Philosopher’s Article On Transracialism Sparks Controversy (Updated with response from author)


An article in the current issue of the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia has created such a controversy over the past several days that the members of its board of associate editors have now issued an apology for publishing it.

The article is “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. 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. [See the update below for a response from Prof. Tuvel.] 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…

It would be decidedly unjust for the acceptance of trans individuals to turn on such knowledge [of the biological versus social basis of sex-gender identity]…

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.” 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. In her discussion of “transracialism,” Tuvel doesn’t cite a single woman of color philosopher, nor does she substantively engage with any work by Black women, nor does she cite or engage with the work of any Black trans women who have written on this topic.

An open letter to Hypatia complaining about the article is now being circulated  and currently has over 130 signatures [update: the letter has apparently been taken down; a screenshot of it is available here]. It states that the article “falls short of scholarly standards” and requests the article be retracted. Among the reasons cited are the following:

1. It uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields; for example, the author uses the language of “transgenderism” and engages in deadnaming a trans woman;

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;

3. It misrepresents leading accounts of belonging to a racial group; for example, the author incorrectly cites Charles Mills as a defender of voluntary racial identification;

4. It fails to seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color) in its discussion of “transracialism”. We endorse Hypatia’s stated commitment to “actively reflect and engage the diversity within feminism, the diverse experiences and situations of women, and the diverse forms that gender takes around the globe,” and we find that this submission was published without being held to that commitment.

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’s 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.

Point 3 is just plain false. Here is what Tuvel says about Mills:

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.

Point 4 has come up in a number of discussions about the article. However, to my knowledge, no one has pointed to a particular piece of scholarship by a woman philosopher of color that is relevant to the specific question Tuvel takes up in her essay. (Readers, examples would be much appreciated.)

That leaves Point 1. I am not an expert in the relevant subfields, so I am not in much of a position to comment as to whether their conventions have been adhered to by Tuvel. Such conventions clearly embed some expert knowledge and communicative efficiency, yet there is a question here about the extent to which a failure to adhere to such conventions counts as an objection.

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.

Between the complaints on social media and the open letter, sufficient pressure has been put on Hypatia that members of its board of associate editors have already issued an apology for publishing Tuvel’s essay in which they state that “Clearly, the article should not have been published.” 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.”

We, the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors, extend our profound apology to our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy, especially transfeminists, queer feminists, and feminists of color, for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused. The sources of those harms are multiple, and include: descriptions of trans lives that perpetuate harmful assumptions and (not coincidentally) ignore important scholarship by trans philosophers; the practice of deadnaming, in which a trans person’s name is accompanied by a reference to the name they were assigned at birth; the use of methodologies which take up important social and political phenomena in dehistoricized and decontextualized ways, thus neglecting to address and take seriously the ways in which those phenomena marginalize and commit acts of violence upon actual persons; and an insufficient engagement with the field of critical race theory. Perhaps most fundamentally, 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. We recognize and mourn that these harms will disproportionately fall upon those members of our community who continue to experience marginalization and discrimination due to racism and cisnormativity.

It 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. We are deeply troubled by this and are taking this opportunity to seriously reconsider our review policies and practices. While nothing can change the fact that the article was published, we are dedicated to doing what we can to make things right. Clearly, the article should not have been published, and we believe that the fault for this lies in the review process. In addition to the harms listed above imposed upon trans people and people of color, publishing the article risked exposing its author to heated critique that was both predictable and justifiable. A better review process would have both anticipated the criticisms that quickly followed the publication, and required that revisions be made to improve the argument in light of those criticisms.

The full statement is available here. You can click on the screenshots below to be taken to the publisher’s page for Tuvel’s article.

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.

UPDATE (5/2/17, ongoing): Commentary elsewhere. [Note this list has been expanded and is now here.]

  • “The reason that two anonymous blind reviewers recommended publication of Tuvel’s paper is because it is a tightly written, well argued philosophical defense of a novel thesis that merits serious philosophical consideration.” — Mylan Engel (Northern Illinois) in a public Facebook post.
  • “It looks to me like defamation per se.” — Brian Leiter (Chicago) at Leiter Reports.
  • “A tentative response to some elements in her piece from the perspective of a fellow-traveler in Millian philosophy.” — Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) at Digressions & Impressions.
  • “The Associate Editors’ Board, in condemning publication (and themselves) ahead of any formal retraction investigation, seem to be on procedurally thin ice” — David Wallace (Univ. Southern California) in the comments below. Also in the comments, from Udo Schuklenk (Queen’s University): “among the signatories of the letter demanding a retraction were a number of current and former journal editors who should have known better than demanding a retraction in the absence of providing an actual justification for that demand, a justification that meets the standards of international ethical guidelines that are binding on the journal.”
  • “It is time for those of us who are tenured to stop allowing a very junior and vulnerable feminist scholar to be subjected to this treatment without any public support from the feminist community.” — Chloe Taylor (Alberta) in the comments, below.
  • “Stop symbolically conscripting Rebecca Tuvel into the role of personifying all of these systemic issues that attach to the profession at large.” — Prof Manners at Feminist Philosophers.
  • “I am bothered by the self-righteousness of philosophers and others who speak from positions of relative privilege—white and/or cis and/or masculine and/or tenured—acting as if they’re so woke that they would never make the kinds of mistakes they’ve charged to Tuvel.” — Jason Wyckoff at his blog.
  • “Although there have been many contributions on both sides of the discussion that have made it clear that Prof. Tuvel is not to blame, individually, for the crisis, some have unfairly targeted her and do not look to the bigger picture. Let us now focus on why this spark led to the fire, rather than the spark.” — Sally Haslanger (MIT) here.
  • In “The School of Athens,” Raphael “disguised Hypatia in the likeness of the Pope’s favorite nephew, hoping in this way to gain approval of the painting. By altering her to resemble the nephew’s juvenile features, he rendered her in a way that she could pass as male, but this also required replacing her darker features with pale ones. We need to understand more of our own history in order to make a different and better future.”  — Linda Alcoff (Hunter/CUNY) in a public Facebook post.
  • “I’ve heard a version of this criticism made many times by philosophers with activist commitments: 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. I’ve always found these kinds of worries to be exaggerated…” — Holly Lawford Smith (Melbourne) at Crooked Timber.
  • “If those of us on the left are unable to make distinctions between legitimate intellectual disagreements and damaging lies, we will be hoist with our own petard.” — Suzanna Danuta Walters (Northeastern) in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  • Some academics “supported Tuvel in private while actually attacking her in public… [while others] were pressuring, even threatening, Tuvel that she wouldn’t get tenure and her career would be ruined if she didn’t retract her article.” — Kelly Oliver (Vanderbilt) in The Philosophical Salon at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Also of interest: “An Inclusive Bibliography on Race, Gender, and Related Topics” — a Google Doc.

 

 

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Ammon Allred
Ammon Allred
6 years ago

“That leaves Point 1. I am not an expert in the relevant subfields, so I am not in much of a position to comment as to whether their conventions have been adhered to by Tuvel. Such conventions clearly embed some expert knowledge and communicative efficiency, yet there is a question here about the extent to which a failure to adhere to such conventions counts as an objection.”

This seems to be the crux of the issue. If you extend the “I am not an expert in the relevant subfields” beyond just addressing point 1 to addressing the controversy more broadly, one wonders why this post takes so much time presuming to be in a position to adjudicate the claims made.

To be clear, I’m not an expert in the relevant subfields either, which is why I defer to the condemnation has been nearly universal among experts in the relevant subfields.

Ammon Allred
Ammon Allred
Reply to  Justin Weinberg
6 years ago

I’m not asking you to shut up, but it does seem to me that as someone who hosts a large blog in the profession, it would have behooved you to be more sensitive to representing the controversy as it stands rather than inserting such a strong editorial voice. Certainly, as philosophers we should be aware of how the initial framing of an issue is often prejudicial. The way you’ve chosen to frame it opens it up to the sort of response one gets from Eric below, who shows his own colors with terms like “social identity crusaders.”

So I’m not asking you to be silent, but I am asking you to be more thoughtful and a better listener.

fearful
fearful
Reply to  Ammon Allred
6 years ago

I agree with Ammon. It is an incredibly sensitive issue that deserves to be treated as such in a professional blog.

This blog post does not read charitably and as a minority of sorts in philosophy, I fear possible negative repercussions if I say more after reading some of the comments below.

Oliver Traldi
Oliver Traldi
Reply to  fearful
6 years ago

Possible negative repercussions like a mob calling you “violent” and censoring your scholarly output?

Ammon Allred
Ammon Allred
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

Again, it’s really too bad that this post decided to frame the issue in a way that gives folks like Oliver Traldi license to accuse other people of “nonsense, metaphysically” while representing themselves as enemies of censorship, without seeming to have engaged any of the issues at stake.. Since when has it been censorship when a majority of the Journal’s own editorial board note that an article should never have been published? But, then when the motives are imputed by saying things like “Between the complaints on social media and the open letter, sufficient pressure has been put on Hypatia that members of its board of associate editors have already issued an apology for publishing Tuvel’s essay” the problem has already been framed as an issue of censorship, so it’s unsurprising.

Oliver Traldi
Oliver Traldi
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

I don’t need any “license” to call things how I see them. I’m happy to see DN taking a stand for free speech rather than its standard “devil’s advocacy, but maybe free speech sucks!” And I’ve read plenty about the metaphysics of social kinds, thank you very much. Or is it a sign of erudition to find bad arguments convincing?

Lance Bush
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

Hi Ammon. You say this:

“Since when has it been censorship when a majority of the Journal’s own editorial board note that an article should never have been published?”

This seems to me to get things causally backwards. They made these acknowledgments only after vicious pushback, and almost certainly because of it. It is doubtful they’d have made similar remarks if it weren’t for the degree of hostility in those critiques. So since when has it been censorship to pressure someone into “agreeing” that they were in the wrong? Since forever.

Ammmon Allred
Ammmon Allred
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

Lance,

The statement signed by the majority of members of Hypatia’s editorial board reads: “Clearly, the article should not have been published, and we believe that the fault for this lies in the review process.” To view this as an issue of censorship is to refuse to take this statement at its word. We as philosophers should be more aware of framing effects.

I applaud Hypatia’s Board for being willing to address acknowledged failures in their own editorial process.

Lance Bush
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

There is plenty of reason to worry that such a response is a post hoc concession to vociferous critics that does not reflect the attitude the editorial board would have had in the absence of pushback. As such, I see it as compromised and the reaction of critics as a form of soft censorship.

Ammon Allred
Ammon Allred
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

Right, but you can only make that case if you assume that the assertion doesn’t have merits on its own grounds. So you rather paternalistically substitute your own judgement of what the import of their statement is without paying attention to what is actually at issue and without addressing the merits of the statement. Which is precisely the problem with the original post, and with the entire “censorship” red herring that this thread has gone down.

Lance Bush
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

Note the remarks below by Wallace: certain serious breaches ought to be met to warrant justifiable retraction (perhaps you disagree with those conditions; I do not). I do not think this article likely to meet those conditions. The apology and any ostensible retraction are not only unjustified, but are themselves a far greater outrage than the contents of the article.

So you say this is a red herring. What do you mean? The way I see it, this is ideological policing of journal contents by organized public outrage. If there are serious scholarly problems with the article, they do not appear in the letter, and the concerns they do raise do not strike me as justifications for retraction.

Philya
Philya
Reply to  Justin Weinberg
6 years ago

Recently heard from an anthropologist friend, who has read the article, that they are so disappointed at this article’s publication that they and other peers in their discipline consider this whole debacle a “referendum on philosophy”. They think philosophy is already so narrow and insular, that our internally not understanding why people are upset at its publication is just making things look worse.
I think perhaps we can’t forget that this article is not just a philosophy paper, it really is in a cross-disciplinary field, in a journal which other disciplines read. The consensus spoken of about the quality of scholarship and the failure to engage with scholarship in those other fields does in fact extend beyond philosophy.

((Let me just add, I wish it were not necessary, that in NO WAY is this intended to be further condemnation of the author of the article, who has been sorely mistreated by our community; the reviewers should have known better. It is just that a lot of the puzzlement from philosophy circles right now seems to be about why anyone thinks it’s bad scholarship in the first place –– I am not sure that’s quite so hard to find out if one talks to other humanists and social scientists who have read it)).

Skeptical
Skeptical
Reply to  Philya
6 years ago

Well, philosophy has standards of objectivity, openness, peer review, and argumentation that are famously not shared by many of the ‘soft’ versions of the social sciences or by many of the humanities disciplines. This is the saving grace for philosophy that, if noted well, could spare us from severe budget cuts when some of the less rigorous disciplines may not fare so well.

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  Philya
6 years ago

What did the anthropologist think were the article’s main flaws?

Did they include the things mentioned by the petition to have it retracted?

CN
CN
Reply to  David Mathers
6 years ago

As an anthropologist, I’m also curious about this. I mean, the article couldn’t be published *as anthropology* since it doesn’t use any sort of ethnographic research. And, the related aspect of the criticism (that she didn’t reference POC/trans scholars) seems a valid concern in terms of its publication in Hypatia which, as someone above mentioned, tends towards a more interdisciplinary crowd. But the failure to meet interdisciplinary (or other-disciplinary) norms of publication hardly makes it a “referendum on philosophy”…. just, wat?

Matt Drabek
Matt Drabek
Reply to  Ammon Allred
6 years ago

Not only is point 1 the “crux” of the issue, I mean, it’s really almost all the issue from what I have seen and read. Probably 95-99% of the criticism I’ve seen in online sources has been about the deadnaming and the use of outmoded/inappropriate terminology (“transgenderism”). And these things appear directly in the abstract, so you don’t even need to read the paper itself to find these issues. The other issues appear to come up from time to time, but someone who has addressed points 2-4 clearly hasn’t really addressed much of the criticism of the paper.

thecart
thecart
Reply to  Matt Drabek
6 years ago

If those are the principle complaints, the author could have simply been asked to change the article on those points, without altering any of the argument. It’s somewhat unorthodox to do so after the article has been published, but it certainly could be done. (Not to mention that in one case the author has a reasonable defence anyway; namely that she read a famous trans activists arguing that a particular term was fine, and was persuaded by this. This strongly suggests to me that there is no consensus against using the term, but maybe Serrano is a massive outlier.)

Matt Drabek
Matt Drabek
Reply to  thecart
6 years ago

In the end, my guess is that this (dropping the deadnaming and changing the terminology without altering the argument) is probably what will happen. Whether or not that’s the appropriate response is something I’m leaving to others to write about. But, specifically regarding Serano, yes, she’s probably best considered an outlier these days among theorists. But there are certain generational issues that come up here (very few, if any, theorists under the age of 40 use “transgenderism”, and the primary usage of the term appears to be the negative usage among TERFs that Serano identifies in the post Tuvel links above).

Kathleen Lowrey
Kathleen Lowrey
Reply to  Matt Drabek
6 years ago

TERF is a slur, not an accepted term of art. What the hell Hypatia, so feminists should get busy no-platforming themselves? Cripes and crikey. I’ve been driven to agree with Brian Leiter about something!

Jason Burke Murphy
Jason Burke Murphy
Reply to  Matt Drabek
6 years ago

Tuvel’s statement includes an apology for “deadnaming” Jenner and she will edit the article to get rid of this.
As for “transgenderism”, she cites a scholar’s defense of the term.

Prince Go-Go
Prince Go-Go
6 years ago

Wouldn’t it have been better for someone to write a reply arguing that the paper is mistaken?

Lance Bush
Reply to  Prince Go-Go
6 years ago

Not in today’s world. Instead you want to create the online equivalent of a riot and demand apologies. This is the result of identity politics superseding open inquiry. I am embarrassed for the philosophical profession that someone would claim that referring to biological sex is a form of ‘violence.’ This trivializes real violence and is a shameful exploitation of concept creep to silence viewpoints the critic disagrees with.

cairnsh
cairnsh
Reply to  Lance Bush
6 years ago

That’s right, in the modern Internet a person can start a post by calling an open letter “the online equivalent of a riot” and finish it by complaining about other people’s easy use of violence metaphors.

Christian Gibbons
Christian Gibbons
Reply to  cairnsh
6 years ago

Lance Bush’s post made analogies. The open letter decried Tuvel’s paper as an instance of actual violence. Not comparable enough to warrant accusations of hypocrisy.

Lance Bush
Reply to  cairnsh
6 years ago

The whole point of emphasizing “online equivalent” was to make it clear that this was a virtual and not a literal riot while simultaneously drawing attention to the characteristics it does share with a real riot. I am willing to bet if someone paid you to accurately describe what characteristics I think are shared and which ones are not shared, you’d do a pretty good job, so I have serious doubts you or anyone else could interpret me as engaging in the same rhetorical moves.

Likewise for claims like “witch hunt.” These are analogies; the people who we are criticizing make use of the language of violence in a way that deliberately equivocates or even explicitly suggests that certain expressions are a literal form of violence.

Eric
Eric
6 years ago

Thank you for a detailed and nuanced post, Justin. With respect for Ammon Allred, I do not think point 1 is the crux of the issue. I think the crux of the issue is that the author expressed views that are considered verboten by identity politics crusaders, which sparked the usual outburst of social-media-based rage. The outrage this article occasioned was not caused by mundane issues with the terminology employed by the article. It was occasioned by the fact that someone publicly endorsed views that the crusaders don’t agree with. Anyone who does that must be denounced and silenced.

EDT
EDT
Reply to  Justin Weinberg
6 years ago

With genuine respect, given that according to the open letter the article causes harm, it’s “continued availability causes further harm, ” and that as a result those signing the open letter have “concerns reach beyond mere scholarly disagreement” , and given that we are discussing an article that whatever its scholarly merits, is hardly inflammatory rhetoric but a scholarly technical article published in Hypatia, how is this not a case of calls for censorship from scholars with a political and/or philosophical agenda?

Maureen
Maureen
6 years ago

On point 3- Mills argues that race is objective meaning we cannot as individuals simply ‘choose’ racial identity because of the 5 features named above. It is also socially constructed (and not metaphysically reducible to ‘real’ essences) because it is phenotypical and not genotypical. Yet for Mills, it exists independently of our preferences and choices. It is maintained in objective ways through ancestry and a history of racial oppression and systemic racism. “Passing as white” to gain access to social opportunity was a pragmatic choice for some Black Americans – not an instance of transracialism for Mills. But “passing” as Black when one was born white, and identifying with a history of racial oppression and insubordination, without that ancestry, history, and only a ‘dip’ into culture, is neither pragmatic nor metaphysically objective. It is also morally offensive given the history of racially oppression and white supremacy. The refusal to consider that the U.S. is not a place where ancestry is “downplayed” for Black Americans (the ‘one drop rule’) seems like willful ignorance. Also here is a start at some of those relevant readings:
Alcoff, Visible Identities
Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera
Anzaldúa and Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed
Collins, Black Feminist Thought
hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?
Lorde, Sister Outsider
Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregringajes
Narayan, Dislocating Cultures

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Justin Weinberg
6 years ago

It comes from Tuvel saying “Dolezeal may or may not be transracial” and that she is keeping open the possibility for the sake of argument when it is clearly the case that the only criteria Dolezeal has met is her own choice to so identify. The entire problematics of the case in terms of absence of ancestry AND societal unwillingness is side-stepped for ‘theoretical purposes.’ Yet real peoples’ lives are being considered ‘theoretically’ without the embedded context of scholarship by Black queer and trans women who have managed to work through every obstacle to tell the truth in ways ‘acceptable’ to academic PhD programs and journals only to be ignored (and disrespected) when a young white scholar wants to muse ‘theoretically.’

Benji
Benji
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

Isn’t it a problem – and sorta Tuvel’s point – that parallel arguments could be leveled against the idea of being transgender?

You write, “it is clearly the case that the only criteria Dolezeal has met is her own choice to so identify. The entire problematics of the case in terms of absence of ancestry AND societal unwillingness is side-stepped.”

Don’t TERFS argue that “it is clearly the case that the only criteria [transgender individuals have] met is [their] own choice to so identify. The entire problematics of the case in terms of absence of [biological markers of sex] AND societal unwillingness is side-stepped.”

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Benji
6 years ago
junior
junior
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

Maureen,

That critique is helpful, but did you notice the author’s contemptous exchange (https://twitter.com/kopshtik/status/859137079489421312) with this other guy, who screencaps a private email RT sent to him and writes: “Here’s what she sent me. Grovelling in private, defensive as all fuck in public where someone she wants a job from might see”

Setting aside the frankly gross sexist imagery of a woman groveling to a man in private to protect her image in public, I really don’t see how this sort of public shaming is proportionate or appropriate; I think it’s that sort of response that lots of people are worried about.

Memo
Memo
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

Wouldn’t the same concept apply to men identifying as women?, There is clearly a historic trend of mistreatment and abuse of woman by men. Wouldn’t be morally offensive to identify with a history of gender oppression and insubordination without having the right genetic background?
This is a serious question, I am not trying to disprove your argument, Thanks.

A
A
Reply to  Memo
6 years ago

I take it this is one of the issues that the article wants readers to consider, that it’s hard to spell out consistently how Dolezal has done something wrong by virtue of her change in identification in a way that doesn’t imply trans-women have done something wrong by virtue of their change in identification. Clearly there’s something approaching a consensus for a lot of people that Dolezal *has* done something wrong, and (rightly) a consensus (that the article defends) that trans-women haven’t. It seems like asking why these are the case and how they co-exist is an offensive question.

Oliver Traldi
Oliver Traldi
Reply to  A
6 years ago

The answer is always: “Race and gender are different.”

What the differences are (Haslanger certainly treats them very similarly, and indeed intentionally analogously), and exactly how those differences are relevant, tends to be left as an exercise for the reader, because (see above) there’s a very voluminous literature on this that is, apparently, nobody’s particular responsibility to summarize or “educate” us about.

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  A
6 years ago

Two differences I’ve seen cited:

1) Black people have been more oppressed in American history than women, and this explains why it would be wrong to try and switch from black-white, or at least it’s wrong to think this is much like the case where someone who was gendered as male wants to know be treated as female.

This is obviously not a very convincing argument for thinking that you can consistently hold that there’s *nothing* morally troublesome about the gender case, since the basic premise that claiming to be a member of an oppressed group having been treated as being a member of the dominant group is morally dubious is being accepted, but it’s being claimed that the degree of wrong is (much) greater in the racial case. I suppose someone might be able to make out a case for transracialism being all things considered wrong, and being transgender being ok on the grounds that although we have the same basic type of reason to be dubious of both, the reason is much stronger in the racial case, and can therefore outweigh the other reasons we might have for permitting switching. But my guess is most trans activists would be super uncomfortable conceding to the proponents of old-style feminist anti-trans arguments that they had even a prima facie case, as anyone making this argument in the racial case basically has to. (To be fair, the person who made this argument to me was just a friend who is LGBT yes (L), but not particularly an expert in this area, so it may well be that none of the academic critics of Tuvel’s argument have anything like this in mind.)

2) In the gender case, people gendered as belonging to the oppressed group can move in the other direction. This is not plausibly so in the racial case, and so allowing transracialism creates an unfair assymetry against people who are already unfairly disadvantaged by racism, in way that allowing people to be transgendered doesn’t create an unfair asymmetry against women.

Suppose this is true, as it very well might be, because even very light skinned people with some known African ancestry are commonly classed as ‘black’ in America. It looks like at least a relevant consideration. But obviously more work would have to be done to show that it’s enough to tip the scales, if one thinks that not letting people switch harms them, which presumably any advocate of trans rights in the gender case is going to have to think at least about some hypothetical trans racial people who are relevantly psychologically like transgendered people (not necessarily about Dolezal).

Furthermore, accepting this argument means accepting that it would be impermissible to be a trans woman, if it was for some reason impossible for anyone gendered as male to go in the opposite direction. Once again I doubt many trans activists, or others supportive of trans rights are going to be terribly comfortable with this.

Olivia
Olivia
Reply to  David Mathers
6 years ago

Saying “black people are more oppressed than women” is ignorant of the reality of women’s oppression in the present and historical context, and it is ignorant of the concept of intersectionality and the work that has been done by black women to highlight the absurdity of the idea that one oppression is ‘worse’ than another. See: Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis. It is also ahistorical given the fact that women’s oppression chronologically precedes the existence of capitalism and white supremacy. By the end of this day, four women will be murdered by a husband or boyfriend in the United States alone. Racial oppression is not ‘worse’ than women’s oppression.

However, I love that you made this argument, as this is exactly what radical feminists have been saying since the 1970s. Women’s oppression is taken less seriously than racial oppression and class oppression because of this persistent, male supremacist myth that women’s oppression is not that big of a deal, or not as real as other kinds of oppression. It may be harder to see, but that is because violence against women happens in the so-called private sphere – women get killed at home.

I agree with you though, that this sexist perspective is the reason why people do not see the harm in insisting that any man who identifies as a woman must be taken seriously while insisting that any white person who identifies as black must be summarily dismissed. They think racial oppression is real and they think sex-based oppression is not.

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  Olivia
6 years ago

To be clear, I do not endorse the view that black people are more oppressed than women, I was merely recounting an argument against trans racialism that had been made to me.

Olivia
Olivia
Reply to  Olivia
6 years ago

Thanks for clarifying.

WP
WP
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

“Yet for Mills, it exists independently of our preferences and choices. It is maintained in objective ways through ancestry and a history of racial oppression and systemic racism.”

Isn’t gender objective in a parallel way—isn’t it maintained in objective ways through sex characteristics and and a history of gender oppression and systemic racism?

Ancestry is obviously different than sex characteristics, but it’s not more objective. There’s some vagueness with both, but also clear cases that act as the basis of the constructs.

The US isn’t a place where sex characteristics are downplayed either—if it was, trans people wouldn’t experience the pain and discrimination that they do.

SH
SH
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

Maureen, thank you for engaging seriously with the arguments at hand. I think you’re right that, for those who wish to draw a hard line between trans (in the sense of gender transition) and “transracialism”, some great weight must be placed on black ancestry. But–as someone who is immersed in race theory and not inclined to be charitable toward claims of transracialism–I just don’t think it’s that obvious. Race in the US is a conceptual mess stitched together out a pastiche of local social and economic practices, a series of ad hoc justifications for white supremacy, and a diverse set of counterreactions to those justifications. I make my seminar students try to define it on the first day of class, and after a few hours of frustration and a few dozen attempts that end up being absurd or exclusionary, they are finally ready to accept that they are embarking on the study of something that it is impossible to succinctly and comprehensively define.

In short, some communities and individuals emphasize ancestry; some don’t; in virtually every case, ancestry is something that interacts with other things, including appearance and culture. And even if we are to accept that race is largely a function of ancestry, that raises an equally vexing set of questions: 1)What kind of ancestry? The one drop rule is only one of the contenders. 2) What’s so special about ancestry? Since you seem to be talking about biological ancestry (in other words, a white person raised by black folks is still white), it seems like the answer must be biological, likely genetic–but race is not genetic. And arguments that affirm race as genetic are often used for anti-black purposes (ex. Charles Murray), which leads some activists and theorists to consider de-essentializing race an important priority. 3) Whatever race means in our current society, why not change it? In fact, given that the concept of race is from its origin white supremacist, it seems that the concept *must* be either transformed or abolished.

I’m not trying to analogize your arguments with Murray’s. It’s a defensible position and I think one can give quite good answers to some of these questions. I just want to emphasize that the position you’ve presented is not an obvious consensus in race theory, not remotely simple or “metaphysically objective”, and not unambiguously favorable to anti-racist goals.

ACM
ACM
6 years ago

“to my knowledge, no one has pointed to a particular piece of scholarship by a woman philosopher of color”

What role is “philosopher” playing, here? Wouldn’t scholarly work that bears on the subject, which is written by women of color, be work that ought to be consulted before publishing on a topic?

