism” as including all sorts of racial passing. In the sense here it’s not about passing for white to access higher social capital when knowing full well one’s mixed-race status. Or passing for black when one is dark-skinned and of Greek ancestry and therefore treated as black anyway. Passing is also an aspect within a single racial identification (like when a person of color is read as white, like Buckell).

It seems to me that the role of self-identification is receiving a very simplistic, under-developed treatment. It’s pretty much being equated with a personal choice. But even to the degree it is, it’s not a choice open to many! *I* can’t just choose to be a man — I’m not trans. And that doesn’t make me an essentialist: I do believe that I (and we all) participate in the performance of gender to varying degrees and have our own mix, but it is still true that I’m best described by the label “woman”, and that there is a reality to this label that the choices that are accessible to me can’t change into “man” (it may be possible to change into some variant of “genderqueer”, but that’s beside the point; also, I’m not exploring that at the moment).

A very small minority I think has, at least after the age of 16, done a serious self-examination about one’s “chosen” gender. Or one’s “chosen” race, though I’m sure this is the case for more people as mixed racial heritage is common. (Me… not so much. I could probably make something about being of mixed Hugenot and Bohemian heritage, which really doesn’t give me much of a racial community to give me a useful strat sign. And those who have, probably won’t talk about choice as much as exploring the facets of their identity.

Self identification comes into both racial and gender identity, but it’s never JUST self-identification. When a person who appears to be one [gender|race] tells us they are really another, we might ask “tell me more”. And one may tell a variant of the story of internal vs. external representation, gendered pass-times, eye-opening readings of Stone Butch Blues,, whereas the other may talk about their ancestry, maybe out in the open from birth, maybe discovered belatedly. If both are social constructs, is there any particular reason we have to use the same blueprints? I guess we *could* have taken the first group and stuffed them into their own gender category (“hopelessly mixed-up” or whatever), but it turns out that for a majority of such people, if they take up the option to go through a transition and adapt their physical features to within the range of the target gender by medical means, and commit to performing the gender they identify with, there has now developed an area of consensus to consider them as *being* of their target gender… mostly by a path of development during which objections have largely dissolved (quite similar to same-sex marriage, btw). But the same hasn’t been the case for race, not in North America or Western Europe. Maybe it’s because of familial transmission of racial categories, or because of the extreme asymmetry of race: a black person who identifies as white and lightens their skin to pass will be considered a fraud and not, at the moment, be accepted by white people as white. Rather I fear for their life should their history be discovered. And this last point is one why some people of color are so harsh with Dolezal because they consider that she availed herself as an option that black people don’t have.

It’s not at all important whether Dolezal strongly feels internally that she is black. Even in case she started out as a pretend-game, by now she probably does! Convincing oneself, even self-deception, is something most people practice concerning some aspect of their life! The point is that as things stand, in this time and place, self-identification and changing her appearance aren’t enough anchor points to tie her identity into the “black” category. That she engaged in actual deception and told untruths to get herself accepted doesn’t help.

There’s something to be said for the OP’s suggestion that ignoring something that shouldn’t be there in the first place isn’t happening as much as it should. When I heard the story, I thought “what an odd person” and expected her to fade into obscurity (back, as far as I’m concerned). That this didn’t happen is linked to the very public, quite problematic comming out by Caitlin Jenner.

Lupita, it depends how you define race. But beyond that nearly every country has ethnic/religious/caste boundaries that are heavily policed. I agree though(as just said above)that consuming all those into the settler colonies racial frames isn’t useful.

Faustusnotes, I read your blog post (or at least I read 4/5s of it, but had to leave the rest as was rushing out)
I still think you’re overstating how fluid these categories have been. Of course there were people who moved between groups, and of course IDs are to some extent contingent. But as a practical matter, in how most people have viewed these IDs in recent history*, they aren’t that fluid, and particularly not in terms of race. The fact that Australian national ID has been able to expand to include groups not from the British Isles is true, but then so have a lot of similar(western)countries by stressing civic rather than ethnic national IDs. But that doesn’t necessarily speak to the realities of how race is viewed, and I think you’d have a tougher time claiming as a white man to be black, than you would as New Zealand born claiming to be Aussie. (Even this has its limits, as I don’t think it’s so fluid that I could claim to be Aussie even though Ive only been there once. You still need some level of socialisation into the national Identity. I mean, you mentioned your Spanish grandfather, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you identify as Australian and not Spanish) The question then is can Dolezal ID as black on account of having been socialised into a black ID? As a normative matter I don’t know (I don’t know if I really care too much either) But as a practical matter, it doesn’t seem so.

*You can see this, for example(afaik) in caste in India, which has a genetic basis predating colonialism by millennia. You can see it in Ireland where you had two very similar (aesthetically and culturally) ethnic groups who didn’t intermarry in any great numbers until very recently. And you see it numerous contexts where the movement between IDs was probably not as easily done as those who stress ID fluidity tend to claim.

Faustusnotes @215
“And furthermore, all those objections arise from exactly the same logical position as past feminist objections to transgender people, i.e. all the exact reasons Tuvel’s work is correct, and yet in this case it’s okay, even if the final consequence of applying that exact logic to the racial case is a civil war era theory of scientific racism.”

Why is the alternative to this scientific racism? I’ve tried about as hard as I can to explain this, I don’t understand what’s not being communicated. I’m talking about Dolezal, as a vulgar American I couldn’t care less about European ethnic distinctions, and I’ve explained above why white passing people of color and other cases are irrelevant. And no, the opposition is not on purely political grounds. The political opposition stems from her conclusion being badly wrong, largely because she ignored the people and fields that could have explained otherwise. I’m sorry that I can’t perfectly articulate what’s wrong with it concisely, critical race theory is something I’m still figuring out fully for myself. But it seems that there is at least one simple chink in her argument with regards to intersectionality. Race and gender cannot be parallel to each other because they intersect and reinforce one another. I realize that’s vague and incomplete but it’s the best I’ve got right now for a simple explanation.

I could say more on this, and I’m working on a more comprehensive framework for evaluating it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. What is the actual harm done to Tuvel and her career so far? The paper has not been retracted, and the editor stands by their publishing of it. I’m not a tenure-track academic, so I honestly don’t know. Is this sort of thing hugely damaging in general? Because it seems like the vast majority of the academic community is on her side and vehemently so, from these comments and looking at the discussion on other websites. As in I’m the only one here (as far as I know) who’s roughly on the side of the letter writers, as far as I can tell. 800 signatures might be pretty scary, but since the letter was received it seems like those 800 are being universally reviled at least as badly as they would have done to Tuvel.

If a small minority of people even discussing retraction is enough to harm someone, consider perhaps that it is possible for Tuvel to have done harm with the work she published simply by discussing the possibility that protections for transgender people extend to people who choose their race.

As long as I’m not allowed to entertain the possibility of its retraction or even give it too harsh a rebuke, I don’t think there’s much more I can say.

One aspect of the situation that I find distressing that is seldom mentioned is that Tuvel effectively criticizes the work of the associate editor that spearheaded the apology (Cressida Heyes) in the impunged article … wasn’t it a pretty obvious and severe conflict of interest for Heyes to lead the apology? She used her position as associate editor to go after a junior critic of her work.

Is this sort of thing hugely damaging in general?

Yes, but the damage is mitigated in this case…

Because it seems like the vast majority of the academic community is on her side and vehemently so

As to the letter writers and signers being reviled: everyone is of course free to sign whatever online petitions they want, but when you resort to these kinds of public shaming tactics, the possibility that they might rebound back on you is a risk you take. As an academic, my take on the open letter is that, yes, it was indeed a significant departure from the normally accepted way of dealing with scholarly disputes, and I have yet to see a convincing case made that the sins of Tuvel’s article were so extreme that they justified this.

Again, though, people can write online petitions for whatever they want. I’m a managing editor for one journal and on the editorial boards of 2 others, and from that perspective, my much bigger concern is with the actions of the associate editors. They seem to have gone through no formal process, just informal discussion among themselves. Instead of signing the apology with their names, they signed “a majority of Hypatia’s board of associated editors”, thus invited the conclusion that the journal as a whole had repudiated Tuvel, when we now know that that was not the case. Based on the fact that Drs Scholz and Solomon subsequently publicly declared that the apology writers did not speak on behalf of the journal, it looks like the associate editors in question were doing all of this without even bothering to inform the Editor-in-Chief of what they were up to.

That behavior is, to use a technical philosophical term, not cool.

From my perspective as someone involved in various capacities in running academic journals, it looks just breathtakingly unprofessional from start to finish.

To answer the question of “which authors specifically,” here’s a Google Doc with an extensive bibliography on these subjects:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1icoJ8jx08pApchnn4uAh8pRWtzFNCLRCokILByD8LvA/edit?usp=sharing

“It’s literally true that (in 2-dimensional Euclidian geometry) straight lines that are parallel are by definition (“axiom”) not intersecting. (Non-Euclidian geometries have different rules.) ”

In what geometries do parallel lines intersect?

A few things. I’ll try to go top to bottom.

Douglas Lain @227
“This isn’t justifiable as not only is it specious to claim that the essay caused harm, the essay also sits unchallenged in terms of argument. The demand for the retraction of this essay is not in any way comparable to the suggestion that certain rights to self select identity be extended to new terrains.”

