Lisa Guenther, one of the academic philosophers who signed the letter demanding that Hypatia retract Rebecca Tuvel’s piece, explained her signing a couple of days ago.

[Jesse Singal’s] article, like the post at the Daily Nous, goes through the arguments of Rebecca Tuvel’s article, “In Defense of Transracialism,” to argue that they’re not so bad after all: no outrageous claims, no offensive slurs, nothing but reasonable arguments. But this is precisely the problem: it’s what Charles Mills critiques as “ideal theory,” which attempts (in the words of author Jesse Singal) to “pull up one level from the real world and force people to grapple with principles and claims on their own merits, rather than — in the case of Dolezal — baser instincts like disgust and outrage.”

But ideal theory is not the only alternative to irrational “baser instincts.” What ideal theory abstracts from–and this is the reason why Mills argues that ideal theory is ideology– is the network of power relations that shape particular historical contexts and meanings.

THIS is the fundamental problem with Tuvel’s article, and with all of the defenses I have read so far: It “toy[s] around” (Singal’s words again) with a few arguments about issues that deeply and viscerally affect the lives of people whose social location is radically different from her own, 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. This is why it should not have been published in Hypatia, and why the demand for a retraction is not simply the irrational whim of an “angry” mob, but a critique of white feminist ideal theory as transphobic and anti-black ideology.

Full disclosure: I know Rebecca Tuvel, I was on her dissertation committee, I don’t think she intended to do harm by writing this article. But intentions do not determine or reduce impact. The point is not to avoid ever saying anything “wrong” or problematic. The point is to commit to accountability — both as actors and as bystanders. This is what all of us are called upon to do in this moment.

She was on her dissertation committee, but still saw fit to join the monstering.

But more basically: what I wonder is why Tuvel is raked over the coals for insufficient awareness of the context, power dynamics, or stakes of these issues for trans people and people of color, with no corresponding chastisement or even mention of awareness of the context, power dynamics, or stakes of these issues for women. What about women? Why are women being told to pay better attention to the stakes of these issues for trans people and people of color while trans people and people of color are not being told to pay better attention to the stakes of these issues for women? Why are trans people and people of color being treated as marginalized or de-privileged while women are treated as hegemonic or privileged? When did we decide that women had left the ranks of the subordinated and joined the ranks of the subordinators? When did we decide that?

Spoiler: I didn’t decide that, and lots of women didn’t decide that. It’s not true. Women are not part of the overlord class. Pasting the word “white” onto feminism doesn’t change that.

That’s not what Tuvel is talking about, but it damn well is what I’m talking about.

That bit of Tuvel’s paper I reserved to take issue with later:

Generally, we treat people wrongly when we block them from assuming the personal identity they wish to assume. For instance, if some one identifies so strongly with the Jewish community that she wishes to become a Jew, it is wrong to block her from taking conversion classes to do so. This example reveals there are at least two components to a successful identity transformation: (1) how a person self-identifies, and (2) whether a given society is willing to recognize an individual’s felt sense of identity by granting her membership in the desired group. For instance, if the rabbi thinks you are not seriously committed to Judaism, she can block you from attempted conversion. Still, the possibility of rejection reveals that, barring strong overriding considerations, transition to a different identity category is often accepted in our society.

I don’t think that’s entirely right about becoming a Jew, and I don’t think it’s right about assuming a personal identity in general. I think it’s more complicated than that.

It’s more complicated than that in the case of becoming a Jew, for sure. Why? Because just for one thing it feels like what people call “appropriation” – and in this case (and others I can think of) that doesn’t feel exaggerated or unfair. I wouldn’t feel I could “become” a Jew because my relatives were never in danger of being sent to Auschwitz. That’s a barrier, a large barrier. I can imagine converting, if I were a very different person, but I have a hard time imagining myself claiming to be a Jew. It’s not mine to seize in that way.

But there is conversion, so some people do become Jews in a sense. Yes but only in a sense, because Judaism is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a Jew.

In a better world that wouldn’t matter. In a better world we could all switch identities as we needed or wanted to. But in a world with multiple histories of ethnic wars, mass migrations, religious wars, inequality, war crimes, invasions, colonialism?

I don’t think so. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think gender identity is more complicated than that too, for the same kinds of reasons.

Note that none of this means I think Tuvel shouldn’t have written the article or that Hypatia shouldn’t have published it or that the APA shouldn’t have selected it to be read at their convention earlier this year. Not a bit of it.

Justin Weinberg wrote a piece at Daily Nous about the monstering of Rebecca Tuvel.

In the paper, Professor Tuvel takes up the question of whether the considerations that support accepting transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, which she endorses, provide support for accepting transracial individuals’ decisions to change races. She defends an affirmative answer to that question.