SadGradStudent
SadGradStudent
6 years ago

Thanks for this post, Justin.
Hypatia is not VOX News or MSNBC! Hypatia is an academic journal that I respect(ed!) so much, and this is so disappointing. I’m so extremely worried for feminist philosophy if our flagship academic journal is going to respond so erratically and thoughtlessly to facebook/twitter outrage. If anything is an example of terrible and careless philosophical writing, these facebook statuses are. So devastating!!

GradGirl
GradGirl
6 years ago

Here is what I’m not getting. In a scientific publication, why is it considered bad scholarship to use terms like ‘male genitalia’ and ‘biological sex’? In an article on sex-change, why would it be bad to focus on surgery, which is the method to achieve the sex-change (which, btw, is supposed to be a change from one biological sex to another)?

Thomas Mulligan
6 years ago

I hope that senior members of our profession come to Prof. Tuvel’s defense. It is to our disgrace that we have tolerated behavior like this from the fringe, feminist left for so long–the bullying, the intellectual emptiness, the self-indulgence. Surely, if we know anything about rational inquiry, we know that it is wrong to assess work on the basis of facts about the author’s race or gender.

Whatever our reasons for toleration have been, they are no longer viable. Our universities and our profession are under attack by those who claim that we simply produce left-wing cant. This open letter and the statement of Hypatia’s Associate Editors only bolsters their case. Important public policies, like the fight against climate change, are being ignored because we have as a culture lost respect for objective truth and rigorous inquiry. And we have a new–and in my view dangerous–President, elected in large part because hard-working, honest people were tired of being berated by the privileged, the whiny, and the non-contributing.

Most of us have known for a long time that this emperor has no clothes. Even if we haven’t always aired the view, we’ve known it. It’s time for us, as a profession, to do something about it.

Robert Frodeman
Robert Frodeman
Reply to  Thomas Mulligan
6 years ago

I would be interested in participating in a letter of defense.

Daniel Kaufman
Reply to  Robert Frodeman
6 years ago

So would I. And I hope that Dr. Tuvel takes Brian Leiter’s advice and sues these people for defamation. They are not only destroying the morale of those who work in our discipline, they are making a laughing stock out of philosophy to those outside the discipline.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
6 years ago

The article is technically well-crafted, but its grounding in the scholarly areas that it addresses is either superficial (in the case of critical race theory) or absent (in the case of trans* philosophy). The manuscript should have been sent to peer reviewers with expertise in these areas, as is customary, one assumes, for all professional philosophy papers. The editors’ statement suggests that this general scholarly norm was not followed in this instance.

Oliver Traldi
Oliver Traldi
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

Yes, sending an article to practitioners of essentially political disciplines is a good way to ensure that it comes out essentially politically correct.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

In your view, “politically correct” appears to function as semantically equivalent to “positions and arguments that I haven’t closely attended to but am politically antagonistic toward.”

Oliver Traldi
Oliver Traldi
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

1. It “appears” that way to you.
2. *critical theory nonsense*

3. It actually is that way.

This is actually a deductive argument.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

A B C
______
T T F

No, it is not.

Actual trans person here
Actual trans person here
6 years ago

Hi there, I’m an actual trans person, and also an academic. (I’m writing anonymously for the reason that my colleagues don’t know I’m trans.) I’m glad that cisgender people are becoming more sensitive to the existence of trans persons and trying to be careful in how to think about gender. However, I imagine not all trans people, or trans academics, agree with the exaggerated response to this article. At least this one does not. In my mind, it’s “enacting violence” when trans women are killed. It’s “enacting violence” when gay and bi men are rounded up in Chechnya. This article has said somethings which maybe are wrong, but it isn’t violent in any straightforward sense of the term. And even if, somehow, the language in the article contributes to general attitudes which are responsible in part for violent actions, we can distinguish between those violent actions and the arguments for them. I think that’s a kinda important distinction, actually.

Other points: I admit that I don’t understand this new fad of using the term “deadname” (its new and wasn’t used until maybe the last few years as far as I can tell). That just sounds kinda dramatic to me–it’s a name that I changed which I didn’t like. Other people do that. But that aside, some trans people are fine using their legal birth name in some contexts. Caitlyn Jenner, who frequently tweets photos of herself pre-transition, seems to be one of them. Why is it a problem to use her former name when mentioning her in the article? (If she were private, that would be another story).

Likewise, the language trans people use to describe themselves is quite varied (spend some time on Tumblr or Reddit). Maybe “transgenderism” isn’t standard in some contexts, and it is typically associated with anti-trans activists, but I’ve heard (I think cis) people complain about language that I know actual trans people use, which I find really weird. Further, whether trans women have had male privilege is also a controversial point–it’s not an established doctrine that everyone has to agree with. (If x privilege is at least in part a matter of one’s being perceived as x, then why not allow that trans women may have had privilege due to being perceived as male, even while they simultaneously had other forms of oppression?).

Look, this paper may be terrible. Maybe it shouldn’t have been published and it’s a failure of the review process. But it’s not itself violent, unless we’re going to stretch language hyperbolically. And these well-meaning people writing on Facebook and elsewhere don’t speak for all transgender persons, whether or not they are trans people or not. Let me also just note that what seems to be implicit here is requiring someone to have identity X in order to write about issues concerning X has some negative consequences both in categories of race and gender, and elsewhere–do we want potential authors to disclose if they are cisgender or transgender before publishing a piece? Should we determine just how much of racial category X allows someone to write on philosophy of race? What if they are frequently read as white? Are they excluded for having white privilege? Or can they only speak to that particular experience?

I am not sure that I’ll have the energy to engage with replies to this comment, but I’ve been watching this discussion, getting more and more frustrated, and unable to comment on it. So, now you have one trans person’s view on this. I hope that folks engaging in this discussion will at least consider some of these points.

JuniorFaculty
JuniorFaculty
Reply to  Actual trans person here
6 years ago

I think two senses of ‘deadnaming’ need to be distinguished. Obviously it’s grossly offensive to use a name that someone has repudiated to refer to them, just as it’s offensive to use a pronoun that they reject. But in a phrase of the form “X (formerly known as Y)”, Y isn’t being used: it’s being mentioned (even though by convention we leave out the quotation marks).

Of course this can still be harmful, if the person in question is keeping the name a secret — then writing “X (formerly known as Y)” can be an invasion of privacy. But in this case Caitlyn Jenner’s former name is about as far from a secret as imaginable.

I think one can strongly oppose deadnaming—in the strict sense—without adopting the policy that it’s wrong to mention a relevant fact that’s been in the public sphere for forty years and is known by literally tens of millions of people.

(Incidentally, I’m not saying that it was relevant in Tuvel’s case; maybe it wasn’t, and she can still be criticized on that score; but there are certainly some cases where it’s relevant. Eventually, a serious scholarly biography will be written about Jenner, given her importance both to sport and to trans visibility: surely the author of *that* shouldn’t pretend to be unaware of her previous name.)

Matt Drabek
Matt Drabek
Reply to  JuniorFaculty
6 years ago

JF, I’m not quite sure you’ve elaborated upon all of the possibilities here. What you’re calling “strict deadnaming”, namely the use of a name that someone has explicitly repudiated and asked you not to use, is obviously a bad thing to do. A person who engages in strict deadnaming is just an asshole. We can’t really have an interesting discussion on that.

But I’m not sure you’ve described the Caitlyn Jenner case as accurately. When people condemn the deadnaming of Jenner, what I take them to be condemning is what you might call “generic deadnaming”, or namely the use of a former name as the *default* way of doing things in the absence of explicit instruction either for or against using the person’s name. What folks are saying, as I hear it, is that unless you have been explicitly given permission to use someone’s former name, you shouldn’t do it. And presumably the charge is that this is what Tuvel did in the abstract and article of this paper.

JuniorFaculty
JuniorFaculty
Reply to  Matt Drabek
6 years ago

I’m a bit unclear — are you using ‘use’ to encompass only what philosophers call use, or in a broader sense encompassing both use and mention?

I certainly agree that unless you have been explicitly given permission to *use* someone’s former name, you shouldn’t do it. But in “X (formerly called Y) did Z” Y is only being mentioned, not used.

When a former name is mentioned rather than used, the person involved isn’t being referred to or addressed by it. Instead, a historical fact is being communicated: that X was once known by a name that is not now their ordinary name.

Does X have a right to request that an author not communicate that information? I think that depends on two things: (1) Does divulging the information have a bona fide scholarly purpose? and (2) Is it information which X wishes to keep private and, but for the author’s actions, could reasonably hope to keep private?

My view is that only if the answer to (1) is yes and the answer to (2) is no should the name be mentioned.

Matt Drabek
Matt Drabek
Reply to  JuniorFaculty
6 years ago

Ah, got it. In this case, I’d want to pass to someone who works more extensively on issues involving trans* people and language. My sense is that a person is going to say that the use/mention distinction isn’t relevant here, because mentions are equally harmful to uses. And that mentions should be avoided whenever uses should be avoided. But I’m not totally confident in that.

Postdoc
Postdoc
Reply to  Matt Drabek
6 years ago

I also found the “deadnaming” criticism to be ambiguous, and liable to mislead people into thinking that the author is being unduly hostile to Jenner. No doubt it’s clearly hostile to intentionally refer to someone by their former name in this context, but the author does not do this – making reference to the publicly available fact of someone’s previous identity is clearly different. It seems to be that the second kind of ‘deadnaming’ is similar to mentioning that someone is transgender. In the context of the paper’s abstract, where the author is mentioning Jenner solely as an example of a transgender person, this does not appear to be a hostile act.

Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
Reply to  JuniorFaculty
6 years ago

I think JF has raised some very helpful points here. There are certainly cases (perhaps the majority of them) where we would identify how “deadnaming” does harm to the person named, but it is equally clear that there are some contexts and cases in which 1) use of a trans person’s former name is unavoidable and 2) might be done without obvious objection.

While few trans people are likely to achieve the level of public recognition and familiarity as Caitlyn Jenner, CJ’s case raises at least one reason to object to what we might call the strong position against “deadnaming” (i.e. opposition not only to use but also to mention of a trans person’s previous name or identity). To be fully committed to the strong position against “deadnaming” would seem to require that I say something like the following (let’s call it A): “In 1976 Caitlyn Jenner won the Olympic decathlon.” But this commits me to stating a counterfactual as though it were a fact and risks, for example, the possibility of misleading the person with whom I am speaking. Of course, it is possible for me to avoid this by saying “In 1976 the person now known as Caitlyn Jenner won the Olympic decathlon” (A1), but questions remain about 1) whether in doing so I have truly avoided causing harm (since I have perhaps drawn undue attention to CJ’s status as a trans person) and 2) whether I am morally obligated to say A1 rather than A.

I take JF’s larger point to be that we have responsibilities both to trans people in the present and to the world of social facts (including historical facts) that all of us inhabit. Given the capacity for some of those historical facts to cause harm to trans people in the present, we ought to exercise care in using or mentioning them, but this should not lead to making all use/mention of them verboten.

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
6 years ago

Hi Eric –

On your rejection of the “strong position against deadnaming”, would you say the following is a false or misleading statement?

“Muhammad Ali was born in 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky.”

Seems that this is perfectly intelligible and even true, even though no one with that name was born in that year in that city. To qualify it with Ali’s given name may be pedantic or worse, esp. after Ali’s 1967 beatdown of Ernie Terrell, i.e., the infamous “What’s My Name” fight.

What’s in a name? For some people, everything. We therefore should err on the side of whatever folks like to be called.

Some exceptions that immediately come to mind are: (1) if you’re trying to disparage the person, e.g., Drumpf; and (2) truly unavoidable use/mention cases, e.g., “Ali’s birth name was Cassius Clay” (and even then, why is that necessary to say?). But neither exception seems to apply here…

Link: https://theundefeated.com/features/whats-my-name/

Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
Reply to  Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
6 years ago

Hi Patrick –

Thanks for your good questions. I will answer the Ali question by way of Caitlyn Jenner. I confess that I can more readily imagine myself saying “Caitlyn Jenner was born in Mt. Kisco, New York on October 28, 1949” than I can “Caitlyn Jenner won the Olympic decathlon in Montreal in 1976.” That seems a bit strange to me and yet it is true. So the question is why is that the case when I have no hesitation in referring to the winner of all of Ali’s fights (even those won before his change of name) as Muhammad Ali?

I am not sure I have a great answer for this, but here is my thinking. Imagine we are looking back at old footage of Ali’s 1960 Olympic bout and Jenner’s 1976 Olympic decathlon. In each case I refer to the two figures by their present day identities, saying, for example, “Check out the speed of Muhammad Ali’s jab here” or “Wait until you see Caitlyn Jenner’s discus throw.” My suspicion is that there would be some non-negligible number of viewers who would experience some momentary cognitive dissonance over the second but likely no one who would experience it over the first. I suspect that this is because in the second case the person must make some slight mental adjustment to accommodate the discrepancy between the name Caitlyn Jenner and the present day associations of that name with a female and the male figure appearing on the screen.

If, on the other hand, I were to have said “Check out the speed of Cassius Clay’s jab here” and “Wait until you see Bruce Jenner’s discus throw,” I suspect the response would be quite different and that the first would occasion, at least in some viewers, a cognitive dissonance that the second would not. Someone might object to the second by claiming that it engages in “deadnaming” but this is a moral objection rather than evidence, strictly speaking, of a perceptual response to the conjunction of a name and an image.

I agree with you that we should refer to people by the names they have chosen and should use the pronouns they prefer. I would never dream of referring to Caitlyn Jenner, if I ever met her, by her previous name. But that isn’t the issue in Tuvel’s article (she is not addressing Jenner, merely noting the historical fact that prior to Caitlyn Jenner there was a person (the same person) who was known to the world as Bruce Jenner. This was enough for some respondents to accuse Tuvel of “deadnaming.” My position is that there are some occasions when reference to a trans person’s earlier name and identity are or ought to be permissible. I can think of at least two examples when that might be the case.

First, if I am citing work by a trans scholar with an extensive publication record pre- and post-transition. While in the body of the paper I would of course refer to this scholar and his or her work by his or her post-transition name, in my bibliography I would not, I think, be guilty of “deadnaming” if I recorded the (different) names that authored these works. Here, I think, my scholarly obligation to make it possible for future scholars to track down the books and articles produced by this scholar outweighs a demand not to make reference to that person’s earlier name and identity.

Second, the state might occasionally have a legitimate need to publicly associate a pre-transition and post-transition identity. For example, here in Massachusetts there is a database that enables one to check on whether a lien exists against a person or a company. It seems reasonable to me that in the case of a trans person (let’s call him Walter Smith) who, prior to transition (as Wendy Smith), had a lien that querying the database for liens against Walter Smith would bring up results for Wendy Smith.

I hope that helps clarify my position at the moment. It is certainly open to change.

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
6 years ago

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Eric.

It may be that we’re agreeing more than I thought. The two examples you gave seem like exceptional cases, where it’s arguably legitimate to use previous names (e.g., maiden/married names), not the general rule.

And your observation that “there would be some non-negligible number of viewers who would experience some momentary cognitive dissonance” seems spot-on. But I wonder if this is their hangup, not a serious one we have to indulge. After all, there’s no “objective” way to conjugate a name and an image, right? It’s all a matter of convention, and philosophy is in the business of challenging social conventions.

One more worry I have is with the idea of “historical facts” as some kind of justification for stating those facts. Again, there may be legitimate exceptions; e.g., if you’re writing a biography about Muhammad Ali, you’d be remiss if you didn’t mention his conversion in name and faith to Islam. But “historical facts” seems too broad a category that would allow for all sorts of privacy and other violations; most known facts are historical, e.g., bank password, online browsing habits, medical conditions.

I think I get the general point of appealing to a claim as a “historical fact”, but I think the justification needs to be clarified and is related to necessity (as you and others seem to suggest). But as with just-war theory — when is war a “last resort”? what is the “military necessity” of a particular attack? — there can be fierce disagreement over what is necessary. Drawing and defending this line is important, since claims of necessity can justify virtually anything.

Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
Reply to  Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
6 years ago

Hi Patrick,

I think you are absolutely right (and I should have made this clear in my earlier reply since I hold it to be true as well) that a thing’s historical facticity does not, in itself, immunize its use from critique nor per se license its use/mention. Historical facts can be used for very invidious purposes and there might well be circumstances in which the same sentence (“Bruce Jenner won the Olympic decathlon in 1976”) is being used in one case innocently and, one hopes, harmlessly and in another where in an effort to do some form of harm.

It is quite tricky, I will admit. Anyway, thanks for your thoughtful replies, challenges, and questions and for bearing with my long responses.

Eric Campbell
Eric Campbell
Reply to  Actual trans person here
6 years ago

Thank you very much for this comment.

Scott
Scott
6 years ago

Thanks for this post. I completely agree with your assessment. The outrage is not justified, and it is terrible for academic scholarship that the journal apologize for the publication. People write things you disagree with. Write better things that show why they are wrong.

Philippe Lemoine
Philippe Lemoine
6 years ago

Life in some corners of academia has become increasingly indistinguishable from The Onion. As Thomas Mulligan says above, we should make sure this doesn’t become true of philosophy, which may already be the case in some areas. You know the situation is really bad when the fact that a paper doesn’t cite any philosopher of color (what a ridiculous expression) is regarded as a valid criticism of the paper in question…

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Philippe Lemoine
6 years ago

Yes especially when it is about race issues. How absurd!

Graduate school in philosophy provided countless cases that would be indistinguishable from Onion pieces. I regularly brought stories home to my working class family who howled in laughter at how cliche and effete graduate school seemed to be. Like the kid next to me who was humiliated and throughly rebuked when he answered famous analytic Professor X who asked the class “What is the most important question in philosophy” and the kid said “Whether God exists.” Or when the effort of our graduate student council to create a workshop on homelessness was met by the faculty with derision and groans of “We’re not a social work program.” Just on and on. The elitism and arrogance was so perfectly cliche and Onion worthy.

Eric Campbell
Eric Campbell
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

Totally agree on both counts! It is absurd in those and other ways.

Philippe Lemoine
Philippe Lemoine
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

I honestly fail to understand the relevance of the anecdotes you mention in your comment.

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Philippe Lemoine
6 years ago

Haha!! That is classic Onion. Good one.

Tim
Tim
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

Thanks Maureen for your humanity.

jake stone
jake stone
Reply to  Philippe Lemoine
6 years ago

Philippe, I have no idea what colour most of the academic authors I read are….unless they have names like Jaegwon Kim in which case I make assumptions.
Maybe there will be a time when we can search academic databases by author’s gender, skin tone, cultural identity, and childhood SES.

Andre
Andre
Reply to  jake stone
6 years ago

Looks like you (and Philippe) are missing the point here. Well, Phillippe is trolling, but you seem to be engaging in earnest, so:

Your difficulty in identifying the race/ethnicity/gender of the author may hold true of many areas of scholarship, but given how one’s experiences of being black, latin@, and/or LGBTQ, affect one’s engagement with critical race theory, latin@ studies, and/or gender studies, it is not that uncommon for such authors to identify themselves in their works. In other words, inasmuch as one’s lived experiences inform one’s scholarship (and inasmuch as their methodology refers to such experience), their race/ethnicity/gender is often made clear to readers.

jake stone
jake stone
Reply to  Andre
6 years ago

Yes, I fully respect that! It is a legitimate form of entitlement and qualification to speak. However, it does not follow that identity or lack of lived experience disentitles or disqualifies a person to speak. It simply means they bring a different perspective.
The validity of a perspective in scholarly debate is open to question, not disqualification based on identity, lived experience, or claim to authority (especially when that authority is “lived experience”).

WP
WP
Reply to  jake stone
6 years ago

A lack of identity or lived experience doesn’t disqualify a person to speak. But philosophizing about people’s identities and experiences without actually engaging with any of their own perspectives on those things is surely ignoring a pretty central piece of the data.

And when you’re neglecting an oppressed group’s understandings of themselves, that’s not just an academic failing.

To me, this seems like the most objectionable thing about the paper. I don’t take engagement with cis women’s experiences to be considered essential to supporting the authenticity of tras* identities in trans* theory, but that seems objectionable as well.

jake stone
jake stone
Reply to  WP
6 years ago

Fair enough. I would simply suggest that such objections be raised in such a manner that appears ready to engage in debate rather than shut it down

Andre
Andre
Reply to  WP
6 years ago

That’s well said, WP.
And Jake, I agree with you fully on this point (as evidenced, I hope, by the fact that I’ve tried to engage in such debate here).

Chris
Chris
Reply to  Philippe Lemoine
6 years ago

It might be a valid criticism to say, “In this article on race, you cite no philosophers who have written on race.” It might even be fine to say “You cite no persons of color who have done philosophical work on race.” But, the emptiness of the criticism of Tuvel for not citing a philosopher who is a person of color is pretty apparent. Should she have cited an article by a person of color that was not about race? Would that pass muster?

Mostly, in this mess, I am sorry to see many people I admire piling on a junior faculty member. I thought one of the lessons of philosophical feminism was that we should stop eating our own.

LK McPherson
LK McPherson
6 years ago

“Perhaps most fundamentally, 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.”

This misleading statement from the Hypatia apology goes to the heart of the “controversy.”

What is “most fundamentally” compared in the Tuvel article is not the ethics of “lived experienced” but the conceptual possibility of race or gender transformation. The Dolezal scenario, as the abstract makes clear, is treated as a hypothetical example for “illustrative purposes.” Anyway, it could be that the ethics and conceptual dynamics of white-to-black (or male-to-female) and black-to-white (or female-to-male) transformation are not equivalent. The article does not create the equivalencies the apology describes.

But contemplating comparisons and complexities of social identity transformation, which the Tuvel article invites us to do (despite weaknesses and infelicities), is what the objectors want to preempt. The reason seems obvious enough: they worry that the race case functions, in effect, as a reductio of the gender case. The challenge, of course, is that the cases don’t seem all that structurally different — red herrings aside.

Tuvel went through the thankless philosophical and professional trouble to develop a fairly sophisticated argument. Maybe we should be more open to the possibility of transracial identity.

Karsten
Karsten
6 years ago

Die Gedanken sind Frei
I have absolutely no expertise or knowledge of this field but the philosophical community has to find a better way of dealing with disagreement. This is just unacceptable. One also wished that the editorial board of Hypatia would have had the courage to shield a junior member of the profession from the harm that is being done to her at the moment due to their decision to publish a scholarly article after a standard review process, regardless of whether one ultimately agrees with it. That is part of your job too!!!
It is time to remind ourselves of the old and valuable insight: The Gedanken sind frei
Here in the rendering of Pete Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbwQXVcbkU0
And here in the words of Hofmann von Fallersleben: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei

Chris
Chris
Reply to  Karsten
6 years ago

Thanks for this. I agree that the abuse to which this junior philosopher is being subjected is horrid.

Alvin Lim
Alvin Lim
6 years ago

Point 1 identifies this controversy as being a clash between the norms of philosophy and those of critical theory. The editors of Hypatia may be forced to decide which discipline their journal belongs to.

Jason Burke Murphy
Jason Burke Murphy
Reply to  Alvin Lim
6 years ago

Critical theory simply is philosophy and social theory conducted with each other in mind.

Logic journals would be weird if they said that they were somehow only engaged in logic but not in philosophy.

Careful Until Tenured
Careful Until Tenured
Reply to  Jason Burke Murphy
6 years ago

“Critical theory simply is philosophy and social theory conducted with each other in mind.”
False. There are counter-examples in both directions:
-Traditional normative ethics is philosophy conducted with other people in mind, but is not critical theory.
-Navel-gazing auto-ethnographies are critical theory.

This claim does not seem to be made with a mind to literal truth, but, rather, in order to imply the moral superiority and greater humanity of critical theorists. I ask you to consider who, between the philosophers and the critical theorists, has demonstrated the most humanity throughout this sordid affair.

Modaloperator
Modaloperator
6 years ago

There is nothing new or revolutionary or progressive about a mob mentality, and mob justice. They’re as old as our species itself. Such a mentality is one of the many reasons why we have principles of tolerance, of due process, of freedom of expression, and academic freedom, in modern liberal democracies. There will always be mobs that try to undermine these principles. As a profession, we need to stand up for them. For those that disagree with the article, there is a simple solution: publish a rebuttal.

SG
SG
6 years ago

The outrage is silly (possibly: deplorable), the charge of violence is laughable, and “actual trans person”‘s comment above is worth the read.

Enzo Rossi
6 years ago

I can see why the associated editors wish that this paper hadn’t been published. But it’s unreasonable to say–as they do–that it shouldn’t have been published, given that it passed peer review, and given that no fraud or plagiarism have subsequently emerged. This is a procedural point. It requires no judgment about the article, which I have not read.

I often read and cite Hypathia, and hope it will continue to be an academic journal rather than turn into a propaganda organ.

Jake Spinella
Jake Spinella
6 years ago

After reading the Hypatia article, I think most of its issues can be chalked up to mediocre argumentation and scholarship. Tuvel basically waves away any empirically or conceptually relevant differences between gender and race in order to make her case that standard arguments re: transgender identity extend comfortably to racial identity. That, coupled with some unfortunate terminological choices, renders it worthy of, minimally, further peer review and a call-out, though I think some of the claims being forwarded by those doing said calling out are overblown (especially re: violence–at best I think it’s an accidental erasure of trans and POC voices, which, while fitting into the logic of violent systems of oppression, is not itself violence without being backed up by some explicit or implied threat of physical or institutional force, imo.) It’s pretty clear that her motives are innocent, so those shouldn’t be questioned, but I want to stress that philosophy–and academia more generally–is not (and ought not be) some zone of neutral critique. In a time where controls on women and gender-nonconforming bodies are growing increasingly stringent under Republican leadership and white nationalism is newly ascendant, we must be exceedingly careful about how our speech fits into the larger dialectics at play, especially concerning political footballs such as Dolezal/transracialism. Tuvel’s intentions are benign and her arguments are in good faith, but this kind of stuff is fodder for agents of intolerance to posit reductios of trans-identity and it helps grant a patina of academic respectability to their bigotry. This isn’t to say that Tuvel’s paper supports any such bigotry–she explicitly rejects that kind of tripe in the article–just that articles like this serve a rhetorically useful purpose for reactionaries looking to adopt its arguments in bad faith and that is something that should give us pause when evaluating the quality of said paper and how we should approach critiquing it. Its ability to be misinterpreted in such a way suggests that the arguments are probably not entirely innocent of (morally) objectionable premises. In that regard, hedging towards too much critique and censure in order to build awareness/discourage objectionable speech seems reasonable to me, given the gravity of our current political situation. Mileage may vary, obviously, but I think the censure is doing its job, considering we have an article and comment thread in the Daily Nous attempting to ascertain just what responsibilities philosophers have when addressing politically charged issues such as these which likely wouldn’t have existed without the aforementioned controversy.

I think the lesson, put roughly, is: When forwarding what will undoubtedly be a controversial position in a politically relevant sub-field of academia, one should have some *really* good arguments at the ready. This paper didn’t really have those and so its other issues (e.g. terminological ones) are rendered even more glaring.

P.S. I find it funny that the people who are complaining about the supposed politicization of philosophy by SJWs in this thread are totally unaware that their comments are virtually indistinguishable from such apolitical bastions of free speech as 4Chan, R/the_donald, and The Red Pill. Not a good like, guys.

Lance Bush
Reply to  Jake Spinella
6 years ago

Why would you presume that we are not aware of similarities between our remarks and those places? I cannot speak for others, but I am aware of it. I support free speech and so do a lot of people on the right. Since when did guilt by association become a legitimate philosophical move?