I wouldn’t say it sits unchallenged in terms of argument, I’ve been trying to articulate in several different ways why race and gender are constructed differently here. Granted I haven’t been especially eloquent or consistent most of the time, and the best reason I can give here is my feeling that it’s not even wrong, vague and insufficient though it may be. These arguments come up all the time in completely nonacademic settings, almost universally as a reductio ad absurdum against trans rights and against self identification of identity, on the grounds that race and gender are similar therefore since you clearly can’t self identify your race, you also can’t self-identify your gender. This is the contrapositive that I mentioned up above, and when I introduced it, I did in fact say that I assume Tuvel doesn’t agree with it. I’m willing to be charitable, because she seems innocently ignorant of this. Granted, trans women wouldn’t be, and that’s sort of the point here. Nonetheless, that’s the social context you’re dealing with when you make an argument like this. You will sound like a TERF because it’s a TERF argument, and it takes more than a slight academic veneer to overcome that.

Simultaneously, you seem to be at as much of a loss as we are to quantify the actual harm that’s occurring here. This is essentially a one-sided argument from my perspective: there are a handful of people that agree with me in my thread, but everyone else who shares my opinion is being ridiculed by the mainstream (Daily Nous, Chronicle, whatever) as the “thought police” and (ghastly) complaining that someone’s “free speech” has been violated. I’ve watched the CT community deal with issues of free speech at a much higher level of nuance than what seems like is being expressed by the majority on this issue, and I don’t quite understand why this is different. Is it because academics have a unique position to commit harmful speech acts? I’m honestly not trying to insult anyone, I’m just shocked at how quickly people are to jump to discussing freedom of speech when the original argument (and the position of the letter writers) was largely around how white, cisgender voices are centered in the mainstream of philosophy.

Here’s a longer Facebook post by one of Hypatia’s editors on the subject:

https://www.facebook.com/lsalcoff/posts/10156108465053047

Sebastian H @229
“I think they all agree that race is largely constructed in much the same way as gender. Is that where I’m wrong? Is it that they think race is NOT constructed?”

Definitely not. In fact, that’s the entire source of disagreement. They think race is socially constructed, but they think it is socially constructed so differently from gender that the analogy completely falls apart. Even so, reasoning by analogy is never particularly strong. I will observe again that most of the problem in her argument and our analyses of it is that none of us have an especially strong understanding of the notions of social constructivism, especially not strong enough so as to enable radical analyses of personal identity. She might not have to deal with critical race theory and queer theory to make her argument effectively, but I then have to wonder why she is arguing from the perspective of social constructivism in the first place as it pertains to queerness and ethnic groups when there is an enormous body of work examining these distinctions. It’s actually extremely difficult to understand in full, modern formulations like Butler’s are (crudely) sort of neo-Althusserian as regards ideological embeddings of roles and such.

Passing politics in the trans community are a thorny subject and I think they’re best not brought up here. From people who want to pass, to people who don’t, to people who wish they could for practical reasons but can’t, there’s far too much nuance to discuss here. Of course, I’m only saying that because I maintain that it’s not comparable, and I don’t feel like it’s been proven that they are comparable yet.

Academic Lurker @230
“Yes, but the damage is mitigated in this case…”

You speak as if a crisis were narrowly averted. I don’t quite understand what that crisis is and what possibly could have caused it when the letter writers have received such ridicule for demanding retraction. They clearly miscalculated the political climate surrounding their request, but then I wonder what the actual risks were in the first place.

“As an academic, my take on the open letter is that, yes, it was indeed a significant departure from the normally accepted way of dealing with scholarly disputes, and I have yet to see a convincing case made that the sins of Tuvel’s article were so extreme that they justified this.”

I’m going to get a lot of shit for saying this, but I don’t really think this letter was about Tuvel in a broad sense. I think it was more like the straw that broke the camel’s back, to use a tired cliché. Black and trans voices in philosophy have been ignored and silenced for a very long time, with articles like this popping up frequently. If you don’t believe this to be the case, I ask then why you are willing to accept that philosophy as a discipline is overwhelmingly composed of white men specifically but more broadly cisgender white people. (maybe you don’t, but people have said they at least agree with me on that higher up in this thread) Big changes and social movements almost always start focused around the deeds of a specific individual, even when there is a history of systematic oppression by many people and not just individuals. Clearly, Rebecca Tuvel is not that individual when it comes to making philosophy more inclusive, because her position and her right to defend that position without fear of retraction has been vociferously defend by what seems like god damn nearly everyone in academic philosophy.

So yes, on the one hand, I do feel somewhat sorry for the individual that becomes a synecdoche for a history of oppression. However, on the other hand, they would not act as a stand-in for that history if their actions were not oppressive in the first place.

These academic debates might seem like they don’t matter, but I caution philosophers (as does the editor in the linked post) against assuming that their thinking is divorced entirely from the social and political realities of our current existence. I’ll be charitable and assume that everyone speaking here is not transphobic, and certainly Dr. Tuvel isn’t either, but when you have the academic mainstream on the same side of an issue as TERFs and transphobes and Black and trans people on the other side with the National Review cackling with glee about the PC police eating their own, I urge everyone involved (my side included) to pause and consider who they are aiding with their arguments and how best to not just distance themselves but respond to the people on their side who are abusing their arguments to hurt people. What do you have to say to the contrapositive, and the people who do think you endorse it with your original implication?

Pomo queer theorist, the reasons the objections lead to scientific racism is that they don’t allow self identification, which by necessity requires someone else to be the determinant of an individuals race. Whether that’s Heinrich himmler or a queer theorist, it’s a dangerous road to go down. Even if we allow society (e.g. Black Americans) to determine who is or isn’t of a race it’s still dangerous – look at what is happening tot he rohingya for examples of how this can end up playing out , or the dubious way that extreme rightists in Japan refuse to allow second generation Koreans to be Japanese (backed up by a history of pogroms this starts to look unpleasant). I gave the example of indigenous cultural reclamation and resistance above, and indigenous people are a really good example of communities whose race has been consistently policed by the state and society (and still are – “you don’t look aboriginal so how can you speak for them?” Is such a common refrain). It’s not just comic book nazism, scientific racism has many cunning forms and it can still be bad for a lot of people. Even in my trivial case (it doesn’t matter to my rights or wellbeing what my identity is) I don’t want some race theorist telling me I’m English. Fuck that noise! I’ll decide whether I’m Australian or not!

It’s particularly amusing given sex is so strongly biologically determined, but for some reason self identification is okay, but race is purely socially constructed and yet we aren’t allowed to rebel against that social construct? This is nonsense, surely?

I find the phrase “TERF” offensive. It is commonly applied to diminish and marginalize the contributions to feminism of some people I have admired all my life (Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer as two examples).

We all know that labels change in their meanings, and that a different combination of letters with the same intent would change nothing. That said, here are a few suggestions:

Instead of: Tuvel’s piece is already being used by TERFs (see the comments on the Facebook post with the apology) as a reductio against trans rights

Try: Tuvel’s piece is already being used (see the comments on the Facebook post with the apology) as a reductio against trans rights

Instead of: Bit concerning that it’s being hosted on a hardline TERF site, though no?

Try: well, nothing.

Instead of: Claims that this or that outcome (for instance the outcome of emboldening or bolstering TERF discourse) is a “negative political consequence”

Are the RF parts of this important here? Is TERF as used here representative of what may also be called second-wave feminist thought? Or it is a too-easy label. Try: Claims that this or that outcome (for instance the outcome of emboldening or bolstering discourse that seeks to penalize and harm trans people) is a “negative political consequence”

Instead of: in so many ways the response to this article mirror TERF responses to trans people that it’s inadvertently hilarious.

Try: nothing. The sentence is simply a claim to insight that the rest of us don’t, apparently have. Such a sentence is fine within a group that shares a common set of beliefs, but to use it in the context of debate adds little. Like other labels, TERF is too often used to police the boundaries of acceptable debate.

I actually see “TERF” as slur (almost like the new “dyke” or “bitch”). It is indeed used to diminish and marginalize the contributions to feminism of women who do not accept as an article of faith that a male’s declaration of womanhood makes him _the same_ as females in any fundamental or relevant sense, or puts him in a position to speak on behalf of women or feminism, or that other women must “centre” such a person in their conceptions of themselves, women as a class, and feminist politics. Basically, “TERF” is used against women who do not uncritically accept the idea that a feeling of “gender identity” makes one male or female, or who reject the idea that women’s oppression is equivalent to the oppression of feminine gender identities/expression. In reality, “TERFs” are simply gender critical women/feminists who focus their analysis/politics around the idea that women are oppressed systemically as a class, i.e. the female sex is oppressed in patriarchy, not ‘gender identities’.

To me what is truly amazing about the Hypatia controversy is Tuvel’s real mistake, which was to naively out pro-trans the most pro-trans possible position in a way that exposed the internal contradictions of trans identity. I think she was trying to occupy the most “progressive” position possible and it dialectically backfired. That is why people are mad and why there are no good arguments made for why her paper is poor scholarship. She accidentally revealed the conceptual incoherence of trans identity by pushing it to its logical conclusions. Therefore, her argument cannot actually be critiqued without effectively deepening its implied critique of transgender discourse. Her critics are in a catch-22.

Oh for christ’s sake, are we going to have to relitigate trans identity here? This is not something I’m willing to do, and frankly, y’all are kind of proving my point.

I’m sorry, as a trans woman, I categorically refuse to argue about this right now. This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen as a result of this article, and now it is happening. This is when I quit.