The result has been an eruption of complaints from a number of philosophers and other academics, expressed mainly on Facebook and Twitter. Among the complaints is the charge that the paper is anti-transgender.

That charge may come as a surprise to some readers, as it comes through quite clearly in her paper that Professor Tuvel supports accepting transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes. For example, she writes:

Trans individuals’ claims to self-identify as members of another sex did not always receive societal uptake, and unfortunately many still struggle to receive it today…

Thankfully, there is growing recognition that justice for trans individuals means respecting their self-identification by granting them membership in their felt sex category of belonging…

Which makes it all the more ironic that she’s being monstered.

Nonetheless, in one popular public Facebook post, Nora Berenstain, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee, says the essay contains “discursive transmisogynistic violence.”

If you say “discursive” that justifies calling a philosophy paper “violence,” apparently.

Also, “transmisogynistic” should not be a word, especially not to philosophers. It mashes two different things together as if they were one thing; that is not useful. Opposition to some claims of some trans women (like “die in a fire” for instance) is in no sense misogyny, indeed it’s usually misogynist claims that are being opposed (like “die in a fire” for instance). It’s also not necessarily hostility to trans people, aka not the equivalent of misogyny but aimed at trans people rather than women. It’s certainly not a blend of the two, because what would that even mean?

She elaborates:

Tuvel enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay. She deadnames a trans woman. She uses the term “transgenderism.” She talks about “biological sex” and uses phrases like “male genitalia.” She focuses enormously on surgery, which promotes the objectification of trans bodies. She refers to “a male-to- female (mtf) trans individual who could return to male privilege,” promoting the harmful transmisogynistic ideology that trans women have (at some point had) male privilege. 

Whether it’s harmful or not, is it true? If it is true, people shouldn’t be berated for saying it. If it might be true the same applies. It’s not an “ideology” that males have male privilege even if they don’t want it; it’s a factual claim about hierarchical relationships. It may be wrong, or incomplete, or right sometimes and wrong others, but none of that makes it an ideology, let alone a harmful one.

In short Berenstein is spouting political rhetoric, not philosophy, and she’s doing it in aid of bullying an untenured young philosopher. She’s claiming that her younger less powerful colleague “enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay.” That’s a horrifying thing to say.

Weinberg goes on to quote and discuss the open letter (which has now been taken down but is archived in various places).

Having read the article, I was surprised to see this particular letter get the support it has, although perhaps not all of the signatories agree to all of the points. Point 2 is a stretch.

Here is point 2:

2. It mischaracterizes various theories and practices relating to religious identity and conversion; for example, the author gives an off-hand example about conversion to Judaism;

Weinberg quotes what Tuvel says about Judaism:

Generally, we treat people wrongly when we block them from assuming the personal identity they wish to assume. For instance, if someone identifies so strongly with the Jewish community that she wishes to become a Jew, it is wrong to block her from taking conversion classes to do so. This example reveals there are at least two components to a successful identity transformation: (1) how a person self-identifies, and (2) whether a given society is willing to recognize an individual’s felt sense of identity by granting her membership in the desired group. For instance, if the rabbi thinks you are not seriously committed to Judaism, she can block you from attempted conversion. Still, the possibility of rejection reveals that, barring strong overriding considerations, transition to a different identity category is often accepted in our society.

It is not clear how this is a mischaracterization. Nor is it “offhand” in any objectionable way.

One would think. I think it’s at least partly wrong, but I’ll save that for a separate post.

The open letter continues:

It is difficult to imagine that this article could have been endorsed by referees working in critical race theory and trans theory, which are the two areas of specialization that should have been most relevant to the review process. A message has been sent, to authors and readers alike, that white cis scholars may engage in speculative discussion of these themes without broad and sustained engagement with those theorists whose lives are most directly affected by transphobia and racism.

I contacted Hypatia to ask whether the paper had undergone their standard reviewing procedure, and the editors there stated that it had. The paper made it through double-anonymous review with at least two referees.

But the Associate Editors decided to grovel anyway, and to throw Tuvel to the wolves.

The speed with which this has all happened is extraordinary.

The apology is in the form of a public Facebook post from Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta. She notes that the associate editors “don’t make editorial decisions but we do advise the editors on policy.”

And they do apparently feel entitled to throw young untenured colleagues to the wolves.

And then there’s Tuvel’s statement.