It would be question-begging to assume that everything the people in those places say must be awful merely because of whatever else they say. On the contrary, perhaps it is more a mark of shame against social justice activists (and you, if you agree with them about censorship) that even Trump supporters and the dregs of the internet are on the right side of this when you are not.

Jake Spinella
Jake Spinella
Reply to  Lance Bush
6 years ago

To be blunt, my aside was mainly meant as a bit of rhetorical snobbery, not so much an argument.

To put it diplomatically, I think the fact that those campaigning hardest for “free speech” are those most interested in uttering hate speech should inspire some bit of epistemic caution in those aligning themselves with them. We’re probably coming from different initial premises and intuitions however. The comment was mainly for fun and ribbing–this is the internet after all.

Lance Bush
Reply to  Jake Spinella
6 years ago

When you make invidious comparisons between the people on the other end of a dispute and groups of ethically questionable people, you invite the audience to disvalue their remarks. Stating that we are “aligning” ourselves with these people is ambiguous. Merely happening to agree with people you do not know or associate with about one thing does not mean that you agree with them about anything else nor that you are actively collaborating with them, yet the ambiguity may insinuate such associations.

Eric Campbell
Eric Campbell
Reply to  Jake Spinella
6 years ago

Ridiculous again. Have Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald been trying to pave the way for hate speech this whole time? Damn! They had me fooled!

It’s just irresponsible drivel to associate those who fiercely champion free speech, as I do and lots of other people do who are *actually* concerned about reducing oppression and increasing human dignity (as opposed to those always looking for opportunities to make a big show of such concern, no matter how counterproductive), with those wishing to promote hate speech. With all due respect and diplomacy, smearing defenders of free speech–one of if not the single most important freedoms we have when it comes to resisting oppression–in this way is pathetic.

Andrew Sepielli
Andrew Sepielli
Reply to  Jake Spinella
6 years ago

Jake Spinella — You associate advocacy for free speech primarily with internet troll-havens, and excuse your own self-avowed “snobbery” (really, it’s worse than that) by saying “this is the internet after all”. May I suggest, as a fellow S*pi*ll*, that you take some sort of a break from the internet?

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Jake Spinella
6 years ago

Right. Like if I decided to write a theoretical piece on whether late term abortion was murder in the same way that smothering an infant to death was murder and used a public case where a woman who had a late term abortion said “It was murder.” But then I clarified that I was only using her case to ‘raise the question’ and that she may or may not have committed murder. Then I went on to speculate (using language like “baby” for ‘fetus’ and “mother” for ‘pregnant woman’) without including any data from women who had late term abortions or any of the philosophical and feminist arguments about abortion. Yeah…it seems pretty clear that such a paper could easily be used to give a “patina of academic respectability” to those who want to strip women of reproductive rights. Again, speculative philosophy about real peoples lives, people who daily face injustice and harm, without grounding that work in the scholarship of those who struggled so hard to get to tell their stories and provide analysis, is an act of social privilege and willful ignorance. The methodology of feminist and anti racist work should be different from sitting by the fireside “…setting aside all my worries and arranging for myself a clear stretch of free time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself, sincerely and without holding back, to demolishing my opinions.” This work needs to be done within community and it requires that people with historical social privilege listen more and speculate less.

Quasi philosopher
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

I’m deeply sympathetic to the idea that poorly thought out writing about oppression or even politically contentious issues can be turned into fodder for furthering said oppression.

But this seems to obscure the fact that unlike the popular press, academics have always seen themselves as maintaining a space for even the most ludicrous seeming ideas to be brought forward, just in case a revolution in thought is eventually called for. In the case of the paper about late-term abortion and the infanticide, I suggest that this would only seem like an unequivocally bad idea to us (even though we know nothing else about this hypothetical paper) if we think with complete certainty that there’s no intellectually plausible position apart from being pro-choice, and therefore anything that might threaten this politically is unequivocally bad.

Similarly, in the case of transgender people, there might be politically bad ramifications if the transracial analogy is pushed (I think this is unlikely considering few people read academic journals to begin with). But IF the original paper is convincing, then transracial people might be real and be suffering deep injustice too, perhaps even more since there doesn’t seem to be support from any sub-group in society. I’m not sure if this is a plausible thesis, in fact it might be quite unconvincing to most people. But what makes academic spaces distinct from others is that the door is never closed to even this view, no matter the consequences if it manages to get past the referees. And if it is really a bad paper, then respond with a paper that shows how, in fact, the original paper shouldn’t have been able to pass a laugh test. Instead, resorting to prohibition (pre or post publication) seems like it will only erode what makes academic spaces distinct and valuable.

Mark Lance
Mark Lance
Reply to  Quasi philosopher
6 years ago

“But this seems to obscure the fact that unlike the popular press, academics have always seen themselves as maintaining a space for even the most ludicrous seeming ideas to be brought forward, just in case a revolution in thought is eventually called for.”

Yes, that is a norm in some parts of the academic world. The suggestion, obviously, is that it is a bad one in cases where real harm is the predictable result of bantering about “the most ludicrous seeming ideas” in a cavalier manner. Let’s grant that the bare possibility of a revolution in thought is some sort of good. Surely you are not claiming that it is a decisive one. Unless you take account of the direct harms that Maureen is pointing out, you just don’t have a response here.
“In the case of the paper about late-term abortion and the infanticide, I suggest that this would only seem like an unequivocally bad idea to us (even though we know nothing else about this hypothetical paper) if we think with complete certainty that there’s no intellectually plausible position apart from being pro-choice, and therefore anything that might threaten this politically is unequivocally bad.”
Sorry but this “complete certainty” standard is of a piece with the philosophical dogma being criticized. It will seem like a bad idea if we have good grounds for thinking that there is no other plausible position and that harm will come from this work.

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

Thank you for saying this so clearly and humanely.

Tom
Tom
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

How, in practice, does “we have good grounds for thinking that there is no other plausible position” differ from “we think with complete certainty that there’s no intellectually plausible position apart from …”? It sounds every bit as smug, arrogant, and intolerant.

Quasi philosopher
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

“Let’s grant that the bare possibility of a revolution in thought is some sort of good. Surely you are not claiming that it is a decisive one. Unless you take account of the direct harms that Maureen is pointing out, you just don’t have a response here.”

Certainly, I don’t think that maintaining a space for all sorts of views is necessarily a decisive reason. If it can actually be shown that there is harm of some sort with regard to a certain issue in some particular context, we might think that the benefits of not publishing outweighs the benefits of publishing.

But what harms have actually been pointed out in this case? Has there been even a modestly plausible causal chain put forward of how this paper would harm transgender people? Even if Maureen is right that it is a blatant “act of social privilege and willful ignorance”, is this supposed to be actual harm as opposed to (an accusation of) shoddy scholarship? Even if words can be violent in principle, this seems like an instance where describing it as “harm” seems unconvincing.

Contract Faculty
Contract Faculty
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

“Like if I decided to write a theoretical piece on whether late term abortion was murder in the same way that smothering an infant to death was murder….without including any data from women who had late term abortions or any of the philosophical and feminist arguments about abortion.” And yet there are papers that do this, without I think doing violence to women or being morally objectionable. The one that comes to mind is Marquis’s “Why Abortion is Immoral”. Marquis does put forward a theoretical argument that suggests that late-term abortion (really, most cases of abortion) are morally equivalent to infanticide (and to all other acts of murder). He doesn’t address (what he calls) hard cases like rape; his article is very general, and doesn’t get into feminist arguments about abortion. And yet I think it’s a perfectly respectable and philosophically interesting take on abortion, whether you agree with it or not. Nor does it seem right to say that journals shouldn’t publish papers like those of Marquis, or that they shouldn’t write them, because they can be exploited by anti-abortion crusaders.

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Contract Faculty
6 years ago

Marquis’ paper is from 1989. There is a reason you had to go that far back to find an example. It is also, as you say, not a feminist analysis. My point was that you don’t find such defenses in feminist journals (and in most recent philosophy journals) because it is both hard to make a defensible case based on the excruciating reality of (rare) late term abortions and because it gives an ‘academic patina’ to an anti-feminist agenda.

Led
Led
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

Of course the deafening silence of pre-natal voices in that literature isn’t a problem…

Instructor Gadget
Instructor Gadget
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

There is this from a few years ago:

http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/03/01/medethics-2011-100411.full

Also, whether such articles are regularly published or not, it is standard practice to teach Tooley on abortion and infanticide along with Marquis in our medical ethics courses.

Contract Faculty
Contract Faculty
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

I’m not seeing the relevance of the year of publication, though. The question here is whether the fact that Marquis didn’t talk about the feminist arguments re: abortion (of which there were many at the time too) makes his arguments bad ones.

Derannimer
Derannimer
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

Do you realize someone actually wrote the infanticide=murder article four years ago, while making the case for infanticide? http://jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/261

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Derannimer
6 years ago

I didn’t. Thanks for the link.

Eric Campbell
Eric Campbell
Reply to  Jake Spinella
6 years ago

With all due respect, this is absurdity masquerading as concern for the oppressed.

“Its ability to be misinterpreted in such a way suggests that the arguments are probably not entirely innocent of (morally) objectionable premises.”

Does this need comment? This is ridiculous on its face, especially in the context of a scholarly article written for philosophers.

“…their comments are virtually indistinguishable from such apolitical bastions of free speech as 4Chan, R/the_donald, and The Red Pill.”

Once again, utterly ridiculous. There are few more important lessons in life than learning to see things as relational that are superficially not so. So when one writes that something is indistinguishable, it is very important to see that as “indistinguishable to me”. That is, *you* cannot distinguish them. When we see learn to see properties as relational in this way, it encourages us to look at both sides of the relation. So where the original phrasing suggests that we attend to the indistinguishability of comments on here defending academic freedom and right wing blather, keeping in mind the relational nature of indistinguishability suggests we look at the other side of the relation: the perceiver. So what appears as a criticism of those defending academic freedom on this blog is, I think, better viewed as an autobiographical confession. I don’t think I’m bragging when I say they are very easily distinguishable to me, as I expect they are to anyone who is really trying to distinguish them.

G
G
Reply to  Jake Spinella
6 years ago

“I want to stress that philosophy–and academia more generally–is not (and ought not be) some zone of neutral critique. In a time where controls on women and gender-nonconforming bodies are growing increasingly stringent under Republican leadership and white nationalism is newly ascendant, we must be exceedingly careful about how our speech fits into the larger dialectics at play, especially concerning political footballs such as Dolezal/transracialism. Tuvel’s intentions are benign and her arguments are in good faith, but this kind of stuff is fodder for agents of intolerance to posit reductios of trans-identity and it helps grant a patina of academic respectability to their bigotry.”

But if what you’re worried about are the possible non-rational influences the article might have on politics and discourse, then is it really obvious that excoriating Tuvel, whom you agree is probably writing in good faith, is at all wise?

I mean, suppose there were no explosive response. Perhaps she and Hypatia were asked to change the objectionable terms and some civil response were made in a future issue. You say the arguments are plainly bad, so such a response could presumably be decisive (which isn’t to say it will convince all philosophers or Tuvel, of course). Maybe someone outside of the philosophy world would notice the article, but it wouldn’t be linked to suppression of free speech.

But given the response that it has gotten, the article is going to be widely noticed outside of academia. People who are inclined to think that transgender and transracial self-identification are on a par are hardly going to be persuaded otherwise by the frankly emotional reaction to Tuvel’s article. It is very easy to come across a lot of excoriating commentary on this article without finding a). an attempt at recapitulating what Tuvel’s argument is and b). an attempt at saying what is wrong with that argument.

In other words, someone who thinks the case for distinguishing transgenderism and transracialism is flimsy is hardly given reason for thinking otherwise.

Philosopotamus
Philosopotamus
Reply to  Jake Spinella
6 years ago

1. i think we should be careful about comparing this case with how other philosophical enquiries are treated. Where the basic questions involve the recognition of one’s personhood, the core of identity, and whether and on what grounds we should accept someone’s claims about their own identity, there aren’t a lot of philosophical analogues for that. These questions are not only universal and abstract questions, they are also particular and they are deeply personal. So, this isn’t like solving the Gettier problem, or understanding qualia, or whatever else people have in mind when they recommend that we handle this matter the way that philosophy regularly handles disagreements. The conclusions people philosophically draw to here can have real effects on the life chances of real individuals.

2. And speaking of how philosophy regularly handles disagreements. This discourse is, of course, not the first foray by philosophers into questions of race and gender and the essential identities of women, gender non-conforming people, and people of color. There has been a longstanding (let’s say a couple of millennia or so) of a wholly dehumanizing philosophical practice that has explored the basic nature of these identities. These were practices that produced philosophical works that remain central to the canon today.

3. And how was disagreement settled in the philosophical practice that produced these works? Quite simply by silencing the relevant voices of disagreement and dissent. So, we should be careful about putting philosophical discourse too high on a pedestal when it comes to handling disagreement in this matter. We should instead recognize that the vocal pushback we see here, the gate-keeping, and the demand for a sensitive, careful, informed, and inclusive treatment of these questions, is a necessary course-correction from the rough-shod and dehumanizing philosophical practices of the past (and of the present, for some practitioners).

4. Calling those who forcefully make the demand for a sensitive, informed, and careful treatment of a sensitive and complex subject “pathetic”, “irresponsible,” “oppressive,” “authoritarian,” “social justice activists,” who espouse “absurdity masquerading as concern for the oppressed,” is a pretty disturbing display of hostility. It seems to reflect, to me anyway, the desire of some for a return to the old ways; to a time of silencing those certain other voices so the “real philosophers” can get back to the business of real philosophy. This desire may be masquerading as a defense of free speech doctrine, and color and gender blindness, and academic freedom—but the effect is the same.

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  Philosopotamus
6 years ago

The person being defended from attack here is not a (dead or living) white male authority figure, taking some bigoted traditionalist line, but a junior women and feminist who supports trans rights.

Do you really want the way she has been treated to be the norm for how the community of politically radical scholars interested in race and gender treats *it’s own members*? Will that lead to better or worse standards of discourse within that community which, presumably, you care about?

Also, virtually everything discussed in an ethics class is relevant to things that are important to various individuals.

Rebecca Kennison
Rebecca Kennison
6 years ago

It would have been better for the author and journal if the peer-review process on this article had not been such a failure. Anyone reading the piece (as I did, and I am simply a well-educated layperson) would consider its premise, its argument, its cherrypicking of sources, and its lack of rigorous engagement with previous scholarly work (especially in queer and race theory) to be mediocre at best, no matter what its topic. In a journal of Hypatia’s status, such slipshod scholarship should never have been published. That the article addressed a highly controversial topic by persisting in its (at best!) tin-eared approach — one that had already been strongly criticized when it was presented as a paper at the APA — should have been even more reason for extra care and extra rigor to have been taken in the review process. I applaud the editors for wanting to revisit that process and improve upon it and so frankly do not understand the criticism (here and elsewhere) of the editors for taking that stance.

I am in any case delighted to see that the article is being subjected to the kind of post-publication peer review it might have received earlier behind the cover of a double-blind process and do hope that Prof. Tuvel takes such criticisms to heart, especially should she ever wish to publish on this topic again. Maybe she could begin by seriously engaging in discussions with her fiercest critics and by learning from them? That would be a start.

pepper
pepper
Reply to  Rebecca Kennison
6 years ago

“one that had already been strongly criticized when it was presented as a paper at the APA”

From what I can tell, this paper was presented as an accepted symposium at the Eastern APA in 2017 (i.e. a few months ago): https://apaonline.site-ym.com/?page=2017E_Accepted. This means that Rebecca Tuvel submitted a paper that was subject to peer-review by those organizing the Eastern APA, and was judged to be among the best papers submitted. Only a small number of papers (17?) receive this honor. They are awarded two hours of meeting time and two commentators. So whatever we want to say about Hypatia and its editorial process here may well apply also to the Eastern APA. Also noteworthy is that the paper was likely already in press at the time of this symposium, so adjusting it on the basis of any criticism received there would have been impossible.

SFSU_MA
SFSU_MA
Reply to  pepper
6 years ago

Hypatia isn’t the APA..

Chris
Chris
Reply to  SFSU_MA
6 years ago

And?

Roman Altshuler
Roman Altshuler
6 years ago

Principle 1 strikes me as extremely problematic, and it’s hard for me to believe it is what the authors intended:

1. It uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields; for example, the author uses the language of “transgenderism” and engages in deadnaming a trans woman;

First, let’s separate the examples from the principle. The outrage directed against these examples does not seem to me to depend on the principle. The problem is that the author uses terminology and ways of talking that harm trans people. But that is not equivalent to saying that the author “uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” That principle is far too mild to capture the level of outrage generated by the the examples.

Second, though, the principle itself is a horrible principle if taken generally, rather than in application to this specific case (and if it is not meant to be taken generally, then why give a principle at all rather than simply pointing out that the author uses harmful tropes and terminology? Is it meant as a rhetorical flourish?). In general, the principle claims that when writing about a topic, one must (to do good scholarship) use the vocabulary and frameworks recognized by the conventions of the relevant subfields. Taken generally, this principle would prevent revolutionary work altogether, and it would mean that those who come first to a topic will have an even greater control over setting the terms of the debate than they already do. That strikes me as antithetical to philosophy and pernicious in general. Feminists, in particular, might have reason to ask how much good and influential feminist work has made a difference precisely because it refused to conform to accepted conventions. All philosophers: how often have you had a paper rejected because you were making a *novel* point, which the referees perceived as being too far outside the mainstream to take seriously?

I’m not claiming that the outrage, especially over the examples, is misplaced. I’m saying that this particular principle strikes me as a bad one, and one I would hope anyone working in a marginalized philosophical field would wish to burn.

Mark Lance
Mark Lance
Reply to  Roman Altshuler
6 years ago

Oh for heaven’s sake. the principle is not that one cannot introduce new vocabulary, but that there is some intellectual work required in doing so. You need to explain why your technical vocabulary is preferable especially if there is an extensive literature arguing the contrary. To blithely ignore that is intellectually irresponsible and would get a paper rejected without any political associations.

Roman Altshuler
Roman Altshuler
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

Mark: that’s fine. Then the principle should say that. In its present form, that is not what those words say to a competent and charitable English speaker.

But below, you actually say this: “Blithely ignoring the literature and the standards that have grown up in it around terminology is incompetent, regardless of political effect.” I think that’s closer to what the principle actually says, and it is problematic as a general rule. One way of putting this: uniformity of vocabulary and framework within a field is usually a sign that a field is too exclusive or too tightly knit. (To be clear: I am not making this claim about any of the fields in question.) And again, the point of the examples (on my charitable and obviously fallible interpretation) is that the paper says things that are harmful. The two examples given do not strike me as examples of failure to “explain why your technical vocabulary is preferable” (nor is it clear that one should always be expected to do that: should anyone contributing to a field be expected to have mastered all or much of the existing body of work in that field? I don’t think so. But if it fails to make a good case as a result of that failure, then it is up to referees to reject it.)

Mark Lance
Mark Lance
Reply to  Roman Altshuler
6 years ago

That my later comment starts with ‘blithely ignoring’ makes it quite the same as my comment here. It seems to me that my reading is what any moderately charitable reading of the letter would suggest. Philosophical hyper-literalization is not standard English.

Felipe
Felipe
6 years ago

Ancestry as culture is absolutely not de-emphasized in Brazil. Brazil is a country where African, European and Asian ethnicities are widely represented and individuals are greatly aware of their ancestry and proud to represent them. So much so that Brazil ranks high in the number of dual citizenship requests for Italy, Germany, and Japan, where a lot of immigrants came in the late XIX and throughout XX century. This person is profoundly ignorant of Brazilian history and society.

What is in fact de-emphasized in Brazil ,historically, is ancestry as race, due to what’s perceived as a high racial mixing during the colonial and imperial period. In an anedotic example: I am Brazilian, ash-blonde, white and blue eyed with documented black slave ancestors who mixed with Portuguese plantation owners. Brazilians might feel they have to choose a race when forced to do so but the fact is there’s relatively little awareness of ancestry as race.

Using Brazil’s example to back up her claim is ridiculous, offensive and dishonest. The reason why Rachel Dolezal’s attempt to self-identify as black is even discussed is because, in the US, ancestry as race and ancestry as cultural heritage is wrongfully considered one and the same. Whereas in Brazil Dolezal would be welcomed warmly to take part in most, if not all, african-brazilian cultural settings, she would not be identified as black and that wouldn’t matter at all. However, in the US, her attempt had a clear intention to mislead, since it sought to equate her looks and appearence with her personal beliefs and cultural identity.

CS Five
CS Five
Reply to  Felipe
6 years ago

So, you’re saying you 100% agree with the author? Because she didn’t say anything about ancestry as culture – you’re the only one who brought that up. She brought up ancestry as race, which you seem to be agreeing with. “Charles Mills identifies at least five categories generally relevant to the determination of racial membership…” “If ancestry is a less emphasized feature in some places….” I’d go so far as to say that you’re attack on a strawman is ridiculous, offensive and dishonest.

Eric Campbell
Eric Campbell
6 years ago

The notion that using the term ‘transgenderism’ enacts violence is so manifestly absurd, that as someone who has been exasperated for a couple of decades about people undermining the causes that I (and they say they) care about, that I would like to make a comparison.

If I had wanted to harm the U.S. back in the wake of 9/11, I would have done almost exactly what Bush et al did, especially invading Iraq. If I wanted to harm it now, I would have tried to get Trump elected. Yet both campaigned, as Republicans tend to campaign, with a heavy emphasis on pro-U.S. rhetoric and demonizing adversaries.

If I wanted to harm transgender people, I would try to train people like Nora and her supporters to act they way they are on facebook. In both cases, and in so many contexts (including religion), the people who make the most conspicuous noise about patriotism, or religion, or the oppressed, are often those that are best working to undermine the very things they say they care about. And in all cases, one of the most common ways to signal group loyalty (and even leadership) is to express a view that is so obviously ludicrous that only a true believer could possibly believe it. Then all the those who want or need to look like committed village worthies sign onto the absurdity, while thoughtful and informed people who actually care about their country, or religion, or the oppressed, have to try to prevent or undo the damage that the worthies cause through their counterproductive signaling. And then of course there are those who are openly happy at the damage.

The fact that a bunch of people ‘like’ a facebook post doesn’t mean you’re doing anything for the cause. And ‘liking’ such things doesn’t help anything either. If you say things that are manifestly absurd and counterproductive (like downplaying real violence by assimilating everything to it), or you ‘like’ things that are manifestly absurd, especially on a public feed, and especially if you make a habit of it, then reasonable people will conclude, as some have done in this thread, and many have done elsewhere, that whenever you are upset about anything, it’s likely to be absurd virtue-signaling. They might be wrong to do that, but you are wrong to give them good cause to do it. Reasonable and thoughtful people who might have otherwise listened to you, or even been your allies, will not be able to stomach associating themselves with such nonsense. You elevate your status within your narrow group at the expense of the long-term good of the people (or, in the case of showy counterproductive “patriots”, the nation) you claim (and I believe, in most cases, sincerely) to care so much about.

I’m in emphatic agreement with the actual trans person in this thread. I also find it weird that using ‘transgenderism’ is such an offense (nevermind the notion that it is violence), given that some transgender people use it (and the whole idea that you protect transgender people by aggressively language-policing is its own species of nonsense). I also don’t approve of the focus on a person’s race or gender when offering critiques of their scholarly work. In fact, it’s pretty clearly contrary to oppressed groups’ interests to promote or accept such a standard. I also find it clearly wrong to assimilate whatever mistakes might have been made in this article to violence against trans people. It’s not just absurd, but pretty obviously contrary to the project of having actual violence against them taken seriously.

Many who consider themselves protectors of the oppressed are alarmed and shocked by recent political developments. But there is always this idea, whether coming from the left or the right, that the other side is developing its pathologies in a vacuum. Whereas in reality, they are developing them partly in response to those of their perceived adversaries. Often, they are mimicking them in important ways, or at least very much seem to be. But this mimesis cannot be seen for what it is by those engaged most enthusiastically in the dance. Each group seems to strengthen itself partly by unwittingly strengthening the competing coalition. The pathologies of the competing group are rallying points for communal outrage, while the lack of perception of one’s own group’s pathologies is a criterion for group membership. In each group the same way, until those at the farthest ends of the spectrum, who see themselves as most opposed to one another, and are least likely to see themselves when they look at the other, are in fact mirror images.

It was in part the culture of manufactured, exaggerated outrage (often serving as a thinly veiled way to get a righteously flavored taste of that sweet, sweet oppression) that brought to power a group of people who are in general unconcerned about trans and related issues. Or if they are concerned, it’s in the wrong direction. The idea that the Hypatia article could be willfully misinterpreted by anti-trans people has been suggested as a valid critique of the article. I have I think a more important and valid concern. And that is that both pro-trans and anti-trans people could *correctly* interpret this nonsense on facebook and elsewhere for what it is, and that to the extent that these people are taken to represent trans people and their allies in general, this is far, far, far more likely to cause them harm in the short, medium, and long run than this article in Hypatia, which is explicitly and repeatedly in favor of trans peoples’ rights and dignity, whatever its other strengths or weaknesses.

I really need to be doing other things, so I apologize if I don’t reply to comments. But I will look at them, and if I think I’ve made a mistake, I’ll own up to it. But I’m way past tired of feeling like I can’t speak my mind on these things, which is undoubtedly coming through in my tone. It might be worth thinking about how people who aren’t as committed to civil rights and human dignity, and who aren’t as steeped in liberal academia, feel about it. For better or worse, how they feel about it will have an effect on people’s lives.

Mark Lance
Mark Lance
6 years ago

Some general points:
first, the vitriol and absurdity of the folks denouncing the apology here is more than a tad ironic.
Second, on your points Justin: 1 is simply true and a real academic failure. Blithely ignoring the literature and the standards that have grown up in it around terminology is incompetent, regardless of political effect.
2 is also correct I think, though perhaps needs some elaboration. The article completely conflates “identification with the Jewish community” with “conversion to the Jewish religion.” Really really wanting the former is not grounds for the latter, and accomplishing the latter does not secure the former. I think that makes the use of the example fairly characterized as “off-hand”
3. has been demonstrated by Maureen and others.
4. has been answered, also by Maureen. now many have pounded the metaphorical table here and claimed that this is a terrible standard. I think they are wrong. I think that there is lots of reason to privilege certain voices in these debates – epistemic reasons. I’m working on a paper arguing this in detail, and I think a very helpful contribution to this whole discussion would be an articulation of a clear statement of the methodology that is implicit in many of these criticisms. (I’m not the one to write that, for obvious reasons.) So I can understand philosophers unfamiliar with the relevant literature not understanding this point. But the absolute confidence that their methodological inclinations are the right and true and only is not justified by any remotely reasonable epistemic standard.

Let me emphasize that I don’t say this out of hostility to your OP. I’m glad you raised your four objections, though as I said I think all have been refuted. And I do think that some of the vitriol and rhetoric has been out of hand here. (No more than calling facebook criticism “a mob” or “censorship” but nonetheless out of hand.) I think a long sober careful look at practices of editorial review is called for here. I say nothing whatsoever about the author – who I know not at all – but I do think this was a bad paper, both by standard norms of philosophy and deeply compounded by it’s practical effects within a political context of oppression and widespread violence. (I use the word ‘violence’ more narrowly than some in this discussion and would not call the paper itself ‘violent’. But the context of racist and trans-phobic violence is very much relevant to the evaluation of the acceptability of this article.)