Thinking back to Harry’s pessimistic comment a ways back, I wonder (at the risk of seeming to parachute in to give the view from 30,000 feet, which I know can seem annoying) whether the problem is essentially the sense that Tuvel and other scholars are trying to heal the rift between their scholarly camp and the one occupied by CRTists and so on, and are disappointed that their offer wasn’t accepted in the spirit meant. What happened to Tuvel seems tragic. She wanted to write something that would help people, and a powerful group of those people within academia were very angry about what she wrote, even though she acted in good faith and had no way of expecting them to be angry. In that case, really there are only two responses: I’m sorry and I don’t care. The Hypatia editors acted very quickly to say they were sorry but essentially said they didn’t care to her. It seems like the only conclusion to draw is don’t write across those boundaries, or if you do, work very, very hard to show that you care about those on the other side. Which might amount to the same thing. It’s a tough problem.

Tom, the gendertrender website that was dismissed as “hardcore TERF” is disgusting – it’s basically a hate site. The things that some of these feminists “questioning” trans rights say are nasty. Julie Bindel, one of their leading lights, isn’t just anti trans – she thinks heterosexual women shouldn’t have sex with men. Unsurprisingly she and Jeffreys (another TERF) hate sex workers and hold them in complete contempt, because they see gender relations as a war with trans women as a fifth column, straight women as traitors and sex workers as quislings. If TERF bothers you then consider the entirety of their political project, which is deeply misogynist and steeped in gender essentialism, full of scorn for ordinary women who want men, and pitiless in its contempt for femininity.
TERF is just a tiny part of their problems.

“Calling somebody a TERF is calling them out for bigotry.

Maybe start by noticing the distinction between addressing opinions and labeling and lumping people?”

I’ll do both. The opinions are transphobic, and feminists that express them are TERFs.

pomo queer theorist@236:

I wouldn’t be quite so certain that no damage has been done to Tuvel’s career. It looks to be true that, in the large general field of academic philosophy, the majority disapprove of the actions of the letter writers and associate editors. However, the particular subfields in which one needs to look for support letters when going up for tenure tend to be small. If enough people in Tuvel’s sub-area continue to hold a grudge, that’s going to hurt. In addition, there are issues of how her presence in the field will be handled now that her name is associated with a “scandal”. Say someone is selecting speakers for a conference: will the risk of a bunch of angry activists showing up and disrupting the session be weighed, if Tuvel is being considered as a speaker? Similar with edited volumes & etc., now that clear “sides”, complete with loyalties and emnities, have been drawn. Most potential damage to Tuvel’s career would likely take the form of these sorts of negatives that are difficult to prove.

Black and trans voices in philosophy have been ignored and silenced for a very long time…on the one hand, I do feel somewhat sorry for the individual that becomes a synecdoche for a history of oppression.

Which individual is not a random accident, I think. I mean, OK, philosophy is overwhelmingly white and male, POC and trans voices have been silenced for a long time. A bunch of mostly tenured and senior philosophers, having contemplated this grim state of affairs, get together and conclude that the solution is to…lay this whole history at the feet of the most junior female academic philosopher they can get their hands on, and not worry too much about whether they might be torching her career in the process.

I confess I’m not following the reasoning here.

I confess to not knowing how to referee this particular disagreement. As John Holbo said upthread, we’ve had a pretty decent discussion of a topic that has (as we’ve seen elsewhere) been hard to discuss in a civil way. I can’t share Tom Slee’s admiration for Germaine Greer who has displayed open hatred of trans people in print. Ditto Bindel. On the other hand, I would not wish to shut down or shout down radical feminists who worry that reconceptualizing the boundaries around sex and gender risks sidelining some issues, e.g. around reproductive rights, that have been central to the feminist agenda. I’d say that making careful distincti0ns would be a way through, but experience suggests that even this will be perceived by one side or other as threatening and offensive. AFAICS, the term TERF generates a lot of unnecessary heat and unhelpfully lumps together people who actively hate trans people (call them subjective transphobes) and people who draw the boundaries of and conceptualize biological sex and gender differently to their opponents (call them objective transphobes if you want, but that seems very theory-dependent). Anyone rude and nasty enough not to respect a trans person’s identification as something genuine has no place here, I think that’s compatible with some degree (not *any* degree) of reasonable variation in understanding what that something amounts to. (And I write this conscious that my own perspective is that of a cisgender man, hence limited and partial, and I wouldn’t have tried to articulate even these thoughts were it not part of the duty of a moderator.)

“I do feel some of your own comments have been more insulting than they needed to be, to make your points – yet I am approving them semi-automatically at this point – so I suggest you take the good with the bad.”

I’d honestly rather you hadn’t. I’d much rather be censored and have my opponents censored than have the conversation derailed by blatant transphobia. Plus, I still feel that I need to learn how to be less insulting, and if you grudgingly allow my transgressions, I don’t know where the line is. For me the line is around calling trans women men. If you want to discuss the word TERF, I’d even be willing to do that to some extent. But I personally draw the line at apres coup’s comments, and I’d much prefer you ban the both of us than let them continue if I’ve crossed the line.

@magistra, 243
Could it be that a DJ Derek, or a Johnny Otis (to use an American example), may get a pass from the community, but that’s earned, not something you can claim as your right?

I find the demand for banning other posters to be unacceptable and actually quite astonishing. This has been an unusually civil discussion of a topic where that’s difficult to achieve.

Don’t leave PQT, that is exactly why that commenter wants! They can’t win on the arguments but they want to make it so unpleasant that you don’t stick around to make them. So don’t!

“I’d much prefer you ban the both of us than let them continue if I’ve crossed the line.”

Well, I’m sorry to say this isn’t how the comment policy works. I am not going to entertain ‘you can ban me if you also ban this other person’ tit-for-tat requests. (I didn’t ok that other comment because of what you said. I just ok’d that comment AND what you said.)

But since I turned on apres coup’ comment, since I’m a bit of that smelly old thing, a liberal, I might as well refute that dumb comment I approved.

“To me what is truly amazing about the Hypatia controversy is Tuvel’s real mistake, which was to naively out pro-trans the most pro-trans possible position in a way that exposed the internal contradictions of trans identity.”

The idea is that trans identity is this hyper-voluntarist thing. You can choose to be anything. If you identify as male you are male. If you identify as a wolf, or a galaxy you are a wolf, or a galaxy; and, furthermore, everyone else is henceforth obliged to play along on pain of being an intolerable bigot. But this is nonsense, therefore trans identity is nonsensical.

“She accidentally revealed the conceptual incoherence of trans identity by pushing it to its logical conclusions. Therefore, her argument cannot actually be critiqued without effectively deepening its implied critique of transgender discourse. Her critics are in a catch-22.”

This is just obvious nonsense. It happens all the time that people advocate positions in ways that turn out to be too strong, or somehow wrongly formulated . They say things they think they mean that imply things they didn’t mean and don’t accept. The idea that it’s shocking for this to happen? when it has happened in literally every ethical theory debate, ever? This isn’t even a Catch-22. The form of the argument here a reductio. If you can choose to be a woman you can choose to be a helium atom. But you can’t choose to be a helium atom, so you can’t choose to be a woman. (A Catch-22, by contrast, is when you need to get something as a precondition for getting it, so you can never get it. Nothing like that here.)

The way to stop this nonsense is quite obvious: explain why gender is not like race, or being a wolf, or being a galaxy or being a helium atom. But the way to stop this nonsense is not therefore so simple. How and why is gender different? We feel that it obviously is, but articulating this is non-trivial, to say the least. Mario, upthread, was impatient with Tuvel’s use of the wolf example. His attitude is plainly this: Look, we know that being trans is ok and that being some otherkin freak is not the same. Right and wrong is simple and self-evident and the good people know what is right and it’s a waste of time arguing about what we all know. It just lets bad people get a word in edge-wise.

I think it’s wrong to be so self-assured in these areas. You can find it to be self-evident that being trans is not like pretending you are a galaxy – or being deluded that you are a wolf. You don’t have to doubt that you are right, somehow, if you think these are silly cases. But you may still find it worthwhile to work through seemingly silly cases, to clarify what it is you really think about gender. That’s the spirit of the philosophical exercise, at any rate. If you don’t like that, then your problem isn’t with Tuvel, actually, it’s with this whole style of philosophy – which is fine. Lots of people think this sort of socratic puzzle-mongering is dumb and never produces anything worthwhile or insightful. But I don’t think that at all. Sure, it’s just a game sometimes, but this sort of thinking has also been an important engine for moral progress. You may not think you are seriously going to conclude that people can choose to be a galaxy, but sorting all this stuff out may somewhat alter what you do think.

To put it one last way: part of doing socratic-style philosophy is entertaining a lot of extreme, absurd-sounding propositions, at least experimentally. If you are on a hair-trigger for anything that would be harmful, if everyone started believing it, then socratic philosophy is more or less a series of bad bombs waiting to go off. But that seems to exaggerate the risks of socratic-style philosophy. The main danger is that no one believes the conclusions. The main danger is not that every silly step along the path is so much in danger of being widely believed that we can’t let people walk this path.

Apres coup is what philosophers call an asshole. Because philosophers are people, too. And when people see people being jerks, they call them ‘assholes’. But sometimes the things assholes say overlap with the things philosophers say (because sometimes philosophers ARE assholes, but that’s not always the reason for the overlap.) If you are going to do philosophy, you are going to get some assholish contributions, passing under cover of being thought-experiments or extreme reductios or what have you. Comes with the territory. And that’s why sometimes we turn on comments by assholes. And why the comment policy can’t be perfect. End of pious liberal sermon.

“Plus, I still feel that I need to learn how to be less insulting, and if you grudgingly allow my transgressions, I don’t know where the line is. For me the line is around calling trans women men.”