UPDATE (5/1/2017): The author of the article in question, Rebecca Tuvel, has issued the following statement:

I wrote this piece from a place of support for those with non-normative identities, and frustration about the ways individuals who inhabit them are so often excoriated, body-shamed, and silenced. When the case of Rachel Dolezal surfaced, I perceived a transphobic logic that lay at the heart of the constant attacks against her. My article is an effort to extend our thinking alongside transgender theories to other non-normative possibilities.

The vehement criticism has already raised a number of concerns. I regret the deadnaming of Caitlyn Jenner in the article, which means that I referred to her birth name instead of her chosen name. Even though she does this herself in her book, I understand that it is not for outsiders to do and that such a practice can perpetuate harm against transgender individuals, and I apologize. The deadnaming will be removed from the article. I also understand that some people are offended by my use of the term transgenderism. My motivation for using it came from a blogpost by Julia Serano, as I find her defense of the term persuasive. A valid reproach is that my article discusses the lives of vulnerable people without sufficiently citing their own first-person experiences and views.

But so much wrath on electronic media has been expressed in the form of ad hominem 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. From the few who have expressed their support, much has been said to me about bullying culture, call-out culture, virtue-signaling, a mob mentality, and academic freedom.

So little of what has been said, however, is based upon people actually reading what I wrote. There are theoretical and philosophical questions that I raise that merit our reflection. Not doing so can only reinforce gender and racial essentialism. I deeply worry about the claim that the project itself is harmful to trans people and people of color. These are, of course, wide and varied groups, some of whom experience offense and harm at the idea of transracialism, and others who do not. People of color and trans individuals are not of one mind about this topic, of course, and online publications attest to this. For instance, Kai M. Green has defended the importance of grappling with the question of transracialism. Adolph Reed Jr., Camille Gear Rich, Melissa Harris Perry, Allyson Hobbs, Angela Jones, Ann Morton, BP Morton, among others, have also expressed more sympathetic positions on the topic. The philosophical stakes of this discussion merit our consideration.

Calls for intellectual engagement are also being shut down because they “dignify” the article. If this is considered beyond the pale as a response to a controversial piece of writing, then critical thought is in danger. I have never been under the illusion that this article is immune from critique. But the last place one expects to find such calls for censorship rather than discussion is amongst philosophers

Wouldn’t you think?

Jesse Singal this morning:

1/ One other observation about this whole Hypatia blowup. In @tweetertation's excellent book, which I'm working on a piece about, she IDs

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

.@tweetertation 2/ this strange and exceedingly unfortunate characteristic of the present progressive privilege-discourse in https://t.co/ENuTmO3TKF

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

.@tweetertation 3/ which women get ganged up on online as these awful, clueless, evil avatars of supreme privilege. It really does seem to hit women way

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

.@tweetertation 4/ more than men, which should give us pause. The thinking seems to be that their whiteness means they have a huge amount of power, and

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

.@tweetertation 5/therefore they are fair game. That totally happened here. A young woman philosophy professor does not have all that much power, even if

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

.@tweetertation 6/ she is white, and some of the responses I'm seeing from the sliver of people supporting the pile-on are acting like she's some sort of

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

.@tweetertation 7/ empress. Which is insane! Privilege politics often turns discussions of power into really weird fairytales.

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

Exactly so. That’s certainly Zoé Samudzi’s approach, and she’s far from alone. Isn’t it interesting how it’s so nearly always women who are the targets of this kind of shit? Isn’t it even more interesting how it’s feminism and feminists hanging from the gibbet?

I’m told that Zoé Samudzi perpetrated a Twitter storm on Friday, and I gather that may be what set off the flamers who quickly got Hypatia to agree to throw Rebecca Tuvel under the bus. Samudzi tweets a lot, so I haven’t found the storm yet, but I found a more recent squall, and it’s nasty enough for any taste. She’s responding to Jesse Singal’s article yesterday.

This @chronicle piece on the Hypatia backlash is bad: it gives Tuvel a platform, but no black or trans academicshttps://t.co/Wg2Zt612RS

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017

The piece is about Tuvel, specifically the attack on Tuvel and the retraction of her article along with a public attack by the editors. It doesn’t “give her a platform”; it reports on her abrupt deprivation of a platform. It’s not obliged to give other academics a “platform”; it’s an article, not an academic department or a conference.

And of course her comments are dog whistle identity politics critique and whining about "censorship rather than discussions." pic.twitter.com/Dm6p5Uqzep

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017

“Whining” indeed. As if Samudzi wouldn’t “whine” if somebody published an article of hers and then retracted it and publicly excoriated her. And she’s lying about the dogwhistle.

Meanwhile it's academics making leveled critique about content and her lazy sociological treatment of race and gender (including my THREAD).