Mark Lance
Mark Lance
Reply to  Justin Weinberg
6 years ago

Justin: My claim of “blithely ignoring” is based on reading the article. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I saw nothing even purporting to be an argument for the revision of the technical terminology, nor even purporting to grapple with the literature arguing for it.
On 2, I don’t see how any tightening or other improvements would make a discussion of conditions for formal admission to a religion count as relevant to obtaining an identity category.
3. I guess we just disagree here. I thought it was explained clearly why the use of Mills was wrong.
4. Come on. Your not knowing the relevant literature is not a criticism of people saying that the article doesn’t site it.

I absolutely agree that there is room for reasonable disagreement regarding some of the specific remedies. Should the paper be withdrawn? I’m not sure myself on this. Should the board undertake a serious review of their editorial and refereeing procedures, yes, I think that is clear.

Contract Faculty
Contract Faculty
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

“Come on. Your not knowing the relevant literature is not a criticism of people saying that the article doesn’t site it.”

The problem for me is that everyone that has written about this, or that I have asked about this, directs me to a cluster of sources, without being able to pull out and articulate the argument in them that Tuvel has neglected to engage with. So Maureen has not answered the question – she has just given a list of sources that discuss the question. Even that doesn’t establish what the right answer is, of course. Just because Charles Mills or anyone else has said something, it does not mean that it’s true or the best position to have.

Consider what Maureen in a conversation above: in response to Justin’s comment about what Tuvel considers sufficient for a change in racial identity, Maureen says that Tuvel side-steps the question of social unwillingness to recognize such changes. In response, Benji asks whether the same considerations might not be raised about transgender people, were there a societal unwillingness to recognize such changes. And in response to that, Maureen doesn’t explain why the two are different: she just links to an article describing an interview with Dolezal. Most people here would already have read that article – I have, and even after reading it, I remain unclear why the two cases are different.

And yet I’ve seen, in the last few days, this strategy used again and again: we’re directed to sources instead of having questions answered. The implicit attitude here seems to be that it’s so obvious that the two cases are different that the onus is on the person asking to dig through a pile of books and articles to find the answer, because it is simply to exasperating to have to explain it. This is not helpful, nor is it true that the answer is obvious: matters of identity are tricky and nuanced.

Maureen
Maureen
Reply to  Contract Faculty
6 years ago

Let me try to make this clearer. Caitlin Jenner is a problematic representative for trans issues for reasons that have to do with wealth privilege and celebrity and a detachment from the theoretical work that many trans theorists have provided. Rachel Dolezeal is more than a problematic case of anything resembling Black identity because of the very things you read in that linked article. Most specifically, she dictates the terms of what it means to be Black without any awareness that her “transition” does not go both ways. Why can’t Black people “transition?” Oh right, the whole systemic racism, one drop rule, bigotry and history of policing white boundaries and privilege. To then compare a problematic case with a totally horrible case as a kind of thought experiment, and not engage any Black feminists and trans theorists, puts the non-trans white author’s perspective on the whole thing at the center. Race is inherited in ways that gender is not. Both are policed and there are connections between race and gender oppression but they are not analogous. A cursory reading of the literature makes this clear. That is why it is so outrageous to people who know this work and why it feels like such a slap in the face that it was in a journal of feminist philosophy.

G
G
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

So submit a response already. It sounds like these editors will gladly accept any article that is a negative response to hers, so this looks like a good publication opportunity for you.

There are lots of bad arguments given in other areas of philosophy, but you don’t see letters of apology sent out for them. (I’d name some, but I don’t want to be mean.) In my view, everyone needs to take a few deep breaths. (Also see the “actual trans person” comment above, for some insight here.)

Contract Faculty
Contract Faculty
Reply to  Maureen
6 years ago

But Tuvel makes it clear, right off the bat, that her article is not intended to come to conclusion about Dolezal’s case. It just sparked this line of inquiry. Even if transracialism of the sort Tuvel endorses is possible, she leaves it open that Dolezal could be a bad example of it.

The other point that you raise is that a change of racial identity like this can only go one way – while many white people can pass as black (given that even very light-skinned people are seen as black), black skinned people cannot transition to being white. This is a difference from the case of gender. But Tuvel does discuss this point, as Tomas above points out.

So now the issue seems to be not that Tuvel didn’t discuss the obvious arguments, but that you don’t like her conclusions about them: she didn’t come to the right conclusions. And that seems to me to be a far more objectionable reason to say that this article shouldn’t have been published.

“A cursory reading of the literature makes that clear”. This is the problem: some people are finding Tuvel’s conclusions so obviously wrong that they don’t think that a non-ignorant person could come to these conclusions. But given that this is a complex topic, that’s doubtful.

Nicole Wyatt
Nicole Wyatt
Reply to  Contract Faculty
6 years ago

“The problem for me is that everyone that has written about this, or that I have asked about this, directs me to a cluster of sources, without being able to pull out and articulate the argument in them that Tuvel has neglected to engage with.”

Translation: Please summarize a huge and varied philosophical literature for me because I can’t be bothered to do the work to master it but I’m not willing to accept the word of someone who has.

tomas
tomas
Reply to  Nicole Wyatt
6 years ago

If someone has mastered said literature, then they can surely articulate an argument that is widespread enough within said literature that any expert should be presumed familiar with it prior to discussion.

I have read the paper and the comments section here (at least, as of when I started writing this post). I have not noted any such articulated arguments that seem conspicuously absent in the paper, i.e., blithely ignored by it. A few examples of articulated arguments follow, most presented in Maureen’s posts.

(1) The argument that race is objective. (Tuvel addresses this; see in particular section starting “The second objection holds that Dolezal cannot identify as black because of the way society currently understands racial membership.”)

(2) The argument that passing as black is morally offensive due to a history of oppression. (Tuvel: “The third objection holds that it is insulting or otherwise harmful to the black community for a white person to identify as black.”).

(3) The argument that it is different because blacks “cannot,” (or more accurately, have a more difficult time) adopting a white racial identity than vice versa. (Tuvel: “Next, let’s consider the idea that white-black transitions are easier than black-white, and therefore an exercise of white-born privilege.”)

Maureen (for one) has certainly demonstrated the ability to articulate arguments presented in the literature. What I have not seen from her in this comment section, however, or from anyone else posting thus far, are the elusive arguments that are purportedly “blithely ignored” by the Tuvel paper as a form of negligent scholarship by her and Hypatia’s editors.

Contract Faculty
Contract Faculty
Reply to  Nicole Wyatt
6 years ago

“Please summarize a huge and varied philosophical literature for me because I can’t be bothered to do the work to master it but I’m not willing to accept the word of someone who has.”

Well, no. I didn’t ask for a summary of all the literature, nor is anyone else. We’re asking for a short explanation of the arguments that Tuvel’s article is said to miss, and which should not have been overlooked. So far, all the leads point to arguments that she does in fact address (as Tomas says). Critics of Tuvel are saying “she misses arguments X, Y, and Z”, and in response to those who ask what those arguments are, they just don’t say.

And yes, philosophers *should* be able to concisely explain arguments and counterarguments to those who are non-experts. Unfortunately I cannot become an expert on the debate in each area of philosophy. It is routine, and a large part of the training to become a philosopher, to learn how to concise explain debates and positions.

And importantly, my lack of expertise doesn’t mean that I have to simply defer to the experts about what is a bad argument: until I hear something convincing, I should be agnostic, and in order to hear something convincing, I need to be given reasons. Particularly because on every important debate, scholars working in the field disagree. To whose views ought one be deferring, anyways?

WP
WP
Reply to  Nicole Wyatt
6 years ago

To be honest, I’ve never had someone tell me there’s someone I should be engaging with without explaining what the direct relevance is.

Maybe the answer here is that she’s failed to engage with things that would cut off the whole line of inquiry, but it would be helpful if that was explained.

AnotherOpenMind
AnotherOpenMind
Reply to  Nicole Wyatt
6 years ago

I’m going to take a crack at understanding why no one seems to be able to point to a specific page range in a text or a specific argument.

(1) A philosophical investigation into a question of this sort (I’ll leave open precisely what sort) must be conducted via the methods of standpoint epistemology.

Comment: This is certainly an arguable claim, and there are certainly legitimate worries about scholarly communities enforcing methodological uniformity. But standpoint epistemology is a “big tent”, and I think the claim is more likely than not correct, and that it would make sense to have this methodological standard on a topic like this in Hypatia.

(2) In order to use these methods, one must, as a necessary prerequisite, immerse oneself, through broad and deep reading, in (a) ethnographies and (b) auto-ethnographies of (members of) socially/culturally/politically/economically marginalized groups, and in (c) the philosophical or otherwise theoretic studies of the sources, processes, and effects of marginalization, especially (d) those written by members of marginalized groups, who can theorize with first-person access to the experience of marginalization, and contribute to developing a conceptually rich interpretation of that experience.

Comment: So far, so good.

(3) To someone who has done this, it is sufficiently clear that Tuvel has not, or at least that she does not exhibit this work in this article.

Comment: Here’s where we run into trouble. This can’t be a matter of specific arguments, locateable in specific texts, which Tuvel hasn’t engaged, or works not cited. If that was it, we’d have the very specific examples being requested, which we don’t. (Sidenote: these requests, in this context, are not a refusal to “do the hard work”, and, in this context, that is a lazy refrain. Prof. Tuvel’s professional competence has been impugned publicly. When one does that, the evidence must be available upon request. It’s not a request for free intellectual labor; it’s a request to have a promissory note redeemed, one which has been publicly and voluntarily issued.) Tuvel doesn’t misunderstand Charles Mills – she knows Mills’ criteria of racial inclusion exclude changing races. She also recognizes that there is enough of an analogy between the different components of race, on such an understanding, with sex/gender, such that the criteria, mutatis mutandis, could be plausibly applied to sex/gender inclusion, and would then imply that one cannot change one’s sex/gender. And this, she argues against on both counts. I cannot for the life of me understand why so many are having so much trouble with this.

So the closest I’ve seen to what’s actually being requested is a discussion of the complex arguments and positions in some other work that Tuvel does cite, and which she oversimplifies in her text. But so what? We all do this of necessity, and there’s been no discussion of how these oversimplifications negatively effect the argument she is actually constructing.

Therefore, there must be something more difficult to pin down, something about her way of writing or her way of arguing which reveals this defect. It’s certainly not the “deadnaming” – Jenner, in her own memoire, refers to herself as “Bruce” when describing the first 65 years of her life – to object to how Tuvel handles this is completely divorced from the reasons which make deadnaming in general offensive.

So it must be something much less tangible. That’s fine – there’s nothing problematic about the claim that there are intangibles which scholars of sufficient expertise can spot, and the rest of us can’t. But it must be possible for those scholars to give other experts in the same discipline a sense, a gist, a general idea, of what’s wrong. What’s really, really bad is that the only indication of what this is – at least in all the comments that I’ve seen here, on the other blogs, and on social media – is that if Tuvel had done this work, the work required to use the methods of standpoint epistemology on this topic – she wouldn’t have come to the conclusion she came to, wouldn’t have even tried to argue for it, wouldn’t even have considered writing about it at all, because it is so obvious what one should think about it. And thus, there is no reason to engage with what she actually wrote at all.

One thing we should all know is that as soon as a scholarly community decides to make that move, it ceases to be a scholarly community. I hope everyone comes back to their senses soon.

P.S. I really recommend everyone read the piece by Kai M. Green which Prof. Tuvel linked to above. It is much, much better than most of the contributions being made here and elsewhere.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Nicole Wyatt
6 years ago

AnotherOpenMind writes, “Comment: So far, so good.

(3) To someone who has done this, it is sufficiently clear that Tuvel has not, or at least that she does not exhibit this work in this article.

Comment: Here’s where we run into trouble. This can’t be a matter of specific arguments, locateable in specific texts, which Tuvel hasn’t engaged, or works not cited.
If that was it, we’d have the very specific examples being requested, which we don’t.”

So let me take a shot:

Tuvel’s analysis assumes that being trans*, and the frequently difficult decision to not hide that one is trans*, from oneself and from others, is akin to choosing to convert to Judaism or to identify as another race. This assumption of “choice” is commonly made by outsiders, but rarely by persons who are familiar with trans* experiences and/or trans* philosophy / theory. To provide just one example from the scholarly literature, Butler’s early concept of performativity (e.g., in Gender Trouble) was criticized by trans* philosophers decades ago for seeming to imply that being trans* was merely at matter of role-play. She acknowledges these critiques in Undoing Gender (2004) and significantly revises her concept of performativity to take them into account.

Someone who had done their homework, whether as an author or reviewer, would have known that this was a contested assumption.

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  Nicole Wyatt
6 years ago

‘Tuvel’s analysis assumes that being trans*, and the frequently difficult decision to not hide that one is trans*, from oneself and from others, is akin to choosing to convert to Judaism or to identify as another race. This assumption of “choice” is commonly made by outsiders, but rarely by persons who are familiar with trans* experiences and/or trans* philosophy / theory. ‘

Can you explain how her analysis depends on the assumption that conversion to Judaism and deciding to transition are relevantly similar in a respect in which they in fact, according to the testimony of trans people clearly differ? If I draw an analogy between A and B, I’m not necessarily saying they are alike in all respects, or even all important respects. Nor am I necessarily even implying that they are. (I question whether religious converts would all find ‘choice’ an appropriate description either. Conversion is very powerful and emotional for many, and sometimes includes a feeling of compulsion (God called me; here I stand, I can do no other, etc.). Regardless, in a literal sense, even things we feel absolutely emotional compelled to do can be things we chose to do, so that would include transitioning. By contrast of course, *being* trans is not typically a choice in the same way, because it’s not an action that people intentionally perform, but a state of mind. But I take it she was comparing conversion to Judaism to transitioning, not to being trans.)

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Nicole Wyatt
6 years ago

The point of my comment was not to adjudicate the issue or to say that Tuvel’s comparison is indefensible and wholly without promise, but rather to reply constructively to AnotherOpenMind’s statements that “This can’t be a matter of specific arguments, locateable in specific texts, which Tuvel hasn’t engaged, or works not cited.
If that was it, we’d have the very specific examples being requested, which we don’t.”

Now we have a specific example that has been of central importance to approximately three decades of trans* philosophy and with which one would expect a reviewer or author with competence or a specialization in this subject area to be familiar.

AnotherOpenMind
AnotherOpenMind
Reply to  Nicole Wyatt
6 years ago

Thank you Amy Donovan, this is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been looking for. I’m sympathetic to David Mathers’ comment as well, and would like to ask a follow-up question – with a few preparatory remarks. There’s certainly a – perhaps uninteresting – sense in which one chooses to convert to Judaism or chooses to transition. One gets in one’s car and drives to the office of the doctor or rabbi, for example. The point that trans* individuals feel compelled to do so – i.e. do not ‘feel as if they have a choice’ about whether to do so or not – is well taken. But what I to Mathers’ point to be – and correct me if I’m wrong, but if this is it then I am in full agreement – is that the analogy holds with respect to this aspect of religious conversion as well. It is not something about which the convert feels that he/she has a choice. (On this phenomenon, I’d recommend the discussion of the psychology of conversion in James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience”.) If this is right, then the assumption Prof. Tuvel is working with is that transitioning is a choice in *precisely* the way converting is a choice – no more and no less. And given what has been said about the experience of internally felt compulsion behind transitioning, and what I know from my own reading of the experience of internally felt compulsion behind converting, the analogy is quite apt. This leaves me thinking that “a reviewer or author with competence or a specialization in this subject area” and with familiarity with the phenomenon of religious conversion would not read Tuvel’s article as assuming that transitioning is a choice in any objectionable way. So my follow-up question, with these remarks in place, is: what precisely is it about this argument that reveals an uneducated assumption about trans* individuals and transitioning, and what precisely is that assumption?

Contract Faculty
Contract Faculty
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

“I don’t see how any tightening or other improvements would make a discussion of conditions for formal admission to a religion count as relevant to obtaining an identity category.”

Why not? You haven’t given any reasons why. Judaism in particular is a religion that is seen as an ancestral inheritance, and a robust identity category (shared traditions, language, history) and yet it is also possible to convert to it. And Jewish people have faced, in should go without saying, terrible discrimination for millennia. So I can see the same concerns raised about a convert in an antisemitic society appropriating a history of oppression that they weren’t born into.

That’s an aside though, anyways. The point is that it does seem like, even setting that aside, it shares some features with race as an identity category.

Chris
Chris
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

‘Cite,’ surely.

AnotherOpenMind
AnotherOpenMind
Reply to  Justin Weinberg
6 years ago

Some quick summary, and then an invitation.

The conversation has, I think, now been narrowed down to the following question: Would the scholars of the relevant sub-disciplines please provide the rest of us, experts in other fields of the relevant disciplines or in closely related disciplines, with either a specific example or two of an argument or a portion of text which Tuvel, or anyone writing on the topic of Tuvel’s article, needed to engage with but did not, to the detriment of her argument; or, failing that, with a general sense of what scholars in the relevant areas are able to identify as seriously deficient in her writing or argumentation. To do so would be to redeem the promissory note issued by point 4 in the letter to the editorial board, in a way which would go some distance toward justifying the insistence that Hypatia review its practices of reviewer assignment and editorial decision making. (It should be clear enough by now that points 1-3 don’t hold up, and that the appropriate grounds for retraction aren’t present.)

Amy Donahue has been generous enough to offer an answer to this question, in the form in which I posed it in my comment in the thread above. Her answer pertains to the argument referred to in point 2 of the letter, but engages with that argument in very different terms. But so as not to unfairly burden Amy, let’s be clear that anyone interested in contributing answers to the follow-up questions posed by David Mathers, Justin, and myself in the thread immediately above is more than welcome to; and anyone with an answer to the original question which differs from Amy’s is more than welcome to chime in as well.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re all close to getting somewhere with, and learning something from, this episode.

JCM
JCM
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

Mark, concerning your point in (4) about the need for an articulation of the methodologies implicit in standpoint stuff, I think you’re looking for Bren Markey’s superb ‘Feminist Methodologies in Feminist Philosophy.’

jake
jake
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

“Privilege certain voices” is a far cry from retracting an article based on narrow minded ideology and authoritarian demands that certain language be used.
Also, if the only people entitled to a voice are those already embedded within the doctrine, then other legitimate voices are being shut out. Indeed, often it is those who come from a different background with different areas of scholarship that contribute the freshest ideas.

g
g
6 years ago

The biggest issue is the nefarious and growing anti-liberal idea that the way to deal with dissident voices, even voices that are a minority of one, is to crush them, shut them down, oppress… If the article is screwy, write a response1 and calling people names is the mark of the rascal, the autoritarian, the intolerant t.. and HATE mail.. Holy bejesus!!!!!

I thought we were supposed be involved in the disinterested pursuit of truth but I guess its all spite and passion and hatred.

Matty
Matty
Reply to  g
6 years ago

My sense is that some of the academics working in areas like trans theory and critical race theory do not always see themselves as *merely* involved in the pursuit of truth. They also (at least sometimes) see themselves as engaged in a kind of political or anti-oppression activism. They see their work not only as true, but also as *liberating*. And so it not entirely surprising that a paper which questions their work — or which flouts some of the norms governing that work — would be viewed not only as misguided or false but also as *harmful*. The appropriate reaction to a paper one deems merely false or misguided might indeed be just to write a response. The appropriate reaction to a paper one deems to be harmful or oppressive may be quite different.
Note that I don’t think this justifies *Hypatia*’s response to the controversy, especially insofar as the journal presents itself as a venue for disinterested academic scholarship. Given the tension described above, I think the editors of *Hypatia* needs to decide whether it is a politically engaged activist journal dedicated to bringing about certain results or an academic journal dedicated to “the disinterested pursuit of truth.” The norms governing the first sort of journal are clearly in conflict with the norms governing the second.

k
k
Reply to  Matty
6 years ago

“My sense is that some of the academics working in areas like trans theory and critical race theory do not always see themselves as *merely* involved in the pursuit of truth. They also (at least sometimes) see themselves as engaged in a kind of political or anti-oppression activism. They see their work not only as true, but also as *liberating*.”

I think this is exactly right about the ideological divide.

Andre
Andre
Reply to  Matty
6 years ago

A disinterested pursuit of truth may be sufficient if you do not have any skin in the game, but not when your status as a person is at stake. This, it seems to me, is one of the key points being voiced by critics of Tuvel’s paper, and one of the main things being missed by her defenders. By not engaging with scholars who have skin in the game (black women who work on race, trans scholars who work on gender), she effectively sent the message that their status can be decided independently of them, and therefore that their scholarship does not matter. It shouldn’t be so hard to see how this comes across as yet another way in which white cisgendered people effectively tell black & LGBTQ people that they don’t matter.

WP
WP
Reply to  Andre
6 years ago

It seems odd to describe cisgender women as not having skin in the game when trans* identities put constraints on how to understand gender in the way “transracial” identities would put constraints on how to understand race.

WP
WP
Reply to  WP
6 years ago

(I agree that she should have engaged with the other people with “skin in the game.”)

Andre
Andre
Reply to  WP
6 years ago

That’s a fair point, WP.

An
An
Reply to  Andre
6 years ago

Can you explain why that is the message that has been sent? Seems to me that anyone who reads her charitably would realize that that is *obviously* not what she means. But then why think that’s the take away from it? Serious question. People always talk about these messages being sent, but they never tell us why it is those messages that are sent, or whether it is rational to think that that is the message.

Andre
Andre
Reply to  An
6 years ago

This is also a fair question, and some charity in reading would have gone a long way in this debacle. But that goes both ways: her critics could have been more charitable in their reading of her article, and her defendants could have been more charitable in their reading of her critics (at least of point #1 above). I have tried to be charitable to her critics here, by trying to articulate what has been my understanding of the problem I’ve seen most commonly brought up (since the vast majority of commenters here seem to have missed that point).

The whole thing got out of hand so quickly though, that I’m no longer sure if I was right to do so.

Andre
Andre
Reply to  Andre
6 years ago

Correction: I did not mean #1 in the open letter. I meant the charge that not engaging in the scholarship of black women and trans* people the author committed violence or enacted harm.

My apologies for the typo. It’s been a long day, and this whole thing has proven exhausting. And I’m just a bystander! I can only imagine what this has been like for Tuvel, as well as for those who felt so harmed by her article (and I do want to take seriously, and understand, the claim of harm here).

Curious
Curious
Reply to  Matty
6 years ago

Andre’s comment here makes explicit the requirement that seems to be conveyed more implicitly or euphemistically elsewhere on this thread. It seems like the request to engage with “lived experience” is not really about engaging with a certain range of facts or data. (For example, it is not a request one can satisfy by conducting rigorous empirical studies.) Rather, as Andre says explicitly, the real requirement is specifically to cite the work of people who are either black women or trans scholars.

Andre
Andre
Reply to  Curious
6 years ago

Is it really that puzzling that black women would have insights about what it means to be a black *and* female that are unavailable to a white woman, or to a black man? If not, then how can you not see that engaging with scholarly work by black women on race and gender would be a requirement to conducting adequate scholarship on race and gender? Or do you really believe that anyone can interpret “empirical data” (and it’s unclear what exactly you mean by this: interviews? statistics?) and arrive at an undistorted view of the Truth?

Curious
Curious
Reply to  Curious
6 years ago

Thanks for this reply, Andre. I was not intending to say that this claim was incorrect but more just to clarify what the content of the claim actually was.

Just so that I understand better, would you apply the same logic to work on white men? Suppose that a black female social psychologist decides to do systematic experimental studies to understand the lives and mental states of white men. (In my view, there has been a lot of truly excellent work in the existing literature along these lines.) Would you say that there is specifically a requirement on this psychologist to engage with the work of white male scholars?

Andre
Andre
Reply to  Curious
6 years ago

I am not a social psychologist, so I’m not sure if the same logic would apply there. But as far as philosophical engagements with whiteness and masculinity goes, I’d say yes.

ikj
ikj
6 years ago

I have to say that this thread is almost as depressing as is the incident itself. Name-calling, glibness and snark are unappealing on both sides of the debate here .

Using less hyperbolic language, I think “g” above has it more or less right. This thread is not the place to debate the merits of Tuvel’s argument–especially since most of the debaters don’t seem to have actually read the paper. Nor even is the issue, as Lance implies, one of the merits privileging certain voices. The issue is that the open letter is not positioned as an intervention but rather as a censure. What we do in scholarship is to write back and critique arguments and views we find problematic. We don’t call for their retraction because of some nebulous idea of “harm.”

To be fair, the open letter does suggest that there has been scholarly malfeasance on Tuvel’s part and that this is one reason the article ought to be retracted. But notice how that point is in the same sentence as the one about deadnaming, which has nothing to do with scholarship per se but instead with a normative position adopted by people of certain ideological commitments. These latter have, or at least ought to have, very little to do with the pursuit knowledge in a disciplinary context.

We often talk about a metaphorical chilling effect that interferes with inquiry. What’s happening with Hypatia is no metaphor–the purpose of the open letter is to foreclose a line of thinking. That line of thinking might be bad. If so, let’s show how it is bad by discussing it, not by hounding it out of existence.

Arthur Greeves
Arthur Greeves
6 years ago

Silencing is a manifestation of insecurity.

Led
Led
6 years ago

Having one’s cake and eating it too – insisting on the norms of disciplinary expertise while embracing a tight fit between the scholarly subfield and a particular set of social and ethical goals.

Urstoff
Urstoff
6 years ago

oh dear

Dmitri Gallow
Dmitri Gallow
6 years ago

I tend to think that the most interesting ethical work emerges from carefully considering apparent conflicts between our judgments in particular cases. We tend to think that saving the drowning child in the shallow pond is obligatory, but saving the starving child in Malawi is not, though the differences we can point to between the cases all either dissolve upon closer inspection or seem, on the face of them, to be ethically irrelevant. Some of us are inclined to think that you have the right to unplug yourself from the violinist, but not to abort a fetus, though it can seem that the differences between the cases are either illusory or, at a first pass, ethically irrelevant. Considering these cases and thinking hard about them can lead us to accept counterintuitive or unpopular conclusions or to refine our understanding of why exactly it is we have the obligations and rights we do. That’s all for the good—that’s what making progress in ethics looks like. Conflicts in our intuitions either point us towards better, more careful, ethical principles, or lead us to revise our ethical judgments.

Since the Dolezal case became national news, I’ve thought that the apparent conflict in most people’s judgments (or, at least, the apparent conflict in the opinions of most of the people I associate with) between so-called “transracial” and transgender people was really worth thinking about carefully. I don’t feel like I’ve thought about either case deeply enough to have an opinion about whether what we need is a more nuanced principle or a change of judgment, but the analogies between racial transitions and sex-gender transitions seem to me to be clearly a profitable area of exploration. Thinking through such cases, and listening to the various arguments on all sides, and not just the sides we antecedently agree with, is a sine-qua-non for making serious progress in ethics.

So I was glad to have DailyNous direct my attention to Rebecca Tuvel’s article. Like most philosophy papers I read, I was left unpersuaded at certain points, there were objections I would have liked to have seen raised that weren’t, and so on and so forth. But this was still a top-notch work of philosophy that gave me lots to think about. Of course, I’ve yet to hear any response to the arguments Tuvel presents in her paper; some of them may be persuasive. I’d like very much to read a response like that. But this is a serious work of philosophy, and as such, it deserves a serious reply. The article does not deserve a retraction, and its author does not deserve to be pilloried in the way she has been.

I, for one, am grateful to Rebecca Tuvel for the work she put into this thought-provoking article (even though she had reason to suspect it would win her professional enemies); I am grateful for the referees and editors at Hypatia for getting it published; and I will be grateful to anyone who provides the careful and thoughtful reply the paper’s arguments deserve. (Perhaps some of her arguments have already received responses in the literature. If so, I’d be grateful to anyone who could direct me to them.)

Steve Geisz
Steve Geisz
Reply to  Dmitri Gallow
6 years ago

Yes. Exactly.