I’ll also address pomo queer theorist. The problem is that I – we – don’t really want to draw a line not letting in bad or wrong thoughts. It’s true that there is some shit we just won’t stand for, but the idea is to let some shit in. There is no way to have an open discussion without admitting some contributions you regard as shitty. Now, with regard to your slinging of ‘TERF’. I really have no opinion about the intellectual sociology here, but my view is: I have no problem with you accusing 2nd wave feminists of being ethically abominable re trans stuff. So long as you explain why you think that. I have no interest in refining ‘TERF’ and then incorporating it into our comments policy and henceforth not letting in any TERF comments. The goal is not strengthening or clarifying the censorship aspect of comment moderation but encouraging open critique in as optimal a fashion as possible. Doing that means letting some shit in. An optimal discussion environment contains some people being shitty because there is no way to stop that completely without narrowing the discussion too much.

Apres coup, the problem with TERFS is not that they ‘do not uncritically accept the idea that a feeling of “gender identity” makes one male or female’. It’s that they uncritically refuse to listen to the perspective of anyone who questions their definition of sex, their definition of what is a “good” woman or a “good” feminist, and their uncritical scorn for any woman who does not behave like a revolutionary. Also, comparing being trans to blackface, dismissing the lived experience of trans people, and saying openly nasty things about trans women.

Yes, lots of ordinary women are suspicious of trans women’s claim to be women. I think almost every (non-activist) heterosexual woman I’ve ever spoken to on the issue is suspicious about what being trans, and accepting trans women, tells them about the sanctity of their own sex and their own ideas about their own sex. But they also don’t deny those women the right to their own identities or dismiss those women’s experience out of hand, and they’re willing to accept them and also to admit that maybe their own definition of what it is to be a woman isn’t the world’s most definitive thing ever. If only anti-trans feminists would just for once in their career bother to listen to the voices of ordinary women they might learn a little nuance. But listening to the voices of ordinary women and trans women might lead them to question their very specific and authoritarian views on who is and isn’t a good woman, and we can’t have that!

Ok, so I think I understand the goals of the policy a bit better. My apologies.

John Holbo @270

I’ll talk about the terminology a bit, but part of my hesitance is that this very argument has been hashed out to my satisfaction many times over, and as a result I don’t really have much to add from what you’d here if you talked to any trans-inclusive feminist.

I’ll try to articulate what the third wave sees as its major innovations and its historiography of feminism, but there are people elsewhere that have done a much better job on this than I can. There’s also the obvious caveat that I haven’t lived anything but the most recent “wave,” so all of this is what I’ve learned, mostly from fellow third-wavers.

The first wave of feminism while vital was also clearly not very inclusive. Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech is still I think the best material here. Additionally, there is of course the question of suffrage for whom? White women.

The second wave is of course a lot more nuanced and a lot more complex. It’s erasing a lot of nuance to say this, but what I take to be the apex of the second wave was the failure of the equal rights amendment. I absolutely consider it tragic and I think we’d be a lot better off it had passed. I don’t think there’s a lot of disagreement there, at least from my (trans, white) perspective. During the second wave of course we have the sexual revolution, and as always there’s more than one side to this. Things like birth control and abortion are clearly vital to the sexual liberation of women, but at the same time, you have the problem that Black women were rarely depicted as anything but hypersexualized by the mainstream culture.

Nonetheless in broad strokes what the third wave sees as the failure of the second wave was a canonicalization of a specific view of womanhood. Before we get to how the third wave thinks it’s gotten past that, I’ll try to be a bit more specific. I’ll also note that far from all the feminists who gained notoriety during the second wave (and I’ll assume even fewer of those who didn’t) are transphobic. Gloria Steinem isn’t, off the top of my head. Andrea Dworkin was actually extremely radical on this stuff, and while she thought that a society without gender roles would eliminate trans people entirely (I’m not convinced) she entirely supported trans people and thought communities should provide for transitioning as a basic service, roughly.

So what we talk about when we talk about TERFs are actually a vocal minority, as committed transphobes are in communities outside of feminism. Camille Paglia, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, Germaine Greer etc. I can’t speak to all of them but nearly all of what Paglia produces is poisonous anti-feminism. I think their positions are shitty because they either reduce womanhood to a biological configuration or they otherwise enshrine an incorrect normative (frequently white) vision. There’s rarely room for sex workers in most second wave feminism, for example.

The third wave tries to be anti-essentialist about the definition of womanhood and manhood. This is mostly stemming from Judith Butler and the broader performative turn in the humanities and social sciences, as well as of course Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (hello critical race theory) theory of intersectionality. It became clear at some point that there was no singular experience of womanhood, and that by canonicalizing a certain version you were always going to be excluding people. It’s also generally well accepted that any “ideal” vision of womanhood is going to be a white supremacist vision while white supremacy is dominant, a classist vision, etc. The same goes for platonic ideals in all forms of activism, which is sort of the main contribution of post-structuralism I think, crudely.

My experience with the third wave is that it’s lost almost none of the positive aspects of the second wave and gained a lot of stuff too. The modern third wave is a mish-mash of stuff but we take a lot from radical and queer feminists in particular of the second wave. The critique of patriarchy stays, with a more nuanced vision of how gender expression effects how you are perceived in a patriarchal society, such as the introduction of femmephobia (generalized fear of femininity) in the vocabulary along with plain old misogyny. The critique of rape culture stays. We don’t think you need the biological essentialism to be good feminists, in fact we think essentialism of all kinds inhibits feminism.

Yes, relevant linking is fine. No one has to follow links they don’t want to. Sometimes we don’t allow linking if we feel someone is just trying to drum up traffic for a site we regard as toxic.

Great. In that case, the #Discourse is starting to proliferate around this issue, and there are a few more takes on the longer side than there were a few days ago.

Julia Serano, again
https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2017/05/regarding-that-transracialtransgender.html
https://twitter.com/JuliaSerano/status/862044508602720256

The most salient point is that she thinks open letters of this sort are relatively common for controversial papers.

Noah Berlatsky, arguing specifically against Jesse Singal
http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/is-jesse-singal-a-bigot

I won’t go to the extent he does with the guilt by association stuff, only to say that it’s difficult for me to have less respect for Singal’s opinions than I already did, and that he’s not wrong about groups lining up on this issue, at least from what I’ve seen (since apres coup joined, in this thread, too).

A storify of Zoé Samudzi’s criticism, which I think I linked to earlier above
https://storify.com/laripley/zsamudzi-on-tuvel-s-hypatia-s-failure

A less respectful, less nuanced take from Trans Lady Academic:
https://twitter.com/TransTheory/status/862698606364467200

I don’t like the performative gender idea. I think it’s simply a feminist retelling of the age-old western (christian) idea that women act feminine to get a man or to get their way and that femininity is just a gloss over their real characters. It’s encapsulated in the idea of “feminine wiles” and really just a reinterpretation of the genesis creation myth, which is evil, in which a girl tricks a guy. It suggests that femininity doesn’t need to be taken seriously and that in our move to equality we have to drop gender differences even if dropping those differences is not something women want to do.

I also think it’s related to the idea of sex and gender being different, which is just silly, and also a throwback to Descartes and his ghost in the machine idea. It seems to me that these aspects of third wave feminism are simply trying to mainstream very old christian misogyny and enlightenment errors within feminist thinking (obviously not intentionally).

I was suspicious of those ideas for a long time but moving to Asia, where femininity is viewed very differently to the west, cemented in my mind the idea that the western repugnance at the “performative” aspects of gender has a lot to do with a distrust of the feminine and a fear of women as mysterious, treacherous, etc. See also: I hope those tits aren’t fake, you can’t trust women because they wear make up, she was asking for it in clothes like that, plastic surgery is shallow and vain, I can’t respect a man who takes longer to do his hair than I do, etc.

It’s also easily deployed by TERFs, since if femininity is just a gloss over the real gender, then trans people are just men who want to wear dresses, perverted cross dressers who were messed up by the patriarchy, dudes who got their performative wires crossed. And simultaneously, any woman who’s actually really into high heels, dresses and make up is performing for the male gaze (and thus suffering from false consciousness) rather than genuinely expressing her sense of self as a woman.

I prefer not to distinguish, and to accept the possibility that the way we express our gender may actually be connected to a deep and abiding core of our gender that we can’t change or identify. But that doesn’t allow for much theorizing, and certainly wouldn’t fill the pages of a journal!

There is no gloss over the real gender. The real gender is the one you experience and express, and it is the only gender there is. That’s the entire point. You’re misunderstanding what performativity means. Butler herself backed down from the most radical interpretation (in Gender Trouble) after discussing her position with trans people. The position she articulates in Bodies That Matter is much more developed, and she recently did an interview with the TransAdvocate about trans rights that articulates an even further development of her theory. She doesn’t entirely reject the biological basis either, the basic idea is that the social realities of gender are entirely resultant of expression and reception, not an internal biological congruence.

What you are describing is the femmephobia I was talking about. For example, men who like dresses will be the target of femmephobia and probably homophobia but not misogyny. Granted if they want to pass all of these factors shift. There’s no reason we can’t have men who like dresses and trans women too. I guess this just seems obvious to me because I’m trans, but there actually is a difference between men who like dresses and trans women, namely that men who like dresses are men who like dresses and trans women are trans women. There’s no reason your expression and your internal sense of self can’t appear entirely disjoint to people. What kind of clothing you like has very little to do with who you are and what your gender is. Our gendered associations with categories of clothing and stuff are sexist and should be eliminated ideally.

