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

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

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

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

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

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

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

5/therefore

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.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/859122708633665536

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, … Read the rest

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