Allison
Allison
Reply to  Dmitri Gallow
6 years ago

Very well said. It is I think the task of a moral philosopher (or, for that matter, a good citizen) to think through the “conflicts between [their] judgments”, to think about how to reconcile them, and to recognize in the conflict space for new moral growth. Whatever your theory of morality is, you should take the problem of internal inconsistency seriously since any mutually contradictory set of explanations can’t be right.

What terrifies me about this ‘scandal’ is that it reflects the growing consensus on the left as well as the right that its better not to ask. The political doctrines on issues of race and sex and sexuality are sacred and to be treated as if religious belief, properly defensible through doublethink and thought terminating cliches rather than reasoned arguments. To even consider reasoning through these questions appropriate is anathema to the left-identitarian ideology because it implies that everyone might be able to think through political dilemmas rather than only those with the epistemic authority of their demographic based “lived experiences.”

Allison
Allison
6 years ago

This is one of the most terrifying and tragic developments for academic freedom and free thought to have come out of the dominance of identitarianism over the last several years. I knew that university administrations fold in the face out of outraged students when it comes to the academic freedom of often politically sketchy faculty or speakers, but for a philosophy journal to condemn a leftwing feminist philosopher for not toeing the precise (and internally contradictory) a party line is a new level of thought policing through shaming.

One of the most disturbing elements is that Hypatia allowed itself to be cowed by a grotesquely ad hominem argument:

“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.”

In turn, Hypatia has in effect announced that ideas will no longer be judged according to their merits but rather according to whether their author possesses the requisite demographic characteristics to permit them to discuss those ideas. This is calling for the end of serious philosophy, the rejection of moral universalism, and an acceptance of

Ian
Ian
6 years ago

Wait a minute, this article was published on March 29th. Why did it take so long for this controversy to start? Or has it been there all along and we’re just now discussing it?

Jake
Jake
6 years ago

The objections here are based almost entirely on who has the authority to speak and who provides the permitted terminology. That’s a bit Orwellian, isn’t it?

To the extent that anything substantive has been addressed about the ideas in the article, they are incoherent. Phenotype, for example, has nothing to do with anything. I know a white guy adopted and raised by Taiwanese parents in Taiwan. Does he not identify as Asian, and frankly who has the right to tell him?

Anyway, the bottomline is that these identity politics are becoming the laughing stock of common folk who no longer fear your bullying by claims to authority (“Oh but there’s 30 years of scholarship!”)

And, btw., I have a Ph.D, have and have published in a couple of decent peer reviewed philosophy journals, but now I feel like the little boy pointing at the ridiculous emperor.

David Wallace
David Wallace
6 years ago

Most of the discussion above seems to concern the academic and moral rights and wrongs of Professor Tuvel’s article. But the “open letter” is not simply a criticism of that article: it is a demand that Hypatia retract the article (and take various other actions going forward).

Hypatia is published by Wiley and so falls under Wiley’s policy on retraction, which reads, in relevant part: “On occasion, it is necessary to retract articles. This may be due to major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article, or in cases of ethical issues, such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, inappropriate authorship, etc.” Wiley also subscribes to the Code of Publishing Ethics (COPE), which give further guidance on dealing with direct and social-media reports of problems with papers, including a requirement to contact the author and get a response from them, and an instruction to separate complaints that “contain specific and detailed evidence” from those which do not.

At least on the basis of what’s in the public domain, there seems to be no case at all for retraction:

1) The “open letter” can’t plausibly be taken as providing the “specific and detailed evidence” noted in the COPE guidelines: the four numbered complaints (discussed by Justin, above) are in total only 164 words and follow an explicit disclaimer by the letter’s author that “it is not the aim of this letter to provide an exhaustive list of problems that this article exhibits”. The very fact that the letter is open and signed by hundreds of people supports the idea that it’s intended to communicate to Hypatia *that many people think there are problems with the article* not *what the specific problems are and that they are serious enough to warrant retraction*. (Number of signatories can communicate strength of community feeling; it can’t plausibly add weight to an academic argument.)

2) If (1) is set aside and the open letter is interpreted as a list of problems meriting retraction, it seems pretty clear that it falls wildly short of Wiley’s retraction policy. There is no suggestion that there are any ethical problems with Professor Tuvel *in the sense meant by Wiley’s policy* : she does not fabricate data nor plagiarise; she conducts no formal research with subjects and so cannot have failed to get research permission; she has not published the article elsewhere. (Her alleged failure to “seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions” would fall ridiculously short of counting as an ethical failing in this sense, even if the open letter provided specifics.)

So retraction would have to rely on “major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article”. In scientific contexts, that normally means straightforward errors with mathematical or technical tools, of the kind that everyone in the field – including the author(s) themselves – would recognise as invalidating the conclusions of the article. (It’s telling that COPE doesn’t even give guidelines of how to handle disputes with an author on “error” issues of this kind, presumably because scientists themselves would want to retract a paper if it had a straightforward error of this kind).

I’m not sure that *anything* could count as “major scientific error” in a philosophy article (except when that paper borrows the formal methods of other disciplines, but there is no mathematics or scientific technique in Prof. Tuvel’s article). In any case, as can be seen from this thread itself the errors in Professor Tuvel’s article, if any, are a matter of academic dispute between members of the community and so fall far short of this standard.

3) The open letter itself urges retraction not primarily on the grounds of academic failings but on wider moral grounds. (“More importantly, these failures of scholarship do harm to the communities who might expect better from Hypatia.”) But there is absolutely nothing in Wiley’s retraction policy (or COPE’s guidelines on such policies) permitting retraction on those kinds of grounds.

In addition to this, Hypatia’s own response is odd, to say the least:

4) I don’t know for certain whether Hypatia followed the COPE guidelines and contacted Professor Tuvel, and received a response from her, before their public comment. But I think it’s most unlikely: the “open letter” appears to have been in circulation for only 48 hours or so, and Professor Tuvel’s own comments don’t give any indication that she has been in correspondence with the journal since then.

5) The comment is on Hypatia’s public Facebook page, and so appears to be official in some regard; and it begins “We, the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors”. But it ends by noting that it’s signed by “a majority of the associate editors”, which strongly suggests that it’s a collective statement by that group and not an offical statement of the journal. So I don’t know what status it has. (In particular, it’s unclear whether it’s speaking for the editor of the journal.) If it *is* an unofficial statement, it seems in tension with COPE guidelines requiring confidentiality during investigations of research misconduct and the like. If it’s an official statement, it seems to have pre-empted a proper investigation, again in tension with COPE guidelines.

6) The letter mentions retraction only after its extensive mea culpa and its declaration that publishing the article was a mistake, saying “Several further types of responses have been suggested to us, including issuing a retraction … we continue to consider those responses and all of their potential ramifications thoughtfully.” I’m rather struck by the lack of any indication that the Board of Associate Editors know that their journal has an official policy and process for retraction. (One might argue, in their defense, that they’re not sufficiently close to the running of the journal to know things like that, but if so, they probably shouldn’t be writing as if they speak for the journal and take responsibility for its process.)

7) Most strikingly, the letter (insofar as it does speak for Hypatia) seems to tread a most uneasy middle way. A journal that has carried out a standard arms-length review process and on that basis published a paper has well-established responses available to subsequent criticism: it can defend its decision on grounds of academic freedom and due process, or it can carry out a proper investigation of whether there are academic or ethical grounds for retraction or correction, and then make that retraction or correction if indeed there are such grounds. The Associate Editors’ Board, in condemning publication (and themselves) ahead of any formal retraction investigation, seem to be on procedurally thin ice, and leave Professor Tuvel in a very awkward position: her paper remains published; there is a declaration, by some part of the journal team but possibly not the journal itself, that it should not have been published; in the absence of a formal process she doesn’t seem to have any appropriate scholarly recourse. In her position, I think I’d be talking to a lawyer.

Tom Hurka
Tom Hurka
Reply to  David Wallace
6 years ago

Is it wrong to think the Associate Editors of the journal, who weren’t involved in the Tuvel decision, are making a public condemnation of the Editor, who was involved, and mounting an insurrection against her? That’s how it seems to me.

Udo Schuklenk
Udo Schuklenk
Reply to  David Wallace
6 years ago

You said it, David. I found disturbing that among the signatories of the letter demanding a retraction were a number of current and former journal editors who should have known better than demanding a retraction in the absence of providing an actual justification for that demand, a justification that meets the standards of international ethical guidelines that are binding on the journal. The response from various people attached to the journal’s editorial management structure (ie an essentially anonymous letter of ‘the majority’ of Associate Editors) is truly something else. It seems oblivious to guidelines that are binding on the journal (COPE anyone?) To be fair, probably a lot of folks who are on journal editorial boards are not familiar with those sorts of guidelines, but still, they ought to be. An uncharitable interpretation of their letter would suggest that they do not believe procedural justice is owed to the author. There are formal processes in place to address concerns about published content, anonymous letters on behalf of ‘the majority’ of editorial board members are not quite part of those processes. Unless I have missed something, there has been silence from the actual Editor of the journal. I understand there will be Errata w/ re to the deadnaming and transgenderism issue.

Ásta
Ásta
Reply to  David Wallace
6 years ago

I am one of the AEs and want to clarify a couple of things.
1. Hypatia has a complicated (feminist and procedure oriented) organizational structure where the Associate Editors select the Editors, which makes us share the responsibility with the Editors for what gets published in the journal. The AE statement is the official Hypatia statement. It was signed “A Majority of Hypatia’s board of Associate Editors” at first because time was of the essence and members were offline. This did not signify a disagreement on the board.
2. I can say that from my perspective, apart from the deadnaming (which should be relatively easy to fix) the central issue is not the topic or the conclusion, but rather to whom we consider ourselves accountable and how we theorize about other people. Hypatia is a philosophy journal, but it is not a standard one in that it is committed to the feminist community and to fighting against the ignoring and silencing of marginalized and minority voices. That practical commitment translates into a methodological one: when we theorize about other people and their experiences, we need to listen to and read what they themselves say and have said on the matter. Papers published in Hypatia should reflect that commitment.

What to do? I personally think the journal owed an apology and we need to change our review process and naming policies but a retraction is a different matter. And I absolutely condemn the attacks on the author of the article. This is not about her, the topic, or the conclusion. It is about our own journal standards.

Nicky Drake
Nicky Drake
Reply to  Ásta
6 years ago

Thanks for the helpful comment, Ásta. I’m wondering whether your view that the issue is not the author herself is consistent with the apology from the Associate Editors, which says “publishing the article risked exposing its author to heated critique that was both predictable and justifiable.” If the AE’s view is that a heated critique of the author is justifiable, then they must consider that the issue is at least partly about the author herself, mustn’t they?

Ásta
Ásta
Reply to  Nicky Drake
6 years ago

No, the issue is the journal’s own methodological commitments.

Shelley Tremain
Shelley Tremain
Reply to  Ásta
6 years ago

Asta,
I hope the editors of the journal will expand how they currently understand the journal’s methodological commitments and will work to eliminate the under-representation of disabled philosophers and philosophers of disability (and indeed disabled philosophers of disability) on the journal’s editorial boards.

Carnap
Carnap
Reply to  Ásta
6 years ago

“Hypatia is a philosophy journal, but it is not a standard one. . .”

That is, it seems, the problem.

Carnap
Carnap
Reply to  Ásta
6 years ago

” when we theorize about other people and their experiences, we need to listen to and read what they themselves say and have said on the matter.”

Whether this is true surely depends on what properties of persons we are theorizing about. Still,
(a) there is no reason to think Tuvel didn’t listen to what transgender people say and write about themselves and their experiences, and
(b) listening to what transgender people say and write doesn’t require citing *theorists* who are transgender,
(c) listening to what theorists who are transgender say and write about the metaphysics of gender or the character of their experience doesn’t require *agreeing* that their metaphysical conclusions are correct or that their experiences are veridical.

Daniel Kaufman
Reply to  Ásta
6 years ago

This strikes me as a rather amazing comment. You pretty much openly admit that Hypatia has abandoned the fundamentally critical stance that has defined philosophy since Socrates, in favor of ideological and political advocacy. In real philosophy, every one of the commitments you describe Hypatia as operating under should be open to critical scrutiny.

At a bare minimum, Hypatia should make it very clear to prospective authors (and readers) that it is not a philosophy journal in the Socratic tradition and that while it is peer-reviewed, the reviewers operate under a number of nonnegotiable ideological standards that will be enforced, regardless of the quality of the arguments in a submission; that there is an ideological litmus test, which even translates (incredibly) into a methodological one, which articles have to meet, regardless of their philosophical quality. But to be honest, I think the journal should be officially censured by the APA, until it demonstrates that it is full committed to truly philosophical — and thus, critical — inquiry. Until it does, I don’t see how it is any different from — or better than — the publications of partisan think tanks, like Heritage or Cato, none of which would be acceptable as publishing venues in hiring, tenure and promotion decisions … at least, not as fulfilling requirements in the area of research.

I must say that as a person who not only has chaired several hiring committees but chaired and served on personnel committees, knowing what I know now makes me seriously question how I would treat a publication in Hypatia in hiring and tenure and promotion decisions.

Ásta
Ásta
Reply to  Daniel Kaufman
6 years ago

That is a gross misreading of what I said. Listening to, reading, and engaging with people one theorizes about does not mean one has to agree with them about the issues or the conclusions reached. The methodological commitments do not translate into constraints on content, including the questions asked or the conclusions reached.

Daniel Kaufman
Reply to  Ásta
6 years ago

You may think it is a “gross misreading.” I do not. What I described is clearly communicated by the following passages of your comment:

“Hypatia is a philosophy journal, but it is not a standard one in that it is committed to the feminist community and to fighting against the ignoring and silencing of marginalized and minority voices.”

= = =
That is advocacy, not critical scholarship.
= = =
“when we theorize about other people and their experiences, we need to listen to and read what they themselves say and have said on the matter. Papers published in Hypatia should reflect that commitment.”
= = =
And this is a clear statement that an article on, say, trans issues, will not be printed unless it includes references to the reports of trans people. So if, for example, one wanted to publish a piece on the purely scientific dimension of the issue, one could not only use and cite the work of non-trans scientists.

So, no, I don’t accept your charge that I have engaged in a
“gross misreading.” The remarks are there for everyone to see in black and white.

kris goddamn rhodes
kris goddamn rhodes
Reply to  Daniel Kaufman
6 years ago

“That is advocacy, not critical scholarship.”

Though there are ways to arrive at that conclusion that don’t involve a false dilemma, what you’ve written gives me no confidence that you used one of those roundabout ways. No, I surmise you went straight through via that false dilemma.

A
A
Reply to  Ásta
6 years ago

“when we theorize about other people and their experiences, we need to listen to and read what they themselves say and have said on the matter”

I assume ‘other people’ refers to demographic categories, not individuals, correct? (Can one write about Dolezal, or Trump, without reading their books about their lives, or no?)

Does this obligation apply for all people or only to people, as a commenter put it above, ‘with skin in the game’? (That is: are we required to engage with the writings and self-conceptions of both millionaires and homeless people before writing about issues around either, or are we only required to engage with the latter due to their marginalized status.)

Asking out of genuine curiosity, for what it’s worth, no subtext or agenda intended.

Genderless
Genderless
6 years ago

I am glad to see that there is a discussion about this topic, somewhere, somehow. I am on the side of Rebecca Tuvel, as I have wondered about that of which she writes. Just as women / men are on a spectrum, POC certainly would be as well (as others have pointed out with varying terminology).

I have been annoyed that discussion has not been allowed regarding ‘transgenderism’ / transpeople.

I am one of the crazy people who is not willing to remain silent about the business of transwomen expecting everyone to go along with them being called women (full stop). And if some feminist should transgress (esp. those with any recognition) – then she gets the hate that supposedly the transwoman is being saved from by everyone pretending that s(he) is a she. It is a pretense – though some will pull it off quite well.

The idea that ‘male genitals’ cannot be referred to – as if they don’t exist is absurd. It’s delusional. Functioning genitals are real – so is denial.

I think Hypatia should return the article to viewing.

kris goddamn rhodes
kris goddamn rhodes
Reply to  Genderless
6 years ago

You can pretend that only biological females are women, and in that way contribute to serious harms happening to actual people, or you can pretend that many biological males are women, and in that way not contribute to serious harms happening to actual people. Pick your poison, if you must pretend that pretense is poison.

Professor Plum
Professor Plum
6 years ago

Wow, this is a very sad day for academic freedom and philosophy.

As a feminist philosopher who has published in Hypatia, I’m horrified; I will obviously never publish or do refereeing work for the journal again. Sadly, Hypatia has revealed itself to be anti-intellectual and hostile to ideas. This sort of attitude will destroy philosophical feminism (and possibly philosophy more generally) from within. The calls are coming from inside the house!

My questions: since we are now in an age where philosophy Journals spinelessly capitulate to social media pressure, why not name names? Which of the (rather illustrious) journal editors actually endorsed this statement? And for the minority who did not, why haven’t you resigned in protest?

Marcy
Marcy
6 years ago

With respect, I’m not sure the defenders of the article have read the article. The author shows little knowledge of relevant scholarship, and relies heavily on popular internet sources giving favor to “transracialism”. The author’s pleas for “intellectual engagement” presume there is new intellectual ground here. I can frankly understand the frustration of scholars well versed in these subjects who have spent more time researching their complexities than the author. Hypatia’s decision to review its editorial standards is the right call.

Urstoff
Urstoff
Reply to  Marcy
6 years ago

Most bad scholarship goes quietly into the night unread and uncited. Why is this one viewed as a moral crime?

Misha
Misha
Reply to  Urstoff
6 years ago

Because a bad paper about deontic semantics will not be used as a justification by the public to tell trans women that they are just men in dresses or black people that they can should just get over their race issues.

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  Misha
6 years ago

What if a good paper is used as a justification to do those things?

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  David Mathers
6 years ago

People can cite virtually anything as a justification for virtually anything, if their intent is bad.

Postdoc
Postdoc
Reply to  Marcy
6 years ago

These points about poor scholarship regularly apply to articles published in philosophy journals. In the case that an article gets published on the back of positive referee reports, this happens. It’s perfectly consistent to think both that (1) the paper is an example of substandard research, and that (2) the level and nature of the public criticism of the article and the author on social media and the unofficial response of the journal are not justified and undermine the integrity of academic journals.

Steve Geisz
Steve Geisz
Reply to  Marcy
6 years ago

Can you give an example of a claim made by Tuvel in the article that is central to her overall argument and that has been so clearly refuted by some specific piece of relevant scholarship that no academic philosopher could competently defend it?

AR
AR
6 years ago

I’ve read through a lot of comments on this, in an effort to sincerely discern, so do forgive if I’ve missed something. But: What is the editorial standard that Hypatia was supposed to have followed but failed to?

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  AR
6 years ago

I’d venture just from reading the article and the associate editors’ response and reflecting on my own knowledge of the subject areas, that the scholars who completed the peer reviews lacked AOSs or AOCs in the scholarly areas central to the author’s argument.

AR
AR
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

Thanks, that’s helpful, and a sensible ground for criticism. However, that is hardly grounds for retraction. Ill-qualified reviewers is a normal, and regrettable, feature of the peer review process – especially given the concentrated responsibility on editors. Risk mitigation measures should be in place, but they will always be mitigation measures – sometimes an article will not get the reviewers it should (and often this will be to the disadvantage of the author). Moreover, a single instance of an article not being properly peer reviewed is inadequate evidence of a procedural failing (any more than an instance of a mistaken conviction is by itself an indication that a trial process should be changed). If an article should not have been published, proceed by criticizing it through normal scholarly channels. If there is a pattern of articles that should not have been published, raise the issue of process. In sum, if improper reviewers is the main criticism of the article’s publication, a much different tenor and set of claims is called for.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  AR
6 years ago

As of now, AR, I do not believe that the article has been officially retracted. And yes, if this were the first, isolated instance of an improper peer review, then the response could be inappropriate.

But for the sake of argument, let’s consider the possibility that it was not the first, improper instance….

With thanks and all best wishes,

AR
AR
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

Right – the letter is calling for it to be retracted.

I’ll grant you more than ‘for the sake of argument, it is a possibility’ – I’ll grant you that it is a possibility full stop. But, most possibilities are not facts. Is there any evidence that a troubling pattern is actual? (I have seen no one even begin to marshall evidence of an illicit pattern. If the process is the core issue, then that evidence should be front and center. How else could Hypatia non-arbitrarily modify its process?)

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  AR
6 years ago

Are you asking, CR, if there is an established pattern of cis and trans* women of color serving generally as objects but rarely as subjects of inquiry?

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  AR
6 years ago

AR — apologies.

AR
AR
Reply to  AR
6 years ago

No, that is not what I am asking. I was asking about Hypatia, and whether there is a specific procedural failing on its part. That was my initial query, and my subsequent points concerned that narrow question. The letter is directed at Hypatia’s process – and you’ve helpfully clarified what aspect of the process might be the matter of concern. I won’t repeat what I’ve said, but I certainly agree that editors have a responsibility to find qualified reviewers, and if there is systematic neglect to consult a certain body of qualified reviewers (who are also personally affected by the questions raised in the literature), then there is a serious problem with the process and/or editorial judgment. Is it true that Hypatia is guilty of this? (I am not really asking you to answer that question, but an answer to that question appears to be at the basis of the associate editors’ letter.)

bex
bex
Reply to  AR
6 years ago

I had thought that the point about familiarity with the literature from POC and trans* theorists was part of it, but that the overall reason to retract (rather than just, say, apologize for publishing a sub-standard paper) was that its availability in print from a legitimate scholarly source somehow does ongoing harm to the relevant marginalized communities. I can imagine cases in which this might be true (a paper that argues in favor of a specific people’s genocide, for example) but personally I think that’s pretty overblown here…

Chris
Chris
6 years ago

Regarding comment 1, “If you’re not a member of the Catholic clergy, what makes you qualified to even discuss whether or not Catholicism is correct?”

Julinna Oxley
Julinna Oxley
6 years ago

Rebecca, thank you for your comments. I’m one of the people whose jaw dropped when I read your paper abstract, what with the Jenner reference and the use of the word “transgenderism” there at the front. I appreciate your clarification regarding the use of the word “transgenderism” (which we now know you did not mean to be derogatory). But please know that for the audience of this essay (Hypatia readers), everydayfeminism is a great website, but not an academic resource. That’s not where we would look for a justification for the use of the word “transgenderism.” We know the conversation that is taking place in the field. If folks like Sheila Jeffrey are using the word “transgenderism” in a derogatory way, well, then that’s the meaning it takes on for us. So this language was particularly confusing.

As to the deadnaming, thanks for retracting that. I get that that was an accident. Many of us feminists could have made this mistake had we not been in touch with trans folks. The readership of Hypatia is really broad. It is unique among philosophy journals as being a venue where people from other disciplines – English, sociology, anthropology and more – publish. As anyone who does interdisciplinary work knows, sometimes we talk past each other. We use the same vocabulary, but the words have different meanings. Anyway, this was a mistake of not knowing the respectful practices (but which is pretty important if you’re going to be talking about a group of marginalized folks, and are not a member of that group). Philosophers are often playing catch-up to the new ground that’s being staked out in feminist studies. So it helps immensely to talk to feminist folks in other fields and stay abreast of the current literature (which I confess to not doing as well as I should).

Had these two features of the article been absent from the get-go, the article would not have received the outrage it did. But it still would have received a fair amount of criticism, in my view. Here’s why. The methodology and argument go contrary to what the sources cited would recommend. For instance, the quote from Talia Bettcher about gender identity being political is really misleading. That’s a super complex paper. Her main argument is that trans people (and all of us really) are subject to a kind of reality enforcement regarding genital verification. She distinguishes between actual moral genitalia (which is concealed) and the merely presumed moral genitalia that is attributed in concealment. Trans people are in a bind when it comes to actual vs presumed moral genitalia. Although they might want to be seen as “beyond the gender binary”, trans people try to “pass” in order to not be considered a pretender. This is because of “reality enforcement,” which is institutionalized through sex segregation in public restrooms, changing rooms, domestic violence shelters, homeless shelters, etc, make trans people have to conform to dominant gender norms in order to move about. This reality enforcement is a kind of trans oppression. Her solution is to take Maria Lugones’ approach to meaning, and argue that there are “multiple worlds of sense” – we have different concepts and meanings to “women” which are open-ended and multiple. This is an amazing paper and I’m not doing it justice, but to say that gender identities are merely political in nature is misleading.

Further, the irony is that your paper seems to engage in a kind of “reality enforcement” on trans people because it reifies the gender binary through your discussion of transitioning. So, to reference Bettcher as providing support for your approach to the topic is, at least to me, bizarre. (For anyone who wants to read Talia Bettcher’s paper, it’s up on her Academia.edu site.)

Second, Charles Mills. Mills’ is known for endorsing the idea that race is a social-political construction. It’s not about skin tone. It’s clear that you agree with that, but when the four objections to ‘changing race’ are discussed, the way they are discussed is as if race is about how skin tone is perceived/constructed in society. But Mills’ point is that race is intrinsically about hierarchy and thus about power relations. “Where are you in the system?” For ease, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epAv6Q6da_o. So if race is intrinsically hierarchical, then the question being asked about the ethics of changing race is nonsensical, or at best confusing. You can’t change your own place in the hierarchy without changing social location. And you certainly can’t do that on your own. So all the objections are, to some extent, beside the point, if you take Mills’ view of race (and critical race theory) seriously.

There are some other debates about methodology that are relevant but this is not my area and I am not a qualified reviewer for the paper. I apologize to any trans theorists or critical race theorists if I’ve misunderstood or misrepresented your work. I’ve read enough to teach a class, not write an article. And contrary to what Thomas Mulligan thinks, this feminist is not short of clothing, and has loads of laundry to do, dishes to clean, and kids’ lunches to pack. Peace out.

k
k
Reply to  Julinna Oxley
6 years ago

Thanks for this careful response. “The methodology and argument go contrary to what the sources cited would recommend.” This happens a lot in philosophy. Then we get into a debate about how to interpret the sources. Then papers get published that argue the interpretation was wrong. *That* is the right response to these remaining worries. Not the public outcry and demand for retraction, I think.

bex
bex
Reply to  Julinna Oxley
6 years ago

Thank you for this. I agree with K — the way to respond to this paper, and the way to treat a professional colleague who seems to be acting in good faith here (however mistaken or problematic the paper may be), is to provide considered critical push-back. I can imagine few examples where public outcry of this sort *might* be appropriate, but those all involve having reason to believe the normal way of dealing with disagreements within our discipline (presenting and publishing critical papers, or at least a thoughtful and even-handed blog post, that explain why this paper is wrong or even why this paper is morally problematic, and argue for some alternative approach/view) would not be adequate in some serious way, but I really can’t see how that would be the case here.

WP
WP
Reply to  Julinna Oxley
6 years ago

This is really helpful, thank you.

Is it generally accepted that gender is not intrinsically hierarchical? My impression was that that was a reasonably standard way of thinking about it.