And I completely agree with you that gender and sex is a false distinction, this is a point that has been made by Butler and subsequent trans scholars for a long time. “Biological sex” is at least as much of a fiction as “gender” is from my point of view.

Of course the more developed perspective is that gender is something to be enjoyed and there are no limits on how you express this enjoyment. You get to choose your gender and how you express it. The so-called “gender critical” feminists misunderstand Butler’s position on gender abolition and use it to support their opinion that since “gender isn’t real” or whatever that trans people don’t have any claim to their identities. Needless to say she completely disagrees and is fairly eloquent in explaining why, I think:

http://transadvocate.com/gender-performance-the-transadvocate-interviews-judith-butler_n_13652.htm

PQT and Faustusnotes: if gender and sex is “a false distinction” and if the “idea of sex and gender being different…is just silly” then I really don’t know what we are talking about. What does it mean to say anyone is a woman? Both biology and social construct have now been thrown out, leaving us only with personal experience. But “personal experience” has to be experience of something. Do you actually think feminism fought oppression, and if so on the basis of what? Women’s personally-chosen experience?

If the “real gender is the one you experience and express, and it is the only gender there is” then this too is a form of gender essentialism. And if “You get to choose your gender and how you express it ” then we are back where this dispute began. Why not race?

If I continued to participate in this thread it will take up my energy for the day, and I think we are past the point of diminishing returns. Best wishes to both of you in your personal journeys but I won’t be replying further.

I don’t like the performative gender idea.

あたしもそう思うわ。

Regarding the “we are really talking about one case (i.e Diallo)” counter-argument, I would nominate as interesting the story of Wayne Jospeh and his brother (for instance as told in http://www.alternet.org/story/16917/black_like_i_thought_i_was). Growing up, everybody from himself to his family to society at large though of him as Black, yet a DNA analysis showed his ancestry was 0% African (the story apparently being that his ancestors passed as black in order to make a political point). Now, Wayne himself has a conflicted relation with these findings, but an interesting point in this story is that his brother apparently flatly rejects them. He is Black, period. However they finally choose to self-identify, I’m sure we all agree that their choice is morally acceptable and that people should make an effort to accept it as the right one. That pretty much sums up my approach to the trans phenomenon.

I think I betrayed the nuance of Butler’s work to say that gender is a choice. Her position is more along the lines that it is constituted and defined through behavior and speech rather than being an essential characteristic arising from biology. These acts and behaviors are somewhat within individual control and somewhat not. The constitutive process is iterative and subject to gendered ideology, among other things. This is where the Althusser is most relevant.

@pomo queer theorist #290:

It might help with clarity to scale back the assumptions baked into your word choice and substitute inherent for innate. To cite a possibly useful parallel, I am inherently a native speaker of English, but in no way, shape, or form am I an innate native speaker of English. I did not and cannot choose to be a native speaker of another language, and short of destroying chunks of my brain cannot cease to be one (though I can let my proficiency and vernacular atrophy by immersing myself exclusively in another language, and perhaps achieving fluency such that I can pass as a native speaker). However, again, this is not innate: I could have become a native speaker of Spanish or Tagalog or Capacha by being raised among native speakers, and I could have become bi/etc.-lingual by being raised speaking multiple languages during my most linguistically formative periods.

Tom Slee @284 is poking holes in his own analysis. The definition of an essentialist theory of identity is a theory which posits a few objectively observable and necessary characteristics as the only possible justification for claims of identity. Let’s try to read my definition of gender as an essentialist theory:

“real gender is the one you experience and express, and it is the only gender there is”

The essentialist formulation would be something like: “you have no identity claims to a gender which you neither experience nor express.”

The first claim is a subjective characteristic, so the claim itself is not essentialist to boot. The second claim is the standard performativist definition, and the third claim asserts that these characteristics are solely constitutive of gender identity.

I personally find “you have no identity claims to a gender which you neither experience nor express” to be very reasonable and almost obviously correct. But what you really meant to say is that it’s essentialist because it doesn’t allow for your essentialism, which is circular reasoning. Show me that your definition of womanhood is not essentialist and you’ll have proved me wrong, but if you want to call me an essentialist, you’ll need to show that you do have identity claims to a gender which you neither experience nor express.

“What does it mean to say anyone is a woman? Both biology and social construct have now been thrown out, leaving us only with personal experience.”

I certainly haven’t thrown out the social construct, just wrong interpretations of it.

I think this paragraph from that transcendent Butler interview should clear this up:

“But this idea of social constructs does not acknowledge that all of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions  – or norms – that help to form us.  We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.  For instance, gender assignment is a “construction” and yet many genderqueer and trans people refuse those assignments in part or in full.  That refusal opens the way for a more radical form of self-determination, one that happens in solidarity with others who are undergoing a similar struggle.
One problem with that view of social construction is that it suggests that what trans people feel about what their gender is, and should be, is itself “constructed” and, therefore, not real.  And then the feminist police comes along to expose the construction and dispute a trans person’s sense of their lived reality.  I oppose this use of social construction absolutely, and consider it to be a false, misleading, and oppressive use of the theory.”

“Do you actually think feminism fought oppression, and if so on the basis of what? Women’s personally-chosen experience?”

I explained this in my brief and incomplete historiography of feminism. Historical feminism fought oppression on an essentialized and idealized view of womanhood, which almost completely excluded sex workers, women of color, disabled women, women who are unable to get pregnant, old women, and yes, trans women. You can get pretty far with this model, but it’s not everything and eventually you need a broader and more generalized criticism of power (as provided by Butler and Foucault) to keep fighting oppression.

One final quotation for apres coup because this interview is goddamned brilliant:

“CW: Do you think “sex” is a social construct?
JB: I think that there are a variety of ways of understanding what a social construct is, and we have to be patient with terms like these. We have to find a way of understanding how one category of sex can be “assigned” from both and another sense of sex can lead us to resist and reject that sex assignment. How do we understand that second sense of sex? It is not the same as the first – it is not an assignment that others give us. But maybe it is an assignment we give ourselves? If so, do we not need a world of others, linguistic practices, social institutions, and political imaginaries in order to move forward to claim precisely those categories we require, and to reject those that work against us?”

I read a few articles on feministcurrent.com, and unfortunately they were all filled with egregiously sloppy thinking.

Here’s their piece on bill C-16 for example. Let’s walk through tearing it down.

“A key problem with this Bill is that it proposes to amend something as important as the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code to include something that is not even definable.”

Heaven forbid. Unfortunately, the article then goes on to define it:

“According to the Justice Canada and The Ontario Human Rights Code, “gender identity” is defined as ‘a person’s internal or individual experience of their gender.'”

Oops.

“But this definition misunderstands what gender is. Gender is not about internal or individual experiences — it is a social construction. It exists as a means to reinforce stereotypes and oppressive ideas about men and women. Gender does not mean male or female; it means masculine or feminine.”

This is not true. You say gender does not mean male or female, this just means that gender is not the exact same thing as sex to you. Good job, except I don’t believe that it does either. Gender identity is man or woman or non-binary; gender expression is masculine or feminine or whatever. The two could be completely different. You can obviously be a feminine man or a masculine woman.

“A century ago, gender determined that women should not be allowed to vote or be counted as persons under the law in Canada. Gender says that men are inherently violent, aggressive, independent, assertive, and rational whereas women are inherently passive, delicate, nurturing, irrational, and emotional. These ideas have been disproved, thanks in large part to the feminist movement,”

And thank god they have been disproved. No disagreement here.

“yet, today, in creating and supporting the idea that one can have an internal “gender identity,” we are regressing. No one is born with a “gender.” We are born male or female and gender is then imposed on us through socialization.”

I’ll note that people are not always born with exclusively male or female anatomy and biology. I’ll also agree that people are not born a gender. This article states that gender is imposed on us through socialization, which would imply not only that we have no say whatsoever in our gender, but also that socialization is destiny. Hypothetically speaking, what would be the gender of a girl who was socialized male? Like if for example had been expressing as exclusively masculine for their upbringing. Before puberty, it can be extremely hard to tell boys and girls apart when they express similar genders. The patriarchy absolutely grants an advantage to women who express masculinity over women who express femininity, and beyond that, it’s entirely conceivable that this girl is perceived as a boy by most people while she is growing up. I think your response to this would be that parents for example that parents know her true identity and would raise her as a girl, but nonetheless, this is just a further esssentialism.

The very idea that you could raise somebody to be a man or a woman and they have no say in the matter whatsoever connotes a whole host of inexplicit essential differences between men and women that don’t actually exist. If you’re just saying that boys and girls are raised differently, then sure, but conservatives and liberals are probably also raised differently and that doesn’t mean that they’re destined to be conservatives or liberals as adults.

“Treating gender as though it is either internal or a personal choice is dangerous and completely misunderstands how and why women are oppressed under patriarchy, as a class of people.”

I don’t think so. I’ve explained above why you don’t need an explicit definition of womanhood to fight patriarchy, and that doing so enables patriarchy. By defining who is and isn’t a woman beyond stating that men aren’t women, you’re inevitably inscribing a certain upbringing (admittedly, in this case) and experience of womanhood as valid and saying that all other experiences aren’t.

“Patriarchy was invented in order to control women’s reproductive capacity and gender was created in order to naturalize and reinforce that hierarchical system.”

Yeah, no disagreement there.

“Women and girls around the globe are killed, prostituted, raped, and abused every day, not because they wear dresses, have long hair, or behave passively, but because they are female, and under patriarchy, females are said to be less than — things that exist for male use, to be owned, bought, sold, and looked at.”