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017

Oh, is she being neglected? Is that a whine? Also, is she really complaining about not getting enough credit for her Twitter yammering? It’s Twitter; it’s not publication. Nobody is obliged to pay attention to her THREAD.

But as with Dolezal, it's ultimately a white woman being given the opportunity to be legitimized & affirmed as a victim. I'm fucking tired.

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017

Oh I see, this is white privilege, is it? Having an article retracted and having the editors publicly trash you? And it’s being affirmed as a victim? That’s how that works?

If this stuff is representative, Samudzi must be a remarkably callous and malicious human being. If that’s lefty politics, we’re all fucked.

This isn't "stifling dialogue": it's responding to a dangerous and frankly irresponsible piece of "scholarly work" that misdefines identity.

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017

It’s not “dangerous.” That blackmailing catastrophizing bullshit is what’s dangerous: it’s driving feminism out of public discourse.

…Tuvel bludgeoned trans materiality and then has the audacity to whine about "academic freedom" when her epistemic violence gets pushback.

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017

That’s simply disgusting. She’s not “whining”; her academic freedom was very obviously infringed; she hasn’t engaged in any “epistemic violence”; and retracting an article and demonizing its author is not mere “pushback.”

I wonder if her tenure committee is following this…

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017

Sure, go ahead, destroy her career. Why not?

I feel dirty now.

Jesse Singal has written a blast against the public trashing of Rebecca Tuvel’s article.

In late March, Hypatia, a feminist-philosophy journal, published an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, as part of its spring 2017 issue. The point of the article, as the title suggests, is to toy around with the question of what it would mean if some people really were — as Rachel Dolezal claimed — “transracial,” meaning they identified as a race that didn’t line up with how society viewed them in light of their ancestry.

Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept the following premises about trans people and the rights and dignity to which they are entitled; (2) we also accept the following premises about identities and identity change in general; (3) therefore, the common arguments against transracialism fail, and we should accept that there’s little apparent logically coherent reason to deny the possibility of genuine transracialism.

Anyone who has read an academic philosophy paper will be familiar with this sort of argument. The goal, often, is to provoke a little — to probe what we think and why we think it, and to highlight logical inconsistencies that might help us better understand our values and thought processes. This sort of article is abstract and laden with hypotheticals — the idea is to pull up one level from the real world and force people to grapple with principles and claims on their own merits, rather than — in the case of Dolezal — baser instincts like disgust and outrage. This is what many philosophers do.

Fortunately for us, because it’s a good idea to probe what we think and why we think it and to highlight logical inconsistencies that might help us better understand our values and thought processes. One of the things I loathe most about the “SHUN HER NOW” school of non-thought is the way it forbids all that and insists that thinking has to be replaced with formulas and that the formulas have to be repeated exactly or dire punishment will follow. In short I loathe the banning of thought and probing and questions. I think I knew I couldn’t stay at FTB any longer when the goons started mocking me for daring to say it made a difference whether we were talking about ontology or politics. Fucking hell, if we can’t make distinctions as basic as that how can we think at all?

Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt, abetted in part by Hypatia’s refusal to stand up for her. The journal has already apologized for the article, despite the fact that it was approved through its normal editorial process, and Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation by sharing all sorts of false claims about the article that don’t bear the scrutiny of even a single close read.

The biggest vehicle of misinformation about Tuvel’s articles comes from the “open letter to Hypatia” that has done a great deal to help spark the controversy. That letter has racked up hundreds of signatories within the academic community — the top names listed are Elise Springer of Wesleyan University, Alexis Shotwell of Carleton University (who is listed as the point of contact), Dilek Huseyinzadegan of Emory University, Lori Gruen of Wesleyan, and Shannon Winnubst of Ohio State University.

It’s shocking. What the open letter people are doing is shocking.

Singal goes through the open letter and lists the many mistakes and false claims in it. I recommend reading the whole thing.

All in all, it’s remarkable how many basic facts this letter gets wrong about Tuvel’s paper. Either the authors simply lied about the article’s contents, or they didn’t read it at all. Every single one of the hundreds of signatories on the open letter now has their name on a document that severely (and arguably maliciously) mischaracterizes the work of one of their colleagues. This is not the sort of thing that usually happens in academia — it’s a really strange, disturbing instance of mass groupthink, perhaps fueled by the dynamics of online shaming and piling-on.

Others within academia criticized Tuvel’s article in misleading ways as well. In his article, Weinberg highlights a popular public Facebook post by Nora Berenstain, a philosophy professor at the University of Tennessee, that has since been taken down but which read as follows (I’m introducing numbers to take the new points on one by one):

(1) Tuvel enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay. She deadnames a trans woman. She uses the term “transgenderism.” (2) She talks about “biological sex” and uses phrases like “male genitalia.” (3) She focuses enormously on surgery, which promotes the objectification of trans bodies. (4) She refers to “a male-to- female (mtf) trans individual who could return to male privilege,” promoting the harmful transmisogynistic ideology that trans women have (at some point had) male privilege.