Julinna Oxley
Julinna Oxley
Reply to  WP
6 years ago

Hi WP, so far as I can tell, the only one thing that most gender scholars agree upon is that gender is a “social construction.” The thing is, there are 100 definitions of social construction and it’s more complicated than it sounds. So, people spend a lot of time debating the ins and outs of whether gender is a natural kind (in the philosophical sense, not the biological sense), how gender relates to (biological) sex, problems with the gender binary, whether and how gender constructs and roles are oppressive to both men and women (and how they are not), where the come from, how they limit people’s lives and opportunities (limiting our perceptions of women’s capabilities, preventing men from being emotional, etc.), the way that gender relates to perceptions regarding reproductive capabilities, whether we can revise gender categories, etc. Sally Haslanger’s view has been particularly influential in philosophy, and on her view, part of what it means to be a woman is to be in a subordinate social role (again, there’s a lot of ways to cash that out, so other philosophers revise and modify this view). I hope this helps just a little. If you want to read more, this might be of interest: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/

dzongsar
dzongsar
Reply to  WP
6 years ago

Gender is a hierarchy. Gender benefits males. Women cannot tell a rapist, “I identify as a tree” when her rapist is targeting her. Men can identify and appropriate the so-called identity of a woman. But, women cannot identify out of being the target of rapists who want to dominate a woman. Many trans women concede that as men they do not change se but they like to express a very feminine version of masculinity. Many detransition from a gender change, and many de-transitioned people have social media presence that should not be ignored.

There are a lot of questions that philosophers an help to answer. How can you prove an innate gender identity? If gender identity is 56 labels according to Facebook, and can be fluid, why are we treating children with dysphoria as if they have a permanent, innate gender identity and in some cases given powerful puberty blocking drugs that are unstudied for long term effects in children?

Please, philosophers, pick up this philosophical discussion. The author in question is pro-trans gender.

I am gender agnostic, there is no legal definition of gender. Why does feelings of 0.03% of population trump biology? With a gay and lesbian sibling I’m very sympathetic to non-hetero sexual orientations. I do know trans people. But, why do the feelings of 0.03% of humans get to erase the lived experiences of 50% of the population which is women?

If Rachel Dolezal cannot make me believe she is black, why can Jenner make me believe in changing sex? Besides, 90% of trans women keep their male tackle. Many are heterosexual and retain attraction to the opposite sex, women.

Any of you academics worried about free speech, pay attention to Jordan B Peterson of the University of Toronto. On Patreon, as his grant funding is cut for questioning compelled pronouns, his social media subscriptions have replaced that income. Interesting conversations about gender identity, free speech and definitions of words should not be silenced. Watch out for shaming labels, name calling, smear campaigns and threats of rape, death to happen to any woman who questions the gender party line. That has been happening online for several years, and women who question gender hierarchy very much know how gender harms women and girls. Stand up, they are coming for the field of philosophy now. Look what has happened to this junior professor. Consider keeping up the conversation about how society is to balance the rights and conflicting needs of women for privacy and safety vs. men for the expression of their preferred personality gender identity.

CN
CN
Reply to  dzongsar
6 years ago

Ha! Wow. When Bex said they could imagine a few contexts where a pile-on might be warranted, Jordan Peterson sprang immediately to mind. How funny that he should then be recommended as someone worth listening to.

For those who don’t know, Peterson is a University of Toronto psychologist who is currently making over $28K/month by producing YouTube Videos claiming that Communists and Feminists have taken over the Ontario government and are threatening the fabric of society by forcing him to use people’s preferred pronouns.

His grant funding was not cut. He applied for a SSHRC and didn’t get it (for his proposed research into the biological origins of “political correctness” according to his Twitter).

Suzy Killmister
Suzy Killmister
6 years ago

One thing that seems to be emerging in this thread is a tendency for critics and supporters of the Tuvel piece to talk past one another. I’ve by no means read all of the criticisms out there, but one of the most common refrains I’ve seen is that Tuvel fails to engage with the lived experiences of trans people and people of color, and that this suffices for it to be poor (perhaps even inadequate) scholarship. However, the pushback to this point has almost entirely been of the form “show me the arguments that Tuvel should have cited/responded to”. But I think this is to misconstrue the norm that’s being invoked – it’s a norm about connecting (certain domains of) philosophical enquiry to the messy reality on the ground, and attending to the voices of those who are so often excluded from philosophical discourse, rather than a norm about identifying and responding to abstract philosophical arguments. (FWIW I think there are strong echoes here with the debate about Tommie Shelby’s keynote at the SAF conference – critics objected to the way Shelby’s talk occluded the contributions and perspectives of Black women, and an all too common response was ‘but tell me what was wrong with his argument!’, as if the only standard by which a philosophical paper could be judged is its soundness.)

jake stone
jake stone
Reply to  Suzy Killmister
6 years ago

Eloquently stated but a bit of a straw man. Few have defended the quality of the article. The objection is that such critiques should have led to a demand for a retraction.
Moreover, while the lived experience is relevant, philosophy , of all subjects, should be willing to engage with the detached observer as well. Indeed, perhaps detachment allows for an equally thought provoking perspective (albeit that may not be the case in this instance).

beauvoir's baby
beauvoir's baby
Reply to  Suzy Killmister
6 years ago

That is a good point, Suzy. But why is it ok to exclude self identified trans racial voices from philosophy? Who decides which voices should be included and which voices should be excluded? Why should self identified trans gender or trans sex voices dominate self identified trans racial voices?

Misha
Misha
Reply to  beauvoir's baby
6 years ago

Because there isn’t a trans racial community. There is no history of unheard or oppressed trans racial voices like there is with gender non-conforming people and trans gender people. There are oppressed people who tried to pass racially to escape oppression but that is not Dolezeal. She is a one off strange case of a white woman who deceived people into believing she was black and used it for her benefit.

Oliver Traldi
Oliver Traldi
Reply to  Misha
6 years ago

Maybe there’s no “history” of them *precisely because they’re so marginalized*. Do you really not see how easily your rhetoric here can be analogized to the “willful ignorance” so often ascribed to dominant groups by your crowd?

misha
misha
Reply to  Oliver Traldi
6 years ago

No. My scholarship is rooted in real histories of oppression not pretend ones. The willful ignorance is yours since you refuse to see the difference. Meanwhile bathroom bills get passed and black kids get gunned down while you wonder about the non existent marginalized white people who want to be black.

Darius
Darius
Reply to  Misha
6 years ago

My sense is that what was going on with Dolezal was rather more complicated than that.

There isn’t a trans racial community as far as you know. But in any case, if not, isn’t that partly because it is much harder to effect a convincing transition in this case? Does anyone doubt that if it could be easily done, there would be quite a few adolescent and young white men, in particular, who would eagerly transition to being ‘black’ (or, if we are not to beg the obvious but seemingly taboo question raised by the vilified Tuvel and the mystifyingly non-vilified Adolph Reed, transition to being black)? Of course, they might come to regret their decision when they find they can’t get a job and are constantly stopped by the police, but if we’re going to require that such a decision be informed and mature, we are back to begging the taboo question, since any such requirement is standardly rejected in the gender case.

My partner is black. Her reaction to the Dolezal case was ‘People want to be like me? The more the merrier!’

misha
misha
Reply to  Darius
6 years ago

A lot of white young men would like what Greg Tate calls “Everything but the burden.” They don’t want to actually be black, they want to be cool. They don’t want the burden. And a lot of black women don’t feel like your partner and have written about it and theorized about it. It is not flattering to many black women that Rachel Dolezeal thinks she is one (and an authority to boot!) Black women don’t need white women pretending to be black women to feel good about themselves.

Darius
Darius
Reply to  misha
6 years ago

I’m well aware that a lot of black people don’t feel like my partner. Since one often gets the impression that no black people feel that way, I thought she was worth mentioning. And I’m well aware that many (most) young white men who might want to be black want this for ill-considered and often discreditable reasons. My main point concerned the supposedly huge different between the ideas of a trans racial and of a trans gender person, given that theorists have been boring us to death for decades about how race and gender are both ‘social constructs’. The phenomena you mention — ‘everything but the burden’, non-trans people not feeling ‘flattered’ or needing trans people to make them feel good about themselves — all have their alleged counterparts in the case of trans women.

John Gardner
John Gardner
Reply to  Suzy Killmister
6 years ago

‘as if the only standard by which a philosophical paper could be judged is its soundness’
In a philosophy journal or at a philosophy conference? Damn right it’s the only standard. If you don’t want to read propositions that make you want to throw up, you’re in the wrong profession. That’s what we’re here for. Scrupulously to test every single awful possibility. Ideally we test the awful ones to destruction, but who knows? (Would you excommunicate me as a philosopher for testing, in Kantian vein, the awful possibility that people’s ‘lived experiences’ ain’t worth diddly squat?)

Suzy Killmister
Suzy Killmister
Reply to  John Gardner
6 years ago

The issue’s not whether an argument makes me, or anyone else, feel uncomfortable, it’s whether it’s likely to contribute to material harm (see Mark’s comment below). Philosophy doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the ideas we put forward potentially have consequences. That doesn’t mean I think all potentially harmful ideas should be censored, but I do think we should be much less blase about just throwing them out there and seeing what sticks, and much more willing to hold each other to a wider set of norms with respect to such ideas. (And the reason I drew attention to the distinction between norms that I did above is precisely that I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to argue that self-identification suffices for membership in racial or other social groups – probably wrong, but not obviously so, and certainly worth exploring philosophically. My point is that this isn’t just a philosopher’s abstract thought experiment, and so shouldn’t be engaged with as such.)

MFL
MFL
Reply to  John Gardner
6 years ago

Strange to read comment after comment about the need for open discussion on any topic (even propositions that might make you want to ‘throw up’) and yet philosophers in the U.S. were trained for decades and decades to consider an incredibly narrow range of propositions and problems judging everything outside that range as “not philosophy.” Interested in propositions about slavery? White supremacy? The racism of the philosophical greats? Women and children? Parenting? Disability? Abortion? Patriarchy? Heteronormativity? Well guess what, that isn’t philosophy. Or at least it wasn’t for the 19th and most of the 20th century. The successful push to finally get some of these topics and associated philosophers into the academy has been met with very mixed results including panic, philosophybros, pearl clutching (“Oh it is a sad day in the academy when politics replace the free exchange of ideas”) and a sudden devotion to open questions where we should be considering “all propositions.” Where were all of you when my brilliant undergraduate student got to grad school and had to teach himself Fanon and Africana philosophy because no one there considered it real philosophy? (or had any expertise) What about the lone brilliant feminist ethicist in my grad program who was routinely humiliated and treated badly by all the boys because she did applied ethics and that ‘soft stuff?’ If philosophy had been this great defender of all ideas some of the comments in this thread would make more sense. But it has historically been a judgmental white boys club where very little social and political applied work was taken seriously. That has changed somewhat but the pushback is incredible. Consider that this article which has raised so many red flags for scholars who have worked so hard to gain credibility for these questions, may actually be doing damage. I’m not sure whether a retraction is necessary and I certainly don’t support threats or personal attacks against the author. But I do know that philosophy has been hostile to the very people and issues this article considers in the abstract. Perhaps less false pretense and screwy nostalgia for the good old days when every idea was considered in the open air of pure reason. Let’s get real. This has always been an adversarial territorial discipline where power and politics played a role. The best reasons have not always risen to the top (nor the ‘best’ people) and we have done a bad job of thinking critically about public issues. Maybe a little more epistemic humility from those of you who think we are in end times. Breaking new ground and cultivating an area can be back breaking work. It raises peoples’ ire when someone comes in and clumsily trots around on some of what was cultivated. Especially when it has to do with the very lives they live. Being aghast at that ire, rather than trying to understand it, is not helping philosophy to become more open and inclusive.

Professor Plum
Professor Plum
Reply to  MFL
6 years ago

Yes, sure; philosophy has a serious problem with inclusion and diversity of both bodies and ideas. But the remedy to this can’t be to declare certain topics or positions to be verboten or to rest on a simple minded version of standpoint theory.

The position of those who signed the petition calling for retraction and of the majority of editors who apologized for the publication of the essay is simply horrifying to anyone who does care about both diversity and free thought. This isn’t “pearl clutching” (thanks for the casual sexism!); it is the recognition that ideas and arguments matter.

One thing that is so frustrating to me as a feminist is how the history of feminist thought has been erased in many of these conversations. You know feminist philosophers have long grappled with the insights and limitations of standpoint epistemology, for example. But instead of taking this work seriously as a jumping off point, you have people rushing in, talking about the perspectives of trans* people or people of color, as if that discourse wasn’t freighted in all sorts of problematic ways.

I’m not anxious about the boundaries of philosophy or interested in policing its borders. But philosophy simply isn’t possible in an atmosphere like this one. All philosophers should outraged by this, just like all philosophers should be outraged by philosophy’s whiteness and maleness.

John Gardner
John Gardner
Reply to  MFL
6 years ago

MFL: Do I detect that you’re trying to make me guilty by association? If so you’re associating me with the wrong people. I have no time for those ‘incredibly narrow range of propositions’ folk. I really think that every proposition is ripe for philosophical testing. I’m delighted to see the rise of philosophical questions about gender, race, sexuality, reparations, identity, perspective, etc. I follow writings on many of these questions fairly closely, including those in Hypatia. I make my living from a form of applied ethics (yes, that ‘soft stuff’) in which such questions often figure, albeit usually incidentally (in writings about discrimination, sexual offences, duties of repair and apology, etc.).
My point in adding my comment was pretty much your point: some powerful people are putting the testing of certain propositions out of bounds to philosophy. Most conspicuously, they regard it as improper to test the fascinating and complex proposition that transwomen are women simpliciter. That was one proposition that Professor Tuvel was trying to test (yes, I read her paper before the hooha). She used the standard philosophical technique of analogising the proposition to another apparently similar propostion (transblackpeople are black people simpilicter) and asking whether the analogy holds, and which way that would cut if it does (she actually left the final question very conspicuously open).
When we embark on such an exercise in a philosophical spirit, we take the risk that that our proposition will be tested to destruction. As philosophers we must remain open to that possibility. If the proposition falls then that may be disappointing for people who are wedded to it for other reasons, say because they are part of a political movement to which the proposition is a central article of faith. (The philosopher who did the testing may even have been one of those people.) Is that harmful to those people? Possibly. (We have to assume that what the occasional philosopher says adversely affects the prospects of the movement, which is only rarely true.) Should we let that possible harmfulness stand in the way of open and scrupulous testing of the proposition, possibly even to destruction? No. If such possible harmfulness were a suitable standard, we should wish that nobody had written Kapital, Der Wille zur Macht, or Du Contrat Social (among countless others). (And by the way they also ‘[came] in and clumsily trot[ted] around on some of what was [freshly] cultivated’, right? Philosophically, I’m really glad they did. It’s another important aspect of the job.)
The people who want to rule out of bounds to philosophers the testing of an important proposition about gender (possibly even saying that it’s not philosophy) are the majority of the editorial board of Hypatia. It’s not an excuse of any kind that lots of intellectuals got up to the same anti-intellectual tricks before them. Yes, I understand the ire (which, let’s be honest, is mostly to do with the political movement, not the philosophy) but I still think it’s shameful. All the more so that they would shit on a junior colleague without tenure in the process.

Contract Faculty
Contract Faculty
Reply to  Suzy Killmister
6 years ago

“The pushback to this point has almost entirely been of the form “show me the arguments that Tuvel should have cited/responded to”. But I think this is to misconstrue the norm that’s being invoked – it’s a norm about connecting (certain domains of) philosophical enquiry to the messy reality on the ground, and attending to the voices of those who are so often excluded from philosophical discourse”.

But many of the points listed in the Open Letter do appeal to problems with the scholarship. If we take the letter at its words, these are problems with the article. Of course, one might say that these two things are related: that the very problem of scholarship we’re talking about is a failure to listen to “voices on the ground”. But it’s not clear what that means. Presumably, the way that voices are the ground are relevant *for a philosophy paper* is that they are articulating arguments (or making explicit assumptions, etc.) that need to be addressed. But when critics are asked which arguments or points of view she overlooked, so far at least they have mentioned things that she discusses.

We can’t, that’s for sure, simply leave it at “Tuvel fails to engage with the lived experience of black or trans people” without explaining how that makes her arguments bad ones. I guess I’m just not of the view that the simple failure to do in in and of itself makes her arguments bad. But I do suspect that what’s really going here is that people think that only because she is a white cis-gendered philosopher who didn’t listen to the voices on the ground that she came to the conclusion that she did. In other words, the problem is not only, or not really, that people find Tuvel’s article poorly researched, it’s that they think that the only reason she holds her substantive position is due to ignorance of the voices on the ground: were she familiar with such voices, she wouldn’t have defended this position. This isn’t clear to me at all, and nor have critics gone to the trouble of explaining why exactly her position is that wrong. They haven’t articulated what it is that those voices on the ground say that would have made Tuvel (and me) go ‘ah, well these arguments are clearly and obviously wrong, such that my position is not only bad, but harmful.’

And importantly, even if Tuvel didn’t listen to “voices on the ground”, that doesn’t merit a call for retraction or an open letter condemning her paper, unless we can articulate some special harm flowing from that in this case. Because if we started doing that for every philosophy paper that failed to do such listening, we’d be at it every day. And I haven’t seen an explanation of why her argument is harmful (though that’s definitely a term that’s been used).

Suzy Killmister
Suzy Killmister
Reply to  Contract Faculty
6 years ago

The critics of Tuvel’s paper are surely not all of one mind, and I was only aiming at picking up one strand of objection. I think it’s worth bearing in mind, though, that Hypatia’s instructions for referees clearly ask whether a submitted paper ‘reflects the diversity of women’s lives’, so the grounds for retraction differ from what you might expect from a different journal. While I think it would be great if more philosophers attended to lived experiences rather than relying exclusively on armchair speculation (and I do mean exclusively – I’ve got no beef with a well placed thought experiment), it’s surely more important in some domains than others.

David Wallace
David Wallace
Reply to  Suzy Killmister
6 years ago

” the grounds for retraction differ from what you might expect from a different journal. ”

At most that’s a case for why Hypatia *should have formulated* a different retraction policy. But its *actual* public retraction policy is no different from any other journal.

junior
junior
Reply to  Suzy Killmister
6 years ago

I agree that “connecting connecting (certain domains of) philosophical enquiry to the messy reality on the ground” is an important norm, but I don’t think the failure of Tuvel supporters to appreciate it explains the main respect in which they and the critics have been talking past each other. To me, anyway, the main dialectic looks more like this:

Supporters: It’s wrong (a) for Hypatia to publicly repudiate Tuvel’s article, and (b) for people to publicly shame her for writing it.
Critics: But Tuvel fails to engage with the lived experiences of trans people and people of color, and this suffices for it to be poor (perhaps even inadequate) scholarship.
Supporters: Perhaps, but it wouldn’t suffice to justify (a) and (b).

The clearest response to this last point I’ve seen on this thread has been Mark Lance’s last comment, which appeals to the extent of the harm and oppression to which trans people and people of color have been and continue to be subjected. The argument, I suppose, would be that in light of these factors, the norm being invoked is so important that violations should be treated extremely seriously, on the level of (a) and (b).

I don’t have a really well-worked-out take on this argument, but frankly it doesn’t look super promising to me. One thing to note, though, is that it clearly accepts significant tradeoffs between certain values (having to do, in part, with empowering historically subordinated points of view) and more traditional values of academic freedom, and here the “show me the arguments” response IS relevant. If it can’t be shown to people who don’t already want to condemn Tuvel that her arguments are obviously beyond the pale of reasonable discourse, the tradeoff becomes a lot harder to accept.

jake stone
jake stone
Reply to  junior
6 years ago

Nice try, but, as you suspected, it’s non sequitur!
Tuvel was not promoting an oppressive agenda. She was under attack because of her identity and lack of connection with the ideological in-group. Your argument by extension would exclude anyone from any group with a history of oppression talking about any issue where that involves oppression.

Mark Lance
Mark Lance
6 years ago

This will be my last comment on the thread. Despite the point having already been made several times, person after person continues to say things like this: “Most bad scholarship goes quietly into the night unread and uncited. Why is this one viewed as a moral crime.”

Well, leave aside the rhetorical flourish at the end. Why does it seem more morally serious to put out abstract glib confused arguments on trans folks and race wihile ignoring most of the relevant literature and all the voices of trans folk and racial minorities than it is to put out an article on material composition that is abstract, glib, and out of touch with the literature? That is the question being posed over and over as if it is a serious one.

Well, then, I suppose a serious answer would start with the murder of trans folks on the street, their brutal treatment by police, their constant public shaming and abuse. It might also start with rates of black imprisonment, profiling, and murder by police, inequities in education, income, and public treatment. It could go on to remind you of the last several hundred years of history. It would take quite a while to fully lay out the relevant differences between discussing “transratialism” in a way that never so much as mentions white supremacy or the role of racial identity in resisting it and a bad paper on material composition. But I hope – in a sort of abstract and reasonless manner, having become familiar with the internet some time ago – that this will be sufficient to put at least this silly point to rest.

Contract Faculty
Contract Faculty
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

The question is, though, how does Tuvel’s paper contribute to such harms? Even if you think that it could have been better researched, and even if you disagree with her conclusions, what does her paper have to do with all of the awful harms that you mention?

And I would say that the issue with being out of touch with the literature, in any philosophical debate, is that you risk reinventing the wheel by saying things that have already been said or failing to consider relevant counterarguments to your views. But people here have been patently unable to point to what it is in the literature that Tuvel should have been discussing but didn’t discuss. Above, you mention that she fails to discuss the role of “white supremacy or the role of racial identity in resisting it” when discussing transracialism. But she does discuss the racist conditions under which racial identities are formed. As people have already noted, she does consider the social importance placed on ancestry, as well as the asymmetric position that white are in (as people more able to present as of another race). If there’s something more specific that she missed, given that we’re talking about an open letter here that could very well ruin her career, the onus is on you to articulate what it is that merited such a response.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Contract Faculty
6 years ago

She could and should have discussed the literature, full stop. In other words, she should have done actual *research* in her field of study. Instead she offers a single off-hand quotation from one trans* theorist and a cursory and questionable summary of one aspect of Mills’ philosophy.

If I’d been a reviewer, it would have been an easy “revise and resubmit” — the manuscript has a promising and provocative thesis and is technically well-argued but demonstrates almost zero awareness of or engagement with relevant scholarship.

As the majority of the board’s associated editors acknowledge, these and other flaws clearly should have been addressed in the review process. That they were not — and were not in a journal actively committed to “promoting diversity within feminist philosophy and philosophy in general” — may be indicative of broader and more pervasive problems, such as systematic silencing and exclusion of the philosophical voices of cis and trans* women of color in this field. (A common complaint raised on discussion boards has been along the lines of — “wait, she got that flimsy piece of scholarship published in a peer-reviewed, ranked journal. And she’s got a tenure-track gig? Look what we have to go through just to maybe get a high teaching load contingent lectureship. Must be nice to be white and cis, Becky.”)

The article was unfit for publication in Hypatia, simply from a scholarly perspective. That it was published nonetheless suggests deeper issues, as a majority of the journal’s associated editors have openly acknowledged.

Lance Bush
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

The reasons given in the open letter are feeble at best. I do not buy the claim that the article was unfit “simply from a scholarly perspective.” Rather, it seems unfit to an ideologically unified group of people who employ a host of norms much of the rest of academia do not conform to. If the same standards were applied here to publications in philosophy more generally and with the same vigor, you may have to retract most publications for failing to meet these aggressive policing standards.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Lance Bush
6 years ago

Expecting publications to demonstrate competence in their areas of scholarship is not an aberrant academic norm. Heck, it’s not even an aberrant norm for grad school essays.
Tuvel’s article reads like a fine grad school paper. Rather than decrying the response she’s received from the community of scholars who specialize in the field she intended to engage, perhaps you could work with her to improve it.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

@Justin W. — the open letter that had 130 signatures at the initial time of your post now has more than 800. Among those who have signed are canonical figures in the scholarly field that Tuvel’s article aims to engage, including but not limited to Sara Ahmed, Naomi Scheman, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Iris Young, Piya Chatterjee, and Jack Halberstam. Further a majority of the journal’s associated editors have stated that “clearly, the article should not have been published.” Seeing as I am not sure how much more evidence one would need to establish that Tulver’s article has received a response from the community of scholars who specialize in the field she intended to engage and that this response has not endorsed its publication, if you advocate any contrary evidentiary criteria explicit, I ask that you please make them explicit.

Dan Butt
Dan Butt
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

Just to be clear, the Iris Young who has signed this petition is (so far as I can see) a graduate student in Chemistry at Berkeley. Iris Marion Young died in 2006.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

Butt — thanks for pointing that out and apologies for the error.

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

You’ve no idea how much research she did. There’s a balance in any article between engaging with the literature in detail, and writing something of manageable length, with a clear argument, that grabs the reader. For all you know, the author read loads of stuff, but decided, in her professional judgment, to err on the side of the latter. (There’s also of course an issue about how much time you want to spend making sure you’ve covered all the bases on a single article, versus pursuing a strategy of getting as many of your ideas sent of as possible and trusting peer review to sort out when you’ve missed something important. This is a matter of degree also of course.)

Given that the author specializes in race and gender issues, I find it unlikely that she does not read writers of colour, or feminists of colour, or read what trans people have written before writing an article on this topic. (Indeed, in response to her critics she cited Serano, a trans activist on, ‘transgendered’). Not everything that someone reads for a paper goes into the paper.

k
k
Reply to  David Mathers
6 years ago

Yes. I think a call for charity is in order.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Amy Donahue
6 years ago

This doesn’t seem to be a very good approach, Amy. Many of the most important ideas, and the most important things to be said, constitute genuine breaks from what has been taken for granted in previous discussions. Philosophy often progresses from fresh questions being asked from fresh perspectives, presented in ways that allow one to see the new challenge clearly whether or not one is immersed in the vast prior literature. Many of the greatest works of philosophy make little reference to the vast body of work that comes before, and this does not disqualify them from being great contributions to their respective fields. In fact, it is often the fact that they take a new approach and refuse to be hampered by the assumptions and consensus of the past that makes such works great.

It’s one thing to reject a submission on the grounds that it ignores an apparently powerful argument that would be well known to someone more familiar with the literature. But in such cases, the onus is surely on the rejecter to _produce that argument_, And in cases like that, the submission should not be rejected because it doesn’t engage with the literature: it should be rejected because it overlooks a clear response.

To reject submissions on the mere grounds that they don’t engage with the relevant literature is at best to perpetuate a blinkered, close-minded, dull and conservative approach to one’s discipline, and at worst to provide an ad hoc justification for eliminating challenging views without fair consideration.

Urstoff
Urstoff
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

Since you quoted my rhetorical flourish, I may as well respond:

Your second paragraph seems like a non sequitur to the first. It is immoral/wrong to write (publish?) a “glib” article (presuming for the moment that that’s some sort of sound philosophical critique) in Hypatia because of horrible things that happen in the world. That’s not really an argument, but seems more like free association. I (and I think pretty much everyone here) recognize that horrible things happen to people because of race and gender identity. Given that, why does that make writing/publishing this paper such a moral offense? Why the demand for a retraction rather than an article of critique?

G
G
Reply to  Urstoff
6 years ago

Agreed. The claim that something shouldn’t be done because it perpetuates oppression just presupposes a long list of causal claims. The thought seems to be that the lives of trans people and racial minorities will be worse because this article was published, or they’ll be better if we pillory Tuvel, destroy her career, etc. (indeed, so much better as to justify destroying her career). How, really, does anyone know that?

Andrew Sepielli
Andrew Sepielli
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

Mark Lance — The apt comparison is not with work on material composition or the “myth of the given” or anything like that. It’s with other work in applied moral, political, and social philosophy. I think of the recent discussions of effective altruism; there, the costs of being wrong are surely great as well — e.g., starvation, disease, political imprisonment — and yet the criticisms from philosophers were almost uniformly glib and superficial, and to compound matters, published in venues more heavily trafficked than a scholarly journal. I bring this up because it seems to me that combined effect of the open letter, the apology, the criticisms of the apology, and many of the comments here, is to single out Professor Tuvel as guilty of a sin different in kind from that committed by all of us limited beings who dare to pronounce on difficult and pressing matters. I’m not saying that most individual critics of hers are trying to do this, although some links upthread reveal that some surely are; I’m just talking about the cumulative effect. I think that this treatment has been unfair, and that more kindness and solidarity are called for.