They’re so close on this one and yet so far. You can’t oppress someone for their sex, (being female) as it would require looking at their chromosomes. Women are oppressed because they are women, and part of how they are recognized as such is long hair, dresses, and feminine gender expression. It’s pretty apparent that more masculine women are given more privilege than more feminine women in our capitalist system, and this article is sort of self-evident of that. Our capitalist patriarchy appreciates aggressive masculinity no matter which gender is expressing it. Consider how violently men who express femininely are treated in our society. Granted, perhaps not as badly as feminine women are, but decades of homophobic hate crimes are nothing to laugh about either. Patriarchy is at least a little about repressing the “wrong” gender expression too.

“Women’s rights exist on this basis — because we, as a society, understand that women are discriminated against and subjected to male violence regardless of their clothing, body language, or behavior (which is now, apparently, is defined as “gender expression”.)”

Sure, this is definitely true. However it’s pretty apparent that not all women are equally oppressed, because women of color face intersecting oppressions and white women don’t necessarily. In addition, women that imitate male gender norms are often rewarded for it. Consider the place of women in the business world, which is almost impossible to navigate without capitulating to patriarchal masculine norms. The amount of oppression that one experiences as a woman is thus also at least partially contingent upon gender expression. Anyone that does not hew closely to the ideology of masculinity is violently oppressed to some degree.

“If we say that a man is a woman because of something as vague as a ‘feeling’ or because he chooses to take on stereotypically feminine traits, what impact does that have on women’s rights and protections?”

Well sure, but what does a cis woman have of proof of her gender identity beyond a feeling too? Chromosomes? Maybe, but your chromosomes do not always match up. How do cis women know that their experience of gender is what we call womanhood and not something else? There’s no objective test. Cis women “feel” like women too. There’s no basis on which you could objectively exclude trans women without objectively excluding some cis women as well. The parts of the article that use this oxymoron are consequently straw men. They are not what trans activists believe.

“Should he be allowed to apply for positions and grants specifically reserved for women, based on the knowledge that women are underrepresented or marginalized in male-dominated fields or programs and based on the fact that women are paid less than men and often will be fired or not hired in the first place because they get pregnant or because it is assumed they may become pregnant one day?”

All these factors are due to patriarchal, capitalist sexism. Regardless at this point the article is aggressively misgendering trans women, who (as demonstrated above) have no less of a claim to womanhood than do regular women. Thus, the opinion to this disingenuous question is obvious: yes.

It’s also not just women that can become pregnant. Anyone with a functioning uterus and ovaries can get pregnant, and this includes some intersex people and trans men. The notion that only women can get pregnant is also a sexist norm that I think can only be struck down with the aid of transfeminism.

“The way men ‘feel’ ‘on the inside does not change that they hold power and privilege in this society and the way women ‘feel’ ‘on the inside’ does not change their experience of sexism.”

I agree completely with this statement, however as I’ve demonstrated above, womanhood can be thought of as an experience stemming from feeling like a woman and expressing this feeling as you see fit. This is why I consider trans women to be women, so the rest of this article is just attacking a straw man. We’re not saying that men who feel a certain way are women, we’re saying that people who feel a certain way are women. “Men who feel like women” is thus an oxymoron. You can’t be a man who feels like a woman because you would no longer be a man.

“I don’t ‘feel’ as though I should be called misogynist names, objectified, abused, or sexually harassed, but these things have happened to me anyway. I did not choose to be treated as a woman under patriarchy and I have never felt comfortable with femininity. Does this make me a man?”

Of course it doesn’t make you a man, but you have to respect the decisions and rights of women who are comfortable with femininity and like to express it. If you don’t feel like a woman, you don’t have to be one. It’s pretty obvious (and I completely agree) that both women and feminine gender expressions in general are violently oppressed in our current society. Because of this oppression, it would also seem pretty clear that people who stick with the category “woman” have good reasons for doing so, at least some of which must be that they feel very strongly that they are women and not something else.

“Dissolving the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in order to allow for ‘fluidity’ may sound progressive, but is no more progressive, under the current circumstances, than saying race doesn’t exist and that white people don’t hold privilege in this world if they don’t ‘feel’ white or if they take on racist stereotypes attached to people of colour.”

There’s a difference between questioning the gender binary and eliminating the categories of man and woman. As referenced before, masculine women (including masculine trans women) have more privilege than feminine trans women. Thus saying that trans women don’t hold privilege is no different from saying women don’t hold privilege, which is to say, completely wrong. However, privilege is a gradient, not a binary, and it would seem pretty obvious that trans women have less privilege than cis men, if only because their gender expression is not exclusively masculine. It’s also pretty apparent that they have less privilege than feminine men, because part of male privilege is being secure in your identity and being secure in the knowledge that your identity is the default. Knowing that your identity isn’t that default revokes all of the most violent expressions of masculinity.

Consider this argument for a further examination of this, and Laverne Cox’s explication of this position:

https://thinkprogress.org/trans-women-do-not-grow-up-with-male-privilege-e51eba1eb42c

https://twitter.com/Lavernecox/status/840711779948740608

“If a white person did this, we would rightly call it cooptation and denounce the behavior.”

Oh, the irony.

“Why do we accept that if a man takes on sexist stereotypes traditionally associated with women he magically changes sex and sheds his status as male in this world?”

We don’t believe this, and this is a straw man. This is called drag. The difference between drag and trans identity should be obvious, but if it’s not, here it is: drag queens identify as men (for the most part, though granted a lot of women figure it out this way) and not as women. A lot of trans women actually think drag queens are misogynist caricatures of womanhood, so we’re not entirely in disagreement with you on that. The fact that we can distinguish ourselves though should clear up that we’re not the same.

“The rights of women and girls are being pushed aside to accommodate a trend.”

Perhaps they are, but you haven’t explained why in this article if they are.

“Bill C-16 may sound persuasive in its efforts to be open-minded and inclusive, but it rests on very shakey ground. I implore you to further consider the consequences and implications of these ideas, this language, and this legislation, before jumping on this bandwagon.”

I hope I have considered these consequences and implications, I believe that thinking about these subjects intensely and critically is the only way of disabling patriarchy.

And to be super clear, when I say “It may or may not be true” I mean that the particular explanation of why transgender people are the way the are may or may not be a good explanation. I’m not denying for a moment that trans-gender people do in fact experience being of a different gender than the one they were initially assigned. I’m merely suggesting that it is very possible that we don’t understand the why of it very well.

Much of the discussion has been about what trans-gender people subjectively experience. None of that has convinced me (as a person who has subjectively experienced neither a feeling of misassigned gender nor race) why we should think that misassigned gender is possible but misassigned race is not. The empathy which makes me think “hmmm, if I deeply felt I were one gender and society insisted I were another, that would suck” can also think “if I deeply felt I were one race and society insisted I were another, that would suck”. Strangely being cis-male may be helping me here, because I already have to extend empathy to get to trans-gender understanding.

Since the correlation between language and ancestry is high, and given that we have google and google translate, I propose that instead of using self-identified race as categorized by the US Census Bureau and US society, as an indicator of diversity and as a means to inclusivity (PoC), we use language. What is the significance of English-speaking transgenders, feminists, and philosophers passionately discussing a topic that is being met by dead silence in the blogs of non-English speaking transgenders, feminists, and philosophers, as revealed by a google search in Spanish of the topic of Tuvel’s paper and Tuvel herself?

And, in answer to the call by some for more examples of transracialism, I propose Shakira. Google-image her when she was young and see for yourselves.

Okay it’s in the queue—it seems like I was (automatically?) blocked for at least 24 hours.

I don’t think I’ll type them again but apropos of those asking ‘if gender may be self-ascribed why not race?’ I wanted to point to Amos Oz’s take on Jewishness:

The Society for Humanistic Judaism defines a Jew as “someone who identifies with the history, culture and fate of the Jewish people.” In their view it is therefore possible for a non-religious individual to adopt Judaism and join a Humanistic Jewish community, and for the Society for Humanistic Judaism to adopt the person wanting to be part of the Humanistic Jewish family.[91] As Israeli author Amos Oz puts it, “a Jew is anyone who chooses or is compelled to share a common fate with other Jews.”[92] Oz summed up his position more succinctly in a monologue published in Tikkun, saying “Who is a Jew? Everyone who is mad enough to call himself or herself a Jew is a Jew.”[93]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_is_a_Jew%3F

The fervor and length of this discussion, here and elsewhere, is grounds for pessimism. Here’s Russell’s concluding paragraph on Augustine.

“It is strange that the last men of intellectual eminence before the dark ages were concerned, not with saving civilization or expelling the barbarians or reforming the abuses of the administration, but with preaching the merits of virginity and the damnation of unbaptized infants. Seeing that these were the preoccupations that the Church handed on to the converted barbarians, it is no wonder that the succeeding age surpassed almost all other fully historical periods in cruelty and superstition.”

I suppose one could argue that our preoccupations are different in detail.

“Cis people assume they are the only objective authorities on the trans experience because they’re not biased by having to deal with it.”

No, you’re taking me almost 180 degrees wrong. I don’t deal with the trans GENDER experience so I have to extend empathy from your descriptions to get there. But when you do so, I can extend empathy in similar ways to trans RACIAL experiences. You don’t have to extend any empathy to understand trans GENDER experiences–you’re living them.

“We do not gender people based on biology, we gender them based on appearance and behavior. Many people falsely assume that there is a direct connection between biology and gendered behavior when there probably isn’t”

Ok. So literally why can’t you say: we don’t ‘race’ people based on biology, we ‘race’ them based on appearance and behavior. Many people falsely assume that there is a direct connection between biology and racial behavior when there probably isn’t.