I read Berenstein’s post yesterday, more than once. I find it skin-crawling. It’s still readable on Google’s cache. Singal notes a fraction of what’s wrong with her post too, and then comments:

I could go on and on. This is a witch hunt. There has simply been an explosive amount of misinformation circulating online about what is and isn’t in Tuvel’s article, which few of her most vociferous critics appear to have even skimmed, based on their inability to accurately describe its contents. Because the right has seized on Rachel Dolezal as a target of gleeful ridicule, and as a means of making opportunistic arguments against the reality of the trans identity, a bunch of academics who really should know better are attributing to Tuvel arguments she never made, simply because she connected those two subjects in an academic article.

But it’s quite clear from her own words Tuvel doesn’t believe it’s an apt comparison to make Breitbart-y arguments about Dolezal and trans people. Here’s what she says in her very first endnote: “Importantly, I am not suggesting that race and sex are equivalent. Rather, I intend to show that similar arguments that support transgenderism support transracialism. My thesis relies in no way upon the claim that race and sex are equivalent, or historically constructed in exactly the same way.” She is making a very specific, narrow argument about identity in an academic philosophy setting, all while noting, every step of the way, that she believes trans people are who they say they are, and that they should be entitled to the full rights and recognition of their identity. This pile-on isn’t even close to warranted.

So why are they doing it? Because it’s so much fun? Because they’re fanatics? Because they’re afraid? I don’t know. I don’t get it. I never have. The venom directed at me was out of proportion too, and I never got that either.

(It started with Dolezal in my case too.)

Unfortunately, Hypatia simply surrendered to this sustained misinformation campaign. On April 30, one of the journal’s editors, Cressida Hayes, posted a lengthy apology to Facebook, later posted to the journal’s Facebook page as well, from “the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors.” Among other things, the apology notes that “[i]t is our position that the harms that have ensued from the publication of this article could and should have been prevented by a more effective review process.” Like the critiques themselves, the apology deeply misreads and misinterprets the original article: “Perhaps most fundamentally,” write the editors, “to compare ethically the lived experience of trans people (from a distinctly external perspective) primarily to a single example of a white person claiming to have adopted a black identity creates an equivalency that fails to recognize the history of racial appropriation, while also associating trans people with racial appropriation.” At no point in Tuvel’s article does she come close to doing anything like this. Rather, the entire premise of the article is to examine what genuine instances of deeply felt transracialism would tell us about identity and identity change in light of the progressive view of trans rights. Early on, she even effectively sets Dolezal aside, writing that she isn’t particularly interested in what Dolezal really feels, since that’s unknowable, but is rather interested in dissecting some of the underlying issues about identity in a more hypothetical way — “My concern in this article is less with the veracity of Dolezal’s claims,” she writes, “and more with the arguments for and against transracialism.”

They’re interesting. Some people are interested in such things. It shouldn’t be treated as a crime.

It is pretty remarkable for an academic journal to, in the wake of an online uproar, apologize and suggest one of its articles caused “harm,” all while failing to push back against brazenly inaccurate misreadings of that article — especially in light of the fact that Tuvel said in a statement (readable at the bottom of the Daily Nous article) that she’s dealing with a wave of online abuse and hate mail.

Some other academics have already reacted angrily to the extent to which Hypatia rolled over in the wake of this outrage-storm. On his Leiter Reports philosophy blog, for example, Brian Leiter, a philosophy professor, writes

…what you already know he writes, because I posted about it yesterday.

[W]hat’s disturbing here is how many hundreds of academics signed onto and helped spread utterly false claims about one of their colleagues, and the extent to which Hypatia, faced with such outrage, didn’t even bother trying to sift legitimate critiques from frankly made-up ones. A huge number of people who haven’t read Tuvel’s article now believe, on the basis of that trumped-up open letter and unfounded claims of “violence,” that it is so deeply transphobic it warranted an unusual apology from the journal that published it.

We should want academics to write about complicated, difficult, hot-button issues, including identity. Online pile-ons cannot, however righteous they feel, dictate journals’ publication policies and how they treat their authors and articles. It’s really disturbing to watch this sort of thing unfold in real time — there’s such a stark disconnect between what Tuvel wrote and what she is purported to have written. This whole episode should worry anybody who cares about academia’s ability to engage in difficult issues at a time when outrage can spread faster than ever before.

I second that.