Mark N Lance
Mark N Lance
Reply to  Andrew Sepielli
6 years ago

OK. Since there is a serious response, I’m going back on my “last comment” claim.
Yes, I think the methodological abstraction and glibness does very real harm in other areas. (That’s not a criticism of my using the example of composition. I was responding to people who said “bad philosophy, meh?”) And I do think that more kindness in the way this has played out is called for. If you have seen John Corvino’s recent contribution to this, I agree with it entirely. But presenting this as if the main focus of critics has been an attack on Tuvel, is simply not true. I of course can’t speak to what every single human on the internet said, but nothing in the letter, nothing I’ve seen from prominent philosophers attacks *her*. (And while I do think it is a bad paper, that had the bad luck to employ a methodology in an area that makes it morally problematic, and also the bad luck to be incompetently assessed by editors, that simply is not a judgment on the person. Look Kant wrote idiotic and morally offensive pieces. Frege wrote idiotic antisemitic tracts. Heidegger – well, yeah. Closer to home I’ve suggested that my own dissertation director, someone I consider one of the most important and consequential philosophers of the 20th c has written some things that are very bad and morally indefensible. I’ve certainly written things I’m not proud of. Shit happens. We make mistakes. I hope that in the fullness of time growth occurs as a result.) The main focus hasn’t even been on the paper. The way things were framed in this blog post has forced those of us who were critical to detail more of our complaints with the paper, but the main focus of the letter, and even more so after the Hypatia apology, has been on the editorial process.

I would personally very much like to see the focus solely on that and these methodological norms that I think are harmful in many places. There is room for lots of future meta-discussion on this. (Many fields have been grappling with methodological ethics when dealing with vulnerable populations for a long time. In philosophy it is largely new.) Sadly, now that the alt-right and the TERFs have jumped into this debate that is going to be harder, but I very much hope that we can move that way.
(Also, smaller point: thanks for using your real name. I have a general – though obviously defeasible – practice of simply ignoring blogs that allow for anonymous comments because they go the way this thread has almost every time.)

jake stone
jake stone
Reply to  Mark Lance
6 years ago

“I suppose a serious answer would start with the murder of trans folks on the street, their brutal treatment by police, their constant public shaming and abuse. It might also start with rates of black imprisonment, profiling, and murder by police, inequities in education, income, and public treatment.”

That is profoundly wrong and hypocritical (and I seldom use this word). You are associating an individual with hatred and oppression simply because of her group identity. It’s a nasty rhetorical device, and one seen often on Breitbart

S
S
6 years ago

I’m genuinely confused as to what is going on here.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that there was a paper which clearly met all four conditions the editors list; i.e. it clearly used relevant vocabulary, etc, it gave an accurate account of theories of religious conversion, it correctly cited theories of racial group belonging, and it engaged fully with the concerns of women of colour. (Note I don’t mean to imply that Tuvel’s paper is actually guilty of not doing any of this: i’m just trying to figure something out). Despite all of this it ended up concluding that either there can be both transgender and transracial people or there can be neither. It might do that, for example, by suggesting that Mills is wrong, or by pointing to various problems with standard models of religious conversion, or whatever.

I really cannot tell if some contributors to this debate think that such a paper should be published – despite the fact that it would be controversial – or whether they think even such a paper should not be published – because of the harms it would cause – or whether they think that such a paper is impossible; i.e. that there simply could not be a good paper which equated the two phenomena. I think that a lot of the discussion actually assumes the last option. Is that right? If so, the entire fuss over publishing ethics seems to miss the mark?

G
G
Reply to  S
6 years ago

“I think that a lot of the discussion actually assumes the last option.”

That is my impression as well. But if that’s what’s being presupposed, then it would be an interesting topic for scholarly treatment for the benighted individuals who don’t find it obvious.

Larry Cahoone
Larry Cahoone
6 years ago

An unconscionable mob political attack on a junior person for inquiring into an issue, vilifying any honest inadequacies in her piece as evil. Makes one ashamed to be part of the profession. Period.

Curious
Curious
6 years ago

I want to better understand the idea that papers like this one should engage with “lived experience.” Under normal circumstances, this would be understood as a request to engage with empirical data. For example, if the author were writing about the experiences of white men, philosophers would think she needed to engage with empirical results about white men. It would not be a problem if those empirical results were obtained by an African American woman (say, Jennifer Eberhardt), and it would not be a problem if the results went against what white men themselves say about their experiences (say, by showing that white men are implicitly racist).

Should the request to engage with lived experience be understood in the same way here? Suppose that the author engages with rigorous empirical research on the experiences of trans people, and suppose further that this research is conducted by a cis person (say, Kristina Olson). Would doing that address the concern here, or is the idea rather that the author is supposed to cite and defer to work by people who are themselves members of the group in question?

Andre
Andre
Reply to  Curious
6 years ago

Confounding “lived experience” with “empirical data” is a mistake. Think phenomenology here, not social science. Many of the harms of discrimination can be best articulated through the experiences of the victims, by the victims themselves. This is (one reason) why it is important to include the voices of black women and trans people in a paper that argues that a white woman identifying as a black woman is analogous to being trans.

David Mathers
David Mathers
Reply to  Andre
6 years ago

Testimony is ’empirical’ right? Not quite sure what’s being disputed here? That we should ask people for detailed descriptions rather than/as well as just giving them the sort of questions you’d see in a purely quantitative survey? That we want sampling to be random, ideally? (You could have a random sample of people talking in great descriptive detail about their experience of racism.)

Also, presumably a paper by, say, a white man on black women’s experience could have many long direct quotations of black women talking about their experience. I take it that that may have been Curious’ point.
.

WP
WP
Reply to  Andre
6 years ago

It would be qualitative, but it could still be empirical.

jake stone
jake stone
Reply to  Curious
6 years ago

Lived experience is typically regarded as the anti-thesis of empirical data. Google Heidegger present at hand vs ready to hand for one form of explanation.

Ryan P
Ryan P
6 years ago

I am so glad that I left the philosophy profession to get a real job.

Puzzled by criterion 4
Puzzled by criterion 4
6 years ago

I have a question about criterion 4, regarding the expectation that the author cite women of color. How does one ascertain this, exactly? In most of the papers I’ve published, I have never met the vast majority of philosophers whose work I am citing. This was especially true when I was early in my career, but it remains true now. If I were working in this area (I do not, and am glad for it today), I would presume that would remain true. So what are my options? Should I seek out papers that are friendly to the kinds of papers that I presume philosophers of color would write? That surely wouldn’t do it–not only philosophers of color are advancing those arguments. Should I look for papers containing self-declarations of identity? I can’t imagine there’s many of those. Should I be google-imaging everyone I cite, looking for their pictures and trying to ascertain of they are a philosopher of color by what google shows me? That seems like a highly objectionable expectation, as would playing the “name game,” where I try to guess ethnicity by someone’s name. Should I be sure to cite a few famous philosophers who I’m confident are philosophers of color? Granting that not every paper cites every possibly relevant source, this would seem like an odd expectation as well–I should be citing material that is relevant to my paper, and I ought to determine that by engaging the literature, not checking the “I cited the famous person who I’m sure is non-white” box.

I honestly don’t see a way to meet this criterion that isn’t straightforwardly highly objectionable. I’m sure I’m wrong about this. Someone help me.

CN
CN
Reply to  Puzzled by criterion 4
6 years ago

Actually self-identifying is reasonably common, certainly common enough to be able to locate perspectives that represent scholarship that meets the criteria of being both about and by members of a given marginalized group.

Once you find a couple of people who are writing on-from-within, you will be able to follow the usual routes of looking up the people they cite and looking at the people who respond to them, which will expose you to others who are in similar positions; it will take you to the conversations that are happening within the group rather than about it.

I don’t think anyone holds that it is necessary for every citation to be a member of a particular group. However, when the subject is one that involves the kinds of power relations inherent in race and gender, it makes sense to look at what people themselves are saying. Often important experiences and ideas are missed or misinterpreted by people outside a given group and it is virtually impossible to discover those without paying attention to what the people in the group have to say.

juniorfaculty
juniorfaculty
6 years ago

Does anyone know if a petition for Rebecca Tuvel has started? The board of associated editors should retract their apology and apologize to Tuvel for causing her harm.

Trans Grad
Trans Grad
6 years ago

I cannot speak for other trans people but here is how the publication of this paper has harmed me: it has been reinforced to me once again that this profession is not a place for me or people like me. Trans people’s lives do not happen in the abstract, even though it might seem that way to some commentators. Things like deadnaming contribute to a very real culture of violence that surrounds trans people, and particularly trans femme PoC. People _get murdered_ because they aren’t seen as their authentic gender. When philosophers engage in poor abstract theorizing that doesn’t engage with the actual lived experience of trans people, and do things like deadname, and then other philosophers rush to their defense, it signals to me that academic philosophy values protecting cissexism and “academic freedom” more than it values my wellbeing.

Skeptical
Skeptical
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

Trans Grad,

Are you actually saying that there’s a likely causal connection between someone’s mentioning that Caitlyn Jenner was once named Bruce Jenner, *in an article in Hypatia*, and some actual violence, including (you stress) murder, being perpetuated against trans people, and that because of this, you feel as a result of the publication of the article that you have no place in the profession?

How far will you take this logic? Should we stop publishing articles on the philosophy of religion because millions of people have been killed for belonging to the wrong religion or to no religion, and so atheists or theists might be harmed by the wrong article? Should we stop publishing articles on political philosophy because they might lead to violent revolutions or terrorism?

Andre
Andre
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

Thanks for posting this, Trans Grad. The inability (or unwillingness) of many commenters here to acknowledge how one’s situation and experiences matter in this kind of scholarship is baffling. Honestly, wouldn’t be surprised to see someone mention “color blindness” here.

jake stone
jake stone
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

There is a whole body of philosophy on justifications for war (and some for torture). Maybe we should start by shutting that down. Then we can discuss the violence in Tuvel’s article.

Also, the rhetorical device of associating people’s ideas with violence and evil simply because you find them uncomfortable no longer sways people.

War Theory Grad Student
War Theory Grad Student
Reply to  jake stone
6 years ago

However, this body of philosophy is also not wont to using what amounts to a slur for the people it advocates making war against: it is written respectfully.

We would be equally horrified by a paper arguing for going to war against Syria that used a racial slur to refer to Syrians, and didn’t seriously engage with literature about the issue.

Carnap
Carnap
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

Trans Grad,

Philosophy is, I hope, for everyone. However, like others here, I am puzzled by the repeated insistence that any discussion of the ontology of human groups or the moral status of certain activity involving members of such groups needs to “engage with the actual lived experience” of members of said groups. Some critics of Tuvel’s paper seem to think doing that requires agreeing with the conclusion of (some!) members of said groups regarding their ontological status and proper treatment. Is that supposed to be because such conclusions are supported by propositional knowledge in principle unavailable to those who are not members of such groups (a la Jackson’s Mary)?

Another Grad
Another Grad
Reply to  Carnap
6 years ago

This is a claim that is a reference to the now fairly well established field of standpoint epistemology, which Hypatia is frequently a main vehicle for. The idea is broadly that the lived experiences of some people (for example, trans folks) contain elements that you couldn’t just reason to from a vacuum. Anyone can engage with philosophy about an issue, but they need to look at the evidence provided by the experience of trans folks to have any data to reason from.

It’s not that cis people can’t have anything to say about trans issues, but they just don’t have the data automatically, and so they need to look for it.

An example might be, a cis person can know what dysphoria is but not specific situations in which it is engaged, so before they write about that, they should do their research.

More can be found here:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/

beauvoir's baby
beauvoir's baby
Reply to  Another Grad
6 years ago

The real reason for the uproar is that Tuvel argues that the arguments for accepting trans race identities are equivalent to arguments for accepting trans gender identities. Tuvel’s equivocation has the consequence that if we reject arguments for the acceptance of trans race identities, we should also reject arguments for the acceptance of trans gender identities. Although Tuvel advocates for the acceptance of both trans race and trans gender identities, trans gender activists and their allies reject her argument because they do not want it tied to arguments for the acceptance of trans race identities, mostly because they reject trans race identities (like nearly everyone else). For trans activists, equivocating trans gender with trans race identities only makes it harder to achieve the goal of acceptance of trans gender identities. The crux of the issue is Tuvel’s claim that trans race and trans gender identities should be treated as politically equivalent, not Tuvel’s scholarship. Claiming this furor is about Tuvel’s scholarship is transparently disingenuous: it is purely politically motivated.

Will
Will
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

The paper also concerns the identity of transracial people like Dolezal. Does that mean that the same obligation to engage with the lived experience of transracial people? If not, why not?

pbrower2a
pbrower2a
Reply to  Will
6 years ago

Rachel Dolezal made a conscious choice and seems to have stuck with it. I can’t imagine doing it, but she did well enough at it to convince people until she lied about things other than ethnicity. Her assimilation into the black population is genuine, whatever else is not.

We would have to ask her why she decided to identify with black people to the extent that she changed her appearance. She cannot change her bone structure (especially in her face), her genes, or — most importantly, her childhood. But we know where her loyalties are. She fooled people who should have been least easy to fool — black people.

This is not the area in which to delve into her psychological character and her family dynamics. I have no idea what music she listens to. I have seen some of her paintings, and it is clear that she gets black people better than she gets white people.

I consider her black — biracial to some degree. If in the unlikely situation in which she had a child by a white man she would simply be the oddity of a black woman with a white child. She has apparently been black long enough that reverting to whiteness would be even more superficial.

…Note well that there are people who have gone from white to black for a very different reason; trying to hide her white origin in the presence of a black husband or biracial children, if not both. Such still gets dirty looks, and if I were in the situation that such a woman got I might frizz my hair and adopt a spray tan to look significantly black. She might do so for two reasons: to avoid dirty looks unhealthy for children or to allow her children to believe that their mother is black as is the father. So what if she ‘acts white’? Lots of black people ‘act white’.

Race may not determine character or ability, but it can certainly change how people think of others in a culture in which race used to mean far more than it does now, but it does affect perceptions in many people today. Race is not culture, but it certainly encourages people to draw some conclusions, however slight and irrelevant those may be.

bex
bex
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

Thanks for this comment. If I may, I want to try to defend/explain something that I take to be implicit in your comment (please do correct me if I’m wrong), and then ask a question about how this whole issue has been & should be handled:

1. As I understood it, your claim is not that *this specific article in Hypatia* is somehow going to set in motion a causal chain that will lead to some specific person’s murder. Instead, the claim is something like: this article reinforces a systemic condition of ignorance about and oppression of trans people. This systemic condition is what gives rise to their murder. Ergo, the publication of this article contributes to a broad social pattern which results in the murder of trans people, and should be taken seriously as not just an academic problem but a moral one as well.

2. Still, surely there are different kinds of possible responses one could have to the publication of an article one takes to be transmisogynistic, and different levels of appropriateness for each of those responses? I think it’s pretty clearly uncharitable to read Tuvel’s article itself as committing violence (even if you do think it contributes to a system which gives rise to violence). It seems to me pretty evident that Tuvel’s intention was not to write a transmisogynistic article (quite the contrary), and while there are often good reasons not to even talk about intent when the consequences are dire and in need of immediate attention, I’m really not convinced that a well-meant if problematic article published in Hypatia rises to that level. So — I’m still not convinced that, even if you do think the article is really problematic, this level of public outcry and shaming and debate over Tuvel’s personal moral character is really justified.

I’m 100% in support of people writing strongly worded responses or even publishing blog posts that explain why they take the article to be hugely problematic or even argue that it’s morally bad or whatever, but I can’t help but feel like we’re treating a junior faculty member who may have published a problematic article in an academic journal as if they’re a well-known public figure who should be called out aggressively on the public stage for some offensive remarks on social media or something. Why is all this necessary, instead of just writing a strongly-worded response in kind (and, perhaps, contacting the editors of Hypatia privately regarding your concerns about their editorial standards and the potential moral issues involved in publishing what you take to be a transmisogynistic article)?

Trans Grad
Trans Grad
Reply to  bex
6 years ago

Your gloss on my claim in (1) is correct. On (2), I will admit that after reading some of the responses in this thread regarding retraction, I no longer think it is appropriate. I still think more needs to be said, particularly by the editor of Hypatia, and I think Tuvel’s response is woefully inadequate.

junior
junior
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

Even when done anonymously, admitting you have reason to change your mind can be hard; fwiw, I appreciate your courage both here and in your original comment.

Modaloperator
Modaloperator
6 years ago

Let’s be honest: this controversy boils down to the fact that the author referred to Caitlyn Jenner as ‘Bruce,’ which is a faux pas in certain social circles. (As noted in the original article, the remainder of the concerns are not obviously valid and come across as a hasty and hap-hazard ‘post peer review’.) It’s not even clear why this should automatically be considered be a faux pas if it is done with good intentions and in a respectful way. In this case, the reference is simply made for clarity’s sake, for readers who may not be aware of the pop cultural facts surrounding who Caitlyn Jenner is. In any case, a faux pas of this sort provides insufficient warrant for retracting an article which has already gone through the rigorous process of peer review.

PhilosopheroftheFuture
PhilosopheroftheFuture
6 years ago

We tear ourselves apart over identity politics while meanwhile the world crashes and burns. Trump and co. will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Hey Nonny Mouse
Hey Nonny Mouse
Reply to  PhilosopheroftheFuture
6 years ago

As a rule of thumb, professional philosophers only ever write for other professional philosophers, so that’s who we fight with. Internal political concerns are not always unimportant, but they seem to get much more attention than playing a political role in the wider world.

dzongsar
dzongsar
6 years ago

Fundamentalist Christians cannot demand I adhere to their set of beliefs.

As a female survivor of rape, I don’t believe penis is female. Why are my beliefs disregarded by individuals who believe in principals that I do not share? Why are my rights to privacy and safety “lesser than” a set of self-identity that includes beliefs in changing sex, being born in wrong body, and beliefs based on strong male and female gender roles that look like same old sexist stereotypes reborn?

All humans have rights to dignity, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Some individuals do not have the right to dictate my free speech, beliefs nor deny that science and material basis matter.

I oppose unproven “innate gender identity” being used to socially and then medically “transition” children from one sex to another. Personality preferences are not biology. Let boys wear skirts, fine. Kids don’t mature until mid-20s. 80-90% of gender non conforming (according to whose standards?) DESIST naturally, so why all the ender clinics making exorbitant profits off medicalizing and potentially sterilizing our youth? It’s a fad, a profitable one.

Let hetereosexual men with fetish to dress as women, who still attracted to women get out of the lesian/gay civil rights umbrella.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  dzongsar
6 years ago

You asked why — so for starters, maybe explore some of the possibilities afforded by the third formulation of Kant’s CI?

Chloe Taylor
Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

I am a feminist philosophy professor, and I have known Rebecca Tuvel since she was an undergraduate student at McGill, when she was a first and second year student in tutorials that I taught as a graduate student. I have followed her career through her own graduate studies and since, and I wish to say that I know she is deeply concerned with social justice (though, like any of us, she can make mistakes in this area – as I have certainly done many times), that I support her and that I am deeply saddened by what is happening to her right now.

I am also particularly saddened because many people I loved, admired, and respected—my closest friends, my senior colleagues—have been part of this attack on her, rather than engaging in critical dialogue, as I would have expected. People who were Rebecca’s mentors, teachers, friends, members of her graduate cohort, have chosen to attack her publicly rather than to engage with her philosophically. I can only imagine how it would feel to cope with so many personal betrayals and so much hatred, death threats and hate mail.

At the same time, Rebecca is receiving countless messages from other feminist philosophers across North America who support her, who assure her that there are many more people supporting her than she knows, and who are also appalled by what is happening right now, but who are too terrified to speak publicly for fear of being subjected to the same treatment. I share these fears. I know that as another cis white woman, this message will be taken up as cis white women simply protecting and defending each other. These fears have kept me silent for the last few days, but I think that it is time for those of us who are tenured to stop allowing a very junior and vulnerable feminist scholar to be subjected to this treatment without any public support from the feminist community. We should begin to support her publicly and not only privately.

I know of people who have joined in the attack on Rebecca and who have then realized they had been swept up in mob mentality and felt remorse, but who are afraid to admit this publicly, for shame. I know others who have signed the letter and joined in the social media attacks who don’t in fact disagree with Rebecca’s position in the article and who admit to me that they didn’t know the dead naming rule and have dead named themselves, but who won’t admit this publicly—they simply condemn Rebecca for acts they may have committed. This doesn’t mean that we have to agree with everything in Rebecca’s article, and we may even be sympathetic to some of the critiques of her work (I agree that she should have drawn on more people of colour in a work on race, for instance, and that to write an article on trans politics, she should have been more immersed in the trans studies literature, such that she would have known the current view of the term ‘transgenderism’ and dead naming), but I know for certain (from people with whom I am in communication) that many people have condemned her simply for the topic and position she took as a white cis woman, without having even read her article. Yet these are arguments that have been made by other white cis feminist philosophers, such as Sally Haslanger and Christine Overall, and they were never subjected to this kind of social media crusade and there were never demands that their work be retracted. Why is only Rebecca being attacked for this position, not more senior scholars? Is it because it gives those white feminist philosophers who have taken on this cause political points (virtue signaling) without any risk to their careers? Would the same response have occurred if Haslanger’s or Overall’s name had been on the article? Overall’s and Haslanger’s work was engaged with in the normal academic ways, through publications that engaged critically and respectfully with their work – and Haslanger for instance has revised her position accordingly. Why are Haslanger and Overall not speaking up right now? Why are the feminist philosophers who reviewed Rebecca’s article and thought it was excellent enough for publication not speaking up? Is it (understandably) out of fear of being subjected to the same, career-destroying attacks? Is such an environment of fear and silence conducive to philosophical thinking?

Rebecca’s article is being taken as a symbol of the problems with white feminism (not drawing on the experiences of marginalized groups of which one is writing) and of analytic argumentation styles (treating real lives as analytic puzzles) and I am sympathetic to these criticisms which characterize so much philosophical work, including much feminist philosophical work, and I think it is time that they undergo more intense critique, but this has to be done in a better way than taking one work by one vulnerable scholar as exemplary and sacrificing her life, career, reputation, and well-being to this cause.

I know many people have signed the letter without reading the article, simply taking the description of it on social media at face value, or wanting to be part of the dominant group, or to show they are on the right side. The general message is that unless you support the attack on Rebecca, you are racist and transphobic, and so many people have signed and endorsed the attack, without actually reading her article. Then those signatures are taken as indicative of this being a fair crusade—these established, in some cases famous feminist philosophers have signed, so it must be right. And yet is there a violence here in assuming that all people of colour and all trans people will share the same view here? In fact they do not, as people of colour and queer philosophers in my community have indicated to me privately, and as Rebecca has indicated in her response, and as one trans commentator in this thread has indicated. Similar to that trans commentator, I would urge us to prioritize our political efforts and energies, and to fight the police and the criminal injustice system, not this article.

Like Rebecca, I did not know the dead naming rule until this happened. Numerous of my feminist philosopher colleagues have admitted to me that they did not know the rule either. I believe that in teaching works by Halberstam and Feinberg, I have dead named, and I am now deeply sorry for that, although I do believe (as many have indicated, including trans folks) that we need to distinguish between different cases of dead naming and those that do more harm than others, and we also need to distinguish between malicious mistakes and non-malicious mistakes. My own mistakes in this regard make me think, however, as I know some of my feminist philosopher colleagues are also thinking, “this could have happened to me.” However we are afraid to admit publicly that we did not know the rule, because this is being equated with material violence against trans people, with police brutality and other such harms.

This is not an environment that is conducive to political change and learning—all that is being taught is to be afraid and silent, to not work on difficult or controversial topics because we could be subjected to this kind of attack. Already I am wondering if I should not write or teach on certain topics that make me vulnerable to attack, and I know of other feminist philosophers who are now thinking the same thing. This is fostering an academic culture of fear and censorship rather than thinking and engagement. We need to discuss these important issues carefully, but we need to do it in a way that does not do so at the expense of a junior social justice scholar working in a male dominated discipline, who may have made some mistakes, but mistakes that many of us could have made or have made without being subjected to the same aggression.

There needs to be a better, more compassionate, more intellectually and politically generative way to engage in these important discussions about the norms of philosophy, about white feminism, and about trans and race politics and their intersections. It is not clear to me that this article does harm, but Rebecca has certainly been harmed. I am almost entirely certain that I would have committed suicide a day ago if this had been me, at which point Rebecca had received virtually no support from the philosophical community, and I admire her strength in withstanding these attacks as bravely as she has. It is not clear to me that Rebecca was furthering her career at the expense of more vulnerable people, but it is clear to me that some of my feminist colleagues (dear friends, respected mentors) have jumped on this opportunity to further their academic careers (virtue signaling to their colleagues) at the expense of someone more vulnerable—an untenured and very junior woman philosopher, who is writing in the norms of the discipline in which she has been trained. Let’s challenge those norms rather than attacking Rebecca. Let us please keep in mind that there is a person here, not just a symbol.

Trans Grad
Trans Grad
Reply to  Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

Tuvel doubled-down in her response to the criticism. No one thinks that we can’t write on these topics at all. The fact is that to do so requires great care and time and effort and embedding yourself in the lives of trans people and black people if you’re a white cis woman. Tuvel acknowledges that she didn’t put in the work required (“A valid reproach is that my article discusses the lives of vulnerable people without sufficiently citing their own first-person experiences and views”) but neglects to apologize and insists, despite the claims of actual trans and black people, that this article is not harmful. I’m not inclined to be charitable in light of that.

X
X
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

Doubled-down in response to which criticisms in the letter, exactly? Early on in her response she apologizes for certain features of the article, so I it’s misleading to state simply that she “doubled down”.

Enzo Rossi
Reply to  Trans Grad
6 years ago

OK so this is what this is about: some scholars want a methodological monopoly. They don’t want people to write about trans issues in the analytic style, at least not without lots of nods (and citations) to auto-ethnographic and/or postmodernist literature. They fear what some have called, bizarrely, “philosophical gentrification”. And they know that organising e-mobs is more effective than attacking the gentrifiers’ arguments.

Sad Eyed Philosopher of the Lowlands
Sad Eyed Philosopher of the Lowlands
Reply to  Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

” I know for certain (from people with whom I am in communication) that many people have condemned her simply for the topic and position she took as a white cis woman, without having even read her article. Yet these are arguments that have been made by other white cis feminist philosophers, such as Sally Haslanger and Christine Overall, and they were never subjected to this kind of social media crusade and there were never demands that their work be retracted.”

If this is true, it’s devastating to the opposition. A lot of people would have a lot of apologizing to do.

SH
SH

Very similar arguments, with a similar but far more pointed conclusion, were posted by Adolph Reed at Common Dreams. There was no outcry: I won’t speculate as to whether this was because of the venue, because he is an African-American (and hence, according to the logic of the opposition, allowed to write about the topic), or because he is a male full professor at an R1. This undermines Tuvel’s critics in their arguments that her position is especially insupportable or unspeakable, though it does support the claim that she failed to cite relevant people of color.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal-one-trans-good-other-not-so-much

SH
SH
Reply to  SH
6 years ago

Just realized that Tuvel’s response mentions Reed, and also others who have made similar arguments (I won’t use names, for fear of directing outrage at junior academics.) This raises two questions: 1) why not engage with Reed et al in the article? and 2) will the outraged academics take their concerns next to Common Dreams and the Feminist Wire? Will they make a similar effort to undermine the professional credibility of POC race theorists who take this position which, we are told, only a cis white person would be oblivious enough to consider?

bex
bex
Reply to  Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

Thank you for this comment; I am largely in agreement. In particular I am really concerned about what seem to me to be drastically disproportionate effects on Tuvel’s personal and professional life that this kind of public outcry is having, and the chilling effect that it is likely to have on those of us who are brave enough to dive into work on the controversial edges of such morally significant topics as this.

Of course, I am in agreement that there were serious problems with the article, and that those problems are worthy of address. Those problems might even belie a variety of ignorance that is borne from white/cis privilege. But I also have gotten the impression that the real problem with the article, according to many of these criticisms, is the topic itself — that the real sin being called out here is for even considering a question like “What is the relationship, if any, between transgender and [purportedly] transracial identities?” I disagree pretty strongly with her position on this matter, but the question is not at all unreasonable to ask — it picks up on a tension in the work on gender and race that is genuinely there. And, as you said, her position has precedent in the work of much more prominent figures — who were also disagreed with pretty strongly sometimes, but certainly never attacked like this.

I am a doctoral student myself, and I am hoping to go on the job market within the next year or two. I have lots of thoughts about these issues that I would like to discuss and maybe even publish something on, because (as evidenced by this entire debacle) it is such a provocative issue of great importance to people’s lives, and to our society’s understanding of race and gender on the whole. However, there are certain difficult questions that are not at all settled in the literature that, in an ideal world, I would want to dig into and foster lively discussion on (e.g., the question about whether trans people could ever be the “recipient” of male privilege, which I think presses on some really serious and interesting live issues in how we think about the relationship between gender identity and systemic gendered oppression) — and it seems like even asking these sorts of questions might subject one to potentially severe professional and personal consequences that I am just not in a position to try to endure.

So, I would echo the call for tenured faculty to speak up more, and try to create some space for these kinds of discussions to go on productively, while also allowing for the kinds of strong disagreement that are appropriate for positions you take to be perhaps even morally problematic. It can’t be someone else; it can’t be the younger generation or the precariously untenured who dive in and get their hands dirty with all this — we’re all already in too vulnerable a position as it is. It has to be people whose careers are at least basically secure, and especially people who are well known in the field, who bring this discussion back around to a place of mutual charity and productive engagement.

Ruth
Ruth
Reply to  bex
6 years ago

I would think a serious journal would have a set of procedures in place for dealing with demands for retraction, as well as a list of criteria for a retraction. Apparently the sole criterion here is that if enough people express outrage, the editors throw the reviewers under the bus and drive over the author two or three times, just to make sure she’s good and dead.
Nice.
Smh.

MG
MG
Reply to  bex
6 years ago

I wanted to take up some of the comments in this subthread (notably that of bex and Chloë Taylor). Taylor’s post raises an important issue (like “Sad eyed philosopher,” this passage caught my eye):

” I know for certain (from people with whom I am in communication) that many people have condemned her simply for the topic and position she took as a white cis woman, without having even read her article. Yet these are arguments that have been made by other white cis feminist philosophers, such as Sally Haslanger and Christine Overall, and they were never subjected to this kind of social media crusade and there were never demands that their work be retracted.”

In spite of some of the valid criticisms and concerns critics have raised, I was troubled by the assumption that Tuvel’s article deserved no philosophical engagement or response whatsoever. I found Tuvel’s article not without merit for the provocation it offered and the controversial questions it considered (as Bex puts its it, the question ” ‘What is the relationship, if any, between transgender and [purportedly] transracial identities?'” is not “unreasonable to ask,” even if one might disagree with Tuvel’s methods and conclusions). If anything, the article is important insofar as it provides an occasion for discussion and debate about how gender and race intersect, where analogies between them may hold, and where analogies between them fail. It’s also unclear to me whether the article is so morally and mortally offensive that it is unworthy of further consideration (and I say this as a person of colour and queer professional philosopher who falls under the umbrella of non-gender conforming people; I’m trying to be vague as I want to maintain my anonymity).

The claim that the article so violates scholarly convention—as to deserve retraction and removal from _Hypatia_—is surprising, given that Tuvel’s argument is building off of existing literature (Overall’s 2004 article, “Transsexualism and ‘Transracialism,” Haslanger’s ameliorative definitions of gender, etc.). In particular, Tuvel is drawing from an analytic feminist literature (feminist metaphysics/ontology) whose methodological approach often relies heavily on conceptual analysis—in addition to social scientific data and other resources—when addressing social categories like gender. Now, of course a lot of analytic feminist metaphysical and social ontological work has come under fire for precisely that reason (relying too heavily on conceptual and definitional analysis of gender and race, at a remove from the lived experience and phenomenologies of marginalized people). And there has been plenty of immanent and external critiques of these methodological commitments in feminist metaphysics from feminist philosophers of various stripes.

However, the helpful critique that feminist metaphysics should consult lived experience theory and standpoint epistemology (and the helpful critique that such work should not treat gender and race as “analytic puzzles,” divorced from critical theory and lived experience) has been the result of philosophical engagement and response from other feminist philosophers—not the result of censure and silencing.

For example, Katharine Jenkins, drawing from decades of trans feminist philosophy and activism, published (in _Ethics_ [2016]) a major critique of Haslanger’s early ameliorative definitions of gender. Notably, Jenkins points out, Haslanger’s definitions of woman as a subordinated social position—a gender class whose defining feature would be that one is presumed/imagined to have female reproductive features and to be subordinated as a result— had problematic exclusionary implications for some trans women. Haslanger’s definition neglected to consider gender identity in addition to gender roles and gender classes, which generated some pretty transphobic consequences.

However, no one demanded (as far as I know) that Haslanger retract her articles (near-original versions of which were included in her 2012 volume _Resisting Reality_ ). Instead, Haslanger’s controversial definitions were taken as an occasion for feminist and trans feminist philosophical engagement and debate, and she has since come to revise her views (especially in light of the important work developed by trans feminist philosophers like Talia Bettcher, Rachel McKinnon, and others). Similarly, Overall’s early arguments that “transracialism” was not “necessarily morally problematic” when considering objections against the possibility of “transracialism” were certainly criticized (notably by Cressida Heyes in _Journal of Social Philosophy_ [2006]), but this too happened as a result of philosophical engagement, not censorship.

Some feminist philosophers have come to argue that feminist analytic metaphysical work needs to incorporate empirical research, social scientific data, standpoint epistemology, and the lived experience of the subjects in question (there were a few panels at SAF this year that addressed precisely this issue). Tuvel’s article may be guilty of neglecting these data and these methods, but so too is a lot of past and contemporary analytic feminist metaphysical work (which doesn’t excuse the neglect, but it does raise questions as to why Tuvel’s article is being singled out and not, say, other feminist metaphysicians). Haslanger, for example, used to describe her work as “aporematic metaphysics,” an attempt to “figure out what gender is,” and thus treating gender as a metaphysical puzzle. And Charlotte Witt’s work on gender uniessentialism and gender essences also approaches gender as a kind of puzzle from a neo-Aristotelian perspective and does not rely heavily on phenomenological data and standpoint epistemology when gender. The fact that these senior scholars are engaged with intellectually and philosophically, and this junior scholar is not, is troubling.

[NB: I’m not saying that Tuvel’s arguments are culpable or excusable because they draw from feminist metaphysics. Nor am I saying that feminist metaphysics is the problem—there has been a lot of great work in feminist ontology and metaontology in the past decade. I’m just trying to contextualize and situate Tuvel’s article within a larger conversation about methodology in feminist philosophy, and wondering why her work and its purported errors are being singled out].

Untenured feminist
Untenured feminist
Reply to  Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

I want to thank Chloë Taylor, MG, and bex for expressing their support. Like Tuvel, I am a (very) junior feminist philosopher who works on social justice issues. Watching this unfold has been terrifying. I submitted a paper yesterday and could not stop thinking: this could have been me. And how would I know? Like Tuvel, I had presented my paper at conferences, it had undergone peer review, I had sent it to friends and mentors for their feedback, etc. etc. I don’t know what else any of us are supposed to do. However, I am more terrified for Tuvel. I cannot imagine how it must feel to have former friends, colleagues, and mentors publicly attack you as a scholar and as a person.

I appreciate that there are some comments here that have been, as far as I can tell, well-meaning criticisms. However, I have to say that I am disturbed by the trend to attribute Tuvel’s position to a lack of scholarly research and/or scholarly understanding. (I am not going to speak about the unconscionable ad hominem attacks. She deserves better.) For example, Julinna Oxley’s comment above, I think, was meant to be helpful. But to direct Tuvel to a 7-minute YouTube video is insulting. One might not agree with her interpretation of Mills, but surely we can grant her the credit of having read far more extensively, and having understood far more, than a suggestion of a YouTube video would imply. I am sure many of us have given papers where the audience suggested foundational texts in Q&A, perhaps even texts we had directly addressed in our talks. Sometimes it is legitimately helpful, but oftentimes the implication is that the *only* reason we could possibly hold our position is that we are grossly undereducated. I know that, as junior scholars, we have a lot to learn. But please grant Tuvel the courtesy of assuming that she knows more than she could learn from YouTube.

I would also ask that people correct critics and supporters alike who refer to the author as Ms. Tuvel. If ‘Tuvel’ is insufficient, might I suggest Dr. Tuvel?

Finally, I want to second Chloë Taylor’s call to keep in mind that the person being attacked is more than a symbol. If I were in her place, I’m not sure how I would react. Certainly not with as much poise and bravery as Tuvel. But I do imagine an immediate exit from philosophy would be at the top of my list. We need to treat each other better than this.

Julinna Oxley
Julinna Oxley
Reply to  Untenured feminist
6 years ago

Hi Untenured feminist, thank you for your thoughts. I totally see your point that posting a Youtube video could be insulting to Rebecca. I obviously would not do that in person (which means that I am clearly inexperienced in blog commenting, and have to figure out who in the world a blog comment is supposed to be addressed to). But in attempting to lay out my position with other people (people whose opinion mattered) on this topic, I’d made the same argument by referring them to Chapter 3 of Mills’ _Blackness Visible_ which is about the metaphysics of race (actually the whole book is phenomenal). There was no response. So when I saw the hundred comments by the end of the day on Monday, I thought, “nobody is really going to care about what I write on this blog, so I might as well post a video since someone scrolling through might click on the link.” Plus I really love hearing Charles Mills give a talk, so maybe I just did that for myself. 🙂 No offense was intended toward her or her scholarly understanding. Just a bad choice on my part.

By the end of Monday, only one person (Maureen) had really tried to engage with Rebecca’s argument, which is what Rebecca wanted and deserved (I may be wrong about that, I am having an awful time following these comments). I felt that SOMEONE should try to explain what the commotion was about. I figured I’d get pummeled for it – by that point there were hundreds of likes on the comments denouncing the situation, and I was the first person to try (at least in my eyes) to engage directly and constructively. So yes, I agree, I could have done a better job (like all of us) if frustration and time constraints hadn’t gotten in the way.

I agree with you 1000% that we must not treat each other so badly. This is why I have decided (probably foolishly) to write under my own name. It would be unfair to Rebecca to not do so and plus it keeps me honest. (I am not saying this applies to others.) And I am tenured. I, for one, never knew the situation would get this out of hand. We’ve got to find better, more considerate, more tactful, more effective ways to communicate, and we’ve got to start listening more charitably. I hope to be part of the solution, not the problem. I nearly left the field when I was at Rebecca’s point in her career — I hope she doesn’t do the same. I have reached out to her personally, and will do so again.

Kathleen Lowrey
Kathleen Lowrey
Reply to  Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

I’m not a philosopher but I am a feminist and an academic, and I’m baffled to see this coming out of _Hypatia_. It’s written as if the radical feminist critique of transgender ideology simply didn’t exist. But it does exist and the editorial board of _Hypatia_ knows it exists. This letter is written as if the situation were akin to a paleontology journal lamentably publishing a highbrow version of the plot of the Flintstones. All knowledgeable paleontologists agree dinosaurs and humans never mixed. But the scholarly and activist consensus in feminism regarding trans issues is… not like that. At all.

Eva Dadlez
Eva Dadlez
Reply to  Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

I share Chloe Taylor’s concerns.

Julien Murzi
Reply to  Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

What Chloe Taylor said, word by word.

jake stone
jake stone
6 years ago

Question 1:
If I am not mistaken, there has been little outcry about philosophical arguments that justify war.
Isn’t “When can war be justified?” a fairly standard dance on the dancelist, so to speak?

Question 2: Why the umbridge at the deadnaming (although a trans-person in this thread challeneged that it was deadnaming)?
Is it because this is more morally egregious than justifying war?

Yes, this is a moral issue. Nonetheless, the *selection* of a moral issue to pursue a personal agenda reduces that issue to one of amoral (or even immoral) power struggle that seldom makes the world a better place. (And didn’t Kant make a point a similar to this?)

JK
JK
Reply to  jake stone
6 years ago

Most people agree that there are some circumstances in which war is justified. Where the line should be drawn is, as you say, a pretty normal question in moral philosophy. There is not a parallel agreement that there are some circumstances in which deadnaming is justified (although there are open questions about what constitutes deadnaming, as have appeared in the comments). It’s even less a parallel in that she wasn’t investigating whether there was a circumstance in which it would be justified to deadname someone. The complaint is not that she justified deadnaming but that she actually did it. That’s both morally distinct and has a different implication for the reading.

As a trans scholar (in both senses), I am disinclined to trust the judgment or good faith of a scholar who fails to conform to or signal awareness of conventions of respect that are very basic to trans culture. She works hard to signal her approval of trans folks but makes several errors that she wouldn’t have made if she was more familiar with trans canon. However, as others have said the vitriol and publicity of the response is separable from the criticisms. We can agree both that there were some serious issues with her work and that it was handled badly by her colleagues.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  JK
6 years ago

“Most people agree that there are some circumstances in which war is justified. Where the line should be drawn is, as you say, a pretty normal question in moral philosophy. There is not a parallel agreement that there are some circumstances in which deadnaming is justified.”

JK, are you saying here that you can easily think of cases in which it is justifiable to start a war, with all the destruction and killing and human tragedy that that involves, but that you can’t easily think of cases in which it’s justifiable to use the former name of a transgender person? I think we need to get some perspective here. I don’t think anyone in this conversation would disagree that we should try to make people as comfortable as possible, ceteris paribus. But surely, the moral gravity of any justification for going to war cannot be more severe than the moral gravity of a justification for using a name someone no longer wishes to have used. I hope everyone can agree on that. If there are circumstances severe enough to justify warfare, then there are circumstances severe enough to justify using a name someone doesn’t wish to have used any longer.

Steven J. Wagner
Steven J. Wagner
6 years ago

*Hypatia* named itself after a female philosopher who was murdered by an intolerant mob. So much for their professed commitment.

Sikander
Sikander
6 years ago

I — a trans person of colour for what it’s worth — find Berenstain’s ‘criticism’ of Tuvel more ignorant and dangerous than Tuvel’s article. There’s nothing transphobic, let alone violent, about terms like ‘biological sex’, ‘male genitalia’, or ‘transgenderism’. At most ‘male genitalia’ can be objected to on the grounds that the word ‘male’ is also used as a term of gender at times, so it may be misgendering or at least come close to it to call the genitalia of a female-identified person ‘male’, but there is no stretch of the imagination by which ‘biological sex’ or ‘transgenderism’ are offensive, transphobic, or violent.

I have noticed this trend of cis (usually white) people going overboard in what they claim is a defense of trans people. There is no need for such virtue signalling: we are not babies who need to be protected from the harms of disagreement. Further, this purported defense is itself silencing of any position on the issues that doesn’t seem politically correct, including well-intentioned positions taken by people like Tuvel. If progressives can’t distinguish between a well-intentioned person innocently using outdated terms like ‘MtF’, and the material oppression of trans people (re: housing, healthcare, actual violence, etc.), then the progressive movement is in trouble.

As for the male privilege issue: many (though not all) trans women have benefited from male privilege, as they are perceived as male by society and treated accordingly. It’s absurd to suggest that Caitlyn Jenner, for example, has never benefited from (white) male privilege at any point in her life. If Berenstain or whoever disagrees, they can present considerations in defense of their view. Nobody ever does: instead they simply shout at the opposition in an attempt to pressure people into never disagreeing with them. The only consideration I’ve ever heard in defense of the view that no trans woman ever benefits from male privilege is that there is often psychological distress associated with being trans (i.e. dysphoria), but privilege is objective and not a matter of the well-being or feelings of the individual. If trans women who are read as male and ‘presenting’ or ‘living as male’ do not benefit from male privilege because of dysphoria, then cis men who have anxiety also should not be regarded as benefiting from male privilege, or white people with anxiety from white privilege, etc. The only way I can think of to avoid the result that many trans women benefit from male privilege at some point in their lives is to deny the existence of male privilege, which I suppose is a path some might take, but I have enough reason to believe male privilege exists that I will not go down that path.

Amy Donahue
Amy Donahue
Reply to  Sikander
6 years ago

You would have served as an excellent reviewer of Tuvel’s article!

Laurie Shrage
6 years ago

One reason this controversy is so heated, I think, is that if you accept the view that transracialism is a kind of fraud, and someone like Dolezal is an imposter, then comparing a trans person to Dolezal is highly offensive. Many conservatives see trans people as frauds (e.g., the bathroom controversy), so to promote this view perpetuates ideas that do harm trans people. However, if you don’t accept the view that transracialism is a kind of fraud, then the comparison is not offensive. Another way to address the potential harm that such analogies might cause is simply to endorse transracialism and not try to depict it as a horrible practice. This is what I think Tuvel is trying to do. Moreover, one can recognize that racial and gender transitioning are similar, but also importantly different. This is what some of her critics are trying to get across, as she may have overstated their similarities. But even if racial and gender identities and transitions have different political and social meanings, it doesn’t mean we have to disavow one while recognizing and supporting the other. Like Tuvel, I thought the public humiliation that followed the outing of Dolezal was very troubling.

Steven Levine
Steven Levine
6 years ago

A small and perhaps out of the way point: we need to distinguish between arguments offered against the article at the level of an evaluation of whether it should be accepted and arguments that it should be retraced. Arguments that have force at the first level may not, and often should not, have force at the second level. Many, if not most of the arguments I have seen on the various threads about this episode seem targeted at the first level, but are taken to be addressing to the second level. There are many articles in many journals that I think are bad, contain bad arguments, are not insightful, do not take into account what I consider to be the relevant literature, etc. etc. If I had been a referee of one of these articles I would have rejected it. Yet I would not think of calling for it to be retracted, because the standards for retraction are much higher than for rejection. We do not call for rejection because we, as member of the community of inquirers, recognize that others in good faith disagree with us, that they found value in the work. So we leave it to processes in the community of inquirers to sort out the validity of the work.
Obviously those calling for retraction think that this work meets the much higher standard for retraction. But it is unclear to me how they get there. It seems reasonable for the Journal to add a note about deadnaming, if that is an especially hurtful practice, which it seems to be. But that is not a retraction. The argument for retraction seems to depend on this consideration: this article does not taken into account literature and perspectives that I think should have been taken into account. An excellent consideration at the level of evaluation. But not at the level of retraction. Again, there have been many papers by many authors that fail in this regard, yet we do call for retraction. We say instead: the journal should have done a better job, we write a counter article, or we ignore it and move on. Because of the severity of this remedy and the relative weakness of this consideration one gets the sense that there are other reasons operating in the background. I think Laurie Shrage puts her finger on these reasons. But it seems these are precisely the reasons that should be taken up, discussed, and evaluated by the community of inquirers.

Philippe Lemoine
Philippe Lemoine
6 years ago

This controversy has now attracted the attention of generalist news media. For instance, Jesse Singal just published a long piece in New York Magazine, in which he links to this post and excoriates Tuvel’s critics. The result is that not only will her critics look bad to a lot more people than they already did, but her article will be read by far more people than it would otherwise have been, which presumably is precisely the opposite of what the people who demanded its retraction wanted. This was entirely predictable and, if only for that kind of prudential reasons, they should not have done that even if they were right, which they are not.

John Corvino
6 years ago

Here is the post of mine to which Mark Lance refers: https://www.facebook.com/johncorvino/posts/10155240514279210

SH
SH
6 years ago

I don’t have the expertise to comment from the perspective of trans studies, but I have some familiarity with related issues in race theory. A few thoughts:
1) While “transracialism” is a neologism that is clearly intended to draw an analogy to gender transition, the phenomenon described has a long history under the name of “passing”. It’s disappointing that Tuvel didn’t make much use of this rich interdisciplinary literature, much of it authored by POC race theorists.
2) While Tuvel’s critics point out that she dehistoricizes the issue, a historical perspective on passing does not remotely support the idea that racial passing serves mainly as a kind of cultural appropriation by white people. The most common example of passing involves black people passing for white, while Dreisinger’s work on passing for black shows that such passing resists any single interpretation. Much of the scholarship on passing emphasizes the social construction and mutability of race.
3) Watching this controversy unfold–not the first time I have watched my friends and colleagues argue frantically over issues raised by a certain former adjunct professor and NAACP officer from Spokane, WA–I am reminded that issues related to passing were (and to some extent still are) governed by a strict code of ethics within the African-American community. Outing a person as black was taboo in much the same way that outing someone as gay is verboten in the gay community. (I suspect this ethic was at work in the Spokane NAACP’s dignified and minimal statement on the affair.) It seems to me that this historical norm is still worthy of serious consideration–NOT because we are bound to hold silent in all matters related to passing, but because an overemphasis on specific, factual examples of racial “outing” is likely to cause harm both to the person “outed” and to any POC communities that intersect with them. It is obvious that the affair in Spokane was publicized partly as an attempt to humiliate and discredit the NAACP, as well as HBCUs, Africana studies departments, and other institutions associated with RD; the unseemly fascination with her hair, skin etc only reinscribes an objectifying concern with mapping the physical signifiers of black women’s bodies and scrutinizing the bodies of racially ambiguous people. (For those who aren’t familiar with it, most of the literature on passing draws from fiction and autobiography; I can’t think of another example that is so focused on an unwilling individual.) Writing articles that obsessively focus on a single, real-life exemplar of “transracialism” does not follow this ethic of reticence; neither does participating in internet pile-ons which pillory the outed individual along with anyone who, like Tuvel, gives any credence to her self-narrative.

SH
SH
Reply to  SH
6 years ago

Also, just to be clear, I both 1) think it’s a big problem that POC theorists are not given their due in academic articles and other fora and also 2) think it’s ludicrous to treat that as a reason for this outcry. The marginalization of POC scholars is real, it is pervasive, and I have experienced it for myself. A bunch of feminist philosophers virtue-signalling by denouncing *the one* Hypatia paper that has failed to cite marginalized voices only shows that they are deep in denial about the issue. I mean, Hypatia is a journal that has dropped Kant’s name (who is, you know, not a feminist thinker) more often than Moraga, Anzaldua and Lorde *put together*–these are some of the founders of contemporary intersectional feminism and incredibly rich, widely applicable thinkers. If Tuvel’s omissions are grounds for retraction, then a whole lot of whitewashed scholarship is going to have to be retracted with it.

jbr
jbr
6 years ago

I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the paper as such, though I find many of the (sometimes seemingly in conflict) positions that have been expressed to be compelling. Instead I want to make two more socially focused comments:

1. To the trans individuals who have commented above: thank you. I hope it is not patronizing (and if it is, I sincerely apologize) for me to say (as a cis white man) that I value you as persons, and I value your voices (in this discussion of course, but in general as well). Ditto for other individuals who are LGTB or POC who have commented (e.g. the individual who identified as queer POC and gender nonconforming). All of your comments were measured and insightful (sadly, unlike many of the other contributions). Were this discussion so close to home for me, I am not sure I would be able to exhibit such academic virtue.

2. To Justin: Like many, I find the discussion here rather depressing, since it follows a rather familiar pattern for the site: first, a flurry of early comments that in tone and substance seem barely better than trolling or gas-lighting, and give off more heat than light. Second, eventually some genuinely helpful and meaningful mini-discussions break out. I suspect that the discourse would be of a bit higher quality (and we might skip some of the first stage), if commenting on posts like this–which touch a nerve for many–was not possible until 2-3 days after the fact. Such a delay would, I hope, cause people to engage in a bit more sober reflection before contributing.

Glaucon
Glaucon
6 years ago

Quick! Someone sound the alarm:
This article’s doing great harm.
The violence of the vocabulary!
Better call the constabulary,
The thought police, the gender gendarmes.

Leaving lived experience unengaged,
Has a mob of scholactivists enraged.
They demand a retraction
Of so great an infraction
Of the norms by which their game is played.

They question her scholarly fitness,
To philosophize -– nay, to bear witness.
Her style of reason
They regard as great treason.
This Tuvel may be worse than Kipnis!

Oliver Traldi
Oliver Traldi
Reply to  Glaucon
6 years ago

This is extraordinarily good. Thank you.

Richard Heck
6 years ago

I’ve only just become aware of the controversy, via the article in New York Magazine:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/transracialism-article-controversy.html
I just wanted to thank Daily Nous for its work on this and to express my disgust with the treatment of Prof Tuvel. I’ve read the article myself now and found it to be a well-written and engaging discussion of a puzzling question. So far as I can see, none of the objections listed in the open letter really have much weight. I can see why Tuvel apologized about ‘deadnaming’, but even then it’s not as if she was outing Jenner (who, as others have pointed out, seems happy enough to have her previous name used in discussions of her past). But the rest is just kind of ridiculous. One can argue about the use of the term ‘transgenderism’, but if it’s good enough for Julia Serrano, it’s good enough for me, frankly.

Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
6 years ago

I think this will be my final comment on the Tuvel affair.

In their decision to make very public their opposition to the publication of Tuvel’s article, the authors of the “Open Letter to Hypatia” open themselves and their claims to a level of public scrutiny that they perhaps did not desire but which they would be naive not to have expected. In addition to unhelpful counter-denunciations of those authors, there have been legitimate requests for clarification of and challenges posed to their claims. The authors of the open letter invited all of this when they wrote that “[Tuvel’s article’s] continued availability causes further harm, as does an initial post by the journal admitting only that the article ‘sparks dialogue.’”

I confess that I find this claim to be one of the most distressing aspects of the whole affair. The claim of harm is a very serious one; to level it ought to require that the claimant demonstrate clear and convincing evidence that the harm has occurred, who precisely has been harmed and how, and that the harm is clearly attributable to the alleged agent. It cannot and should not be treated as a black box that only elicits silent assent.

Troublingly, silent assent seems to be precisely what some of the open letter’s authors expect. Academia, however, simply cannot operate on such a principle, not when, as here, the charge of harm done by an academic article defames a junior female scholar and risks jeopardizing her tenure prospects.

I want to conclude with an anecdote that the authors of the open letter may wish to consider as they contemplate the defenses they may wish to offer for their claims that Tuvel’s article, as well as the editors’ original defense that it “sparks dialogue,” have produced harms so great that they require the retraction of the article. The great historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg–author of the definitive account of the destruction process initiated and developed by the Nazis for the extermination of European Jewry and who himself lost 26 members of his family to that process–once said that he was able to find something of value for the refinement of his own findings and argument *even* in the literature of Holocaust denial. While Hilberg obviously rejected the arguments made by the authors of that literature, he nevertheless did not–unlike the authors of the open letter–desire to wish it out of existence nor did he feel it necessary to assert that its existence constituted some kind of harm. Quite the opposite: he found it useful for the better refinement of his own work.

James Goetsch
James Goetsch
6 years ago

I would just like to say publicly that I think Dr. Tuvel has been treated badly. The proper response to an argument in a journal is another one countering it in the same medium. One reason I was drawn to philosophy was its spirit of radical questioning and the give and take of real argument, and the political nature of the response to her seems to me