Don’t those sentences sound even more true for race than they do for gender?

“I don’t think race is constructed in the same way that I think gender is, that is, through constitutive speech acts and gendered behaviors.”

Are you being serious here? Of course race is constructed through constitutive speech acts and racial behaviors. Black people for more than a century got accused of “acting uppity” if they tried to adopt the ‘wrong’ racial behaviors. And more than that they get ‘constructed’ through policing of norms at least as strongly as gender gets policed. They actually got put into special areas of many cities. You can’t just erase segregation.

“For one thing, there is no strong or even significant racial binary on the biological level”

You should talk to Chinese people about how the Han treat lighter skinned people. (It turns out they value lightness of skin almost as much as people in the Deep South).

And this seems to STRONGLY contradict what you just said about gender in the first sentences I quoted–where you said that we don’t gender people based on biology. Now suddenly it is a real and existing binary that has no analog in race? I can’t follow your logic there.

I would tend to say that there is quite a bit of biology in gender, and much less in race. Which should make it more likely to be trans-racial rather than impossible.

“PQT is arguing that it is not women but “femininity” that is oppressed under patriarchy, and that gender non-conforming (“masculine”) women are privileged.”

No, that’s not what at all what I said. Please try to argue against what I said, not what you want me to have said. Women are oppressed under patriarchy, as is feminine gender expression. Privilege is not a binary state, it is a gradient of advantages and disadvantages. This is the entire thrust of intersectionality. Anyone can be (and generally is) an oppressor along one dimension and oppressed along another. You can be oppressed for your gender expression and oppressed for your gender identity separately, they are not the same thing. They inform, interweave, and can reinforce each other, definitely. But they are not the same, and I’m making a serious effort not to conflate them.

Saying that people with masculine gender expression have more privilege than those who don’t is a dynamic feminist analysis that acknowledges that circumstantially some women can have more privilege than others depending on their gender expression. Masculine men still have more privilege than masculine women, and feminine men still have more privilege than feminine women, all else being equal.

“By implication this would mean that lesbians are especially privileged by patriarchy, since as a group they are disproportionately gender non-conforming.”

No, this is something I definitely did not say, and which I certainly do not believe. Sexuality and gender are linked but they are not the same thing. Lesbians are not especially privileged by heteronormative patriarchy, they face homophobic as well as misogynistic oppression, and can face femmephobia as well. You’re also generalizing what I said about masculinity to mean generalized non-conformity. It’s pretty obvious to me at least that being a gender non-conforming woman can mean many things besides being masculine.

“Another implication is of pqt’s claims is that women’s historic oppression is a result of their natural/innate femininity, since it is feminine people who are oppressed under patriarchy, not female persons.”

If you’re going to call something an implication you have to state what you’re implying from. So far this seems more like putting words in my mouth than following my implications. I don’t believe any of what you’ve said I believe so far, and I think you’re broadly misunderstanding my position. Female persons and feminine people are oppressed under patriarchy, it’s both, not just one or the other. More feminine women are especially oppressed, but masculine women face misogyny too. Some of the oppression that women have faced historically is because of their being “female persons,” and some of it isn’t.

“Frankly, these notions undercut the very possibility of feminist politics, as they deny the existence of women as a class and simultaneously naturalise gender norms.”

Undercut the possibility of feminist politics? Absolutely, that’s why I don’t believe them. You’re the one who’s saying it’s feminine people who are oppressed and not women, I never said that and do not believe it. I did say that cis women have no better “proof” of their womanhood than do trans women, and I stand by that claim. I would bet that that’s where we disagree most, the rest of the disagreement so far is straw people.

“These elements of trans politics are deeply, deeply anti-feminist/woman.”

Could you explain why? I honestly don’t understand so far.

“The gender critical claim is that gender is a social phenomenon not reducible to individual psychology.”

Again, I don’t believe that gender is “reducible to individual psychology” and I completely agree that it’s a social phenomenon. I don’t call myself “gender critical” because that is a word used by trans-exclusionary feminists to describe a certain (incorrect, as demonstrated by Judith Butler’s interview response quoted higher up in the thread) reading of Butlerian social constructivism.

“Women have common political interests because of historic and ongoing oppression related to a lack of control over their bodies, among other things.”

Trans-affirming politics is right on the tip of your tongue here, it’s painful. If I didn’t have the context of your previous statements I would say that you’re already trans-accepting. Almost the entire experience of being transgender is not having control over your body and being condemned to live in it nonetheless. Tell me how that’s not an experience of womanhood in your definition. “Other things” I suppose…

“It is not essentialist because it does not posit a category ‘woman’ based on some inherent physical or psychic trait/identity feeling, but rather a common set of interests based on being collectively positioned in an oppressive set of social relations.”

Ok, so then why am I not a woman, to you?

Z @172 “So, self-identification and acceptance by the group should be considered as a basis for racial identity.”

That seems like a plausible conclusion, but it would be problematic someone like Rachel Dolezal. As far as I can tell, she wasn’t accepted by African-Americans as a member of their group, at least once the facts of her biography became known.

Orange Watch @309

“If gender is not based on biology, and no gender roles exist in a society, it is rather a stretch in want of proof to conceive that gender would endure in a form recognizable to what we refer to as such – unless ofc society aggressively enforces adherence to gender norms in order to maintain its existence.”

I’m sorry, I clearly explained this using a lot of slang that we use in the trans community but which seem like terms of art elsewhere.

When I say “gender someone” I mean “assume their gender.” I don’t mean to say anything about what gender is when I reference that.

Thus when I say that you don’t gender someone based on biology, that doesn’t mean that biology has zero effect on gender. It just means that, as I mentioned earlier, you don’t look at their chromosomes and hormone panels before assuming their gender. Simultaneously, even if you did, these biological markers can’t tell the whole story. They might tell a good part of the story for a statistical quantity of the population, (say the middle of a bell curve or something) and none of it for others. The best definition is still how that person conceives of themselves, and you can only find that out by asking.

For people who are other to yourself, there is no causal relationship between biology and gender. For yourself, there may well be, if that makes any sense, but that’s something only you can really know.

Biological incongruence (gender dysphoria) with regards to hormones and secondary sex characteristics is not a necessary condition for being trans but it is a sufficient one. That’s why I think there would still be trans people in a post-gender society.

I disagree with pqt on whether gender is innate or socially constructed. I absolutely think it’s innate. It’s also socially constructed. We can, to cite the famous gif, have both.

I find it interesting that the gender critical feminists (TERFs) think sex is entirely socially constructed but can’t allow a man to be a woman. This is completely incoherent. If sex is socially constructed and your mission is to deconstruct the harmful parts of that construction, then inevitably you’re going to get men dressing and acting as women. Yet as soon as someone comes along who does that you create a whole network of websites preaching hate against them. What’s that about?

Okay, um, having read the first hundred comments…

Let me just say I find some of the comments absurdly appalling.

I, of course, have never thought of Tuvel’s paper as anything more than empowered mediocrity. I didn’t think she hurt people, but I also do not think that the argument she presented (as I understand it) was worth publishing or worthy of any sort of intellectual defense. It reminds me of a very unfortunate homophobic argument I made on a CEDA email group, way back in the day, using similar chains of reasoning (or unreason–I wasn’t thinking very much about much else but scoring points and being a noisy asshole).

Even if you take this stuff seriously, Rachel Dolezal is a horrible person to use when making any sort of “transracial” argument. And using the right sort of examples pretty quickly leads to some pretty TERF-y places.

I wouldn’t care to repress Tuvel’s academic speech or whatnot, but I would also not piss on her if she was on fire.

And now having read the entire thread…

I’m not going to do any razzle dazzle philosophy here. I’m just going to do, I guess, history.

1) There is an underlying assumption that people like Dolezal is acting in good faith. This should be challenged, and it should be challenged on a broad level.

2) Why? There is a long history of white actors who perform transracialism to get something they want, typically access to non-white spaces for whatever reasons. These aren’t spaces like bathrooms like anyone of any gender can use. These spaces/resources are like the student teaching job that Howard University that she was rejected for and sued for discrimination. Remember, though, that Howard University accepts white students! Howard University would not care one wit whether that white student thought of herself as black! Black people in general aren’t going to stop a white person from saying that she’s black. “Transracialism” has never been about the normal drift of identities and families and who you associate with. “Transracialism” has always been about people like Margaret Jones, Linda Taylor, Kent Johnson, and all the other invasive white people who take on non-white identities at least in part to seize opportunities. And like Miley Cyrus, they switch back to being white (or anti-black) on a dime as needed.

There is a long history, as Chris Rock explained a while ago, of white people wanting all the perceived advantages of being black, without being black. Get Out was just all of that updated.

There simply isn’t any real analogue to transgender. Even if you thought that Caster Semenya was a cheater cheater cheater, she also isn’t going to be anything other than a woman. More than that, she had never been anything but a woman. This lack of a real resource conflict with treating trans as who they are has a lot to do with how society has to construct scenarios where trans people are threats to the “righteous” users of the the porcelain thrones.

Suppose the article had compared transgender to ‘trans-classism’ (Britain’s venerable tradition of posh people discovering they are working class when students/up-and-coming artists/right-wing Labour MPs) I assume would it have been reasonable for people to have been offended then?

So: Althusser: would he clear up the question “does explaining how gender is socially constructed emancipate, or does it reinforce oppression”?

Or the question fn raises: “does the fact that gender is socially constructed mean we can and should try to live without (defined) gender?”

faustusnotes #314 writes:

I absolutely think [gender is] innate. It’s also socially constructed. We can, to cite the famous gif, have both.

My recollection of the 1990s is that there was a recognition, partly following Judith Butler, that what it means to be a “man” or a “woman” was socially constructed as well as biological. That what it meant to be “a man” involved biology (sex), but also involved adopting roles that were the product of social expectation and history (gender).

It was helpful to have a word for each of these aspects. So we all started seeing “gender” getting used where social construction was prominent and “sex” where biology was prominent. That was, if I remember correctly, the whole point. Part of the benefit of this evolution was that it helped society to realize how much of the man/woman thing is socially constructed, because using “gender” emphasized it. It also helped us to be more careful in our thinking about what it means to be man/masculine/male and woman/female/feminine because we had to stop and ask ourselves “am I really talking about biology or am I talking about socially-constructed roles and expectations?”

If you are now going to say that both sex and gender are both biological and socially constructed, the usefulness of the distinction gets lost, and the usefulness of having two words gets lost. Politics aside, this is a huge loss in clarity and makes it much more difficult to communicate: I no longer have a clue what you mean by “gender”, or by “sex”.

@pomo queer theorist #312:

I’m sorry, I clearly explained this using a lot of slang that we use in the trans community but which seem like terms of art elsewhere.

Please extend your interlocutors the respect of considering the possibility that you’re using language in an unclear – indeed, ambiguous – manner rather than using strange, foreign jargon which they’ve never possibly heard before. You write with the enthusiasm of a youthful convert to an ideology, with the conviction that the only thing preventing us from agreeing with you is that we’ve never encountered the tenets of the theory you’ve embraced. We have – certainly, I have – but we found them lacking and unconvincing. Merely repeating them as obvious facts rather than arguing their validity is not in the least persuasive.

To echo something Seb said earlier that you took issue with – coming at this “from the inside” does not necessarily give you a better perspective. It’s actually a bit of a trap. If a presented theory closely aligns with one’s personal experience, it’s easier to accept it as generally true, regardless of whether or not it is an accurate general characterization. Standpoint epistemology has many problems beyond this, but presenting subjective bias and limited perspective as expertise is certainly one of its shortcomings. And since you’ll likely disagree with what I just said for the very reason I said it, I’m going to do something I’d rather not and absolutely should not need to, because it’s not actually relevant and does not give my words any more validity than they’d otherwise have: I’ll qualify all of the above with “As someone who could be reasonably described as genderqueer-but-passing”.

“Thus when I say that you don’t gender someone based on biology, that doesn’t mean that biology has zero effect on gender. It just means that, as I mentioned earlier, you don’t look at their chromosomes and hormone panels before assuming their gender. ”

How is this a distinction between how we ‘race’someone and how we ‘gender’ them? if this is what you meet by”based on biology” we don’t race identify based on biology either.

You keep saying things like this with the assumption that they don’t apply in the race case, but they keep looking like they apply in the race case. What you seem to be saying in this explanation is that in practical reality we gender people by secondary and phylogenic surface characteristics rather than deep genetic or hormonal markers. And we really shouldn’t.

Are you arguing that in the (totally different) race case we ought to race identify people by their secondary and phylogenic surface characteristics? And that contra the trans case that can never be wrong? I don’t think you’re arguing that but I don’t see how you think your discussion of biology and gender applies to the race case in ways to exclude the race case. If you look at what I quote from you, how do you intend to distinguish it from race?

bianca steele @322
“So: Althusser: would he clear up the question ‘does explaining how gender is socially constructed emancipate, or does it reinforce oppression’?”

I think possibly, yes. Understanding gendered subjects as interpellated within a certain ideology of gender validates transgressions against that ideology and also explains at least some of the complexity surrounding identity.

Of course Althusser being an arch-structuralist and Butler being a poststructuralist she has to criticize and develop his idea before applying it to gender:

“Here the performative, the call by the law which seeks to produce a lawful subject, produces a set of consequences that exceed and confound what appears to be the disciplining intention motivating the law. Interpellation thus loses its status as a simple performative, an act of discourse with the power to create that to which it refers, and creates more than it ever meant to, signifying excess of any intended referent.”

(from Bodies that Matter)

This is also probably a case where my understanding of Lacan is lacking, and unfortunately I can’t help a lot with the Lacanian aspects of these theories right now.

TF79 @323
“Here, the core academic issues seem best handled through the scholarly process itself, and a lot of the rest of it seems rather unprofessional (as AcademicLurker noted above).”

Well right, but isn’t this sort of what those editors were saying and trying to do? That they needed to change their review practice? And they were vilified for saying so, they were told to stand behind it unequivocally. As of right now it seems highly unlikely that the paper will be retracted, so the question becomes one of whether it should have been or what else should have been done in response to the letter.

Orange Watch @326
“Please extend your interlocutors the respect of considering the possibility that you’re using language in an unclear – indeed, ambiguous – manner rather than using strange, foreign jargon which they’ve never possibly heard before.”

Yes, I would say that I’m doing that. For some people here though I know that this discussion is not as well understood, and I realize that for example when I say “gender” that I probably am using it interchangeably in several senses and that it’s not always apparent based on context. I do apologize for that and I’ll make an effort to clarify what I mean when it seems ambiguous from here on out.

“You write with the enthusiasm of a youthful convert to an ideology, with the conviction that the only thing preventing us from agreeing with you is that we’ve never encountered the tenets of the theory you’ve embraced.”

Yes, I’m actually quite certain that I’ve been behaving like this. Is it inherently inappropriate here?

In some cases I do think though that careful explications in these theories will help people understand what I believe even if they don’t agree. I’m not always writing to convince people here, it’s a bit more expository than that for me. Of course, I’ve definitely been less than careful for most of this discussion and my enthusiasm does get in the way, no disagreement there.

“If a presented theory closely aligns with one’s personal experience, it’s easier to accept it as generally true, regardless of whether or not it is an accurate general characterization.”

Yah but this isn’t entirely what I’m saying. I don’t think Seb is actually arguing against the poststructural theory of gender (at least I haven’t seen them do that so far) I think they’re taking it and extending it with a gross oversimplification. If I used my identity to validate my belief in that particular theory and bludgeon people who disagree, yeah I would consider that grossly incorrect and I apologize if I did that.

All I want to say about standpoint epistemology is that I do think I’m somewhat more qualified to say that Rachel Dolezal is not more oppressed than trans women are, and that her case is not inherently similar to ours. Perhaps you don’t think so, but I don’t yet understand why.

You need a lot more than just “why doesn’t this work for race” to develop a positive case in that direction, and I haven’t seen it provided so far.

“And since you’ll likely disagree with what I just said for the very reason I said it, I’m going to do something I’d rather not and absolutely should not need to, because it’s not actually relevant and does not give my words any more validity than they’d otherwise have: I’ll qualify all of the above with ‘As someone who could be reasonably described as genderqueer-but-passing’.”

No I actually don’t disagree with you or what anyone has said because of standpoint epistemology primarily. If I gave that impression it was because I was trying to express in a naive fashion what my friends would say about this conversation, because for them this sort of barrier is enough to make this not worth discussing at all. I don’t believe that! I disagree with them pretty strongly on this, but I also don’t think it’s an entirely intellectually bankrupt perspective and perhaps useful to consider from time to time. You obviously have a lot to say on standpoint epistemology though so I’ll let you explain why it is completely intellectually bankrupt.

Val @327
“So pqt @ 312, we you say we ‘gender’ someone, or assume their gender, that’s not the primary way that people get ‘gendered’, as I’m sure you realise.”

Yes, this is is why I tried to clarify. I accept that sense too and I apologize if it seemed like I was vacillating between the two definitions because sometimes I do mean one and sometimes I do mean the other.

“Is there a self that exists independently of the body? Because that’s what your reasoning seems to be based on but you don’t seem to say that (although I must admit you have written a lot and I haven’t read it all carefully).”

Hmm, I would say probably no it’s not independent, but this is a little complicated and a very interesting question to boot. I think even if you’re trans that your self is very dependent on your body, even if (as is often the case) your self is defined against your body. I guess maybe then there must be something (a self?) that does the process of definition? But I also think that that process of definition is sort of ongoing, and that saying your self is dependent on your body could be read as invalidating trans identity, but I’m trying to use it to do the opposite. Maybe it doesn’t work. I clearly have more thinking to do on this.

For what it’s worth it’s not probably all worth reading carefully, mostly because I’ve been butchering a lot of very elegant and beautiful theories and confusing a lot of people along the way.

Sebastian H @328
“You keep saying things like this with the assumption that they don’t apply in the race case, but they keep looking like they apply in the race case.”

I don’t actually have that assumption a priori, I just wasn’t talking about race because I was responding to apres coup’s transphobic comments. As for why they don’t apply, I’m not sure I have a better answer right now besides that I wasn’t talking about race? You can’t just interchange the subject of these theories and expect to get all the same conclusions unless the two are exactly the same before transformation.

“What you seem to be saying in this explanation is that in practical reality we gender people by secondary and phylogenic surface characteristics rather than deep genetic or hormonal markers. And we really shouldn’t.”

Yeah, I meant gender here in the Althusserian sense of hailing. You seem to be saying that gender should be based on deep biological characteristics, and I’m just saying that it’s not currently.

I also don’t think that would be a good idea because I don’t see how that view of gender could be trans inclusive or account for intersex people. Prove me wrong, though.

I apologize for the tendency on my part towards logorrhea in my responses. We’re keeping a lot of different conversations at the same time here and a lot of very difficult questions without simple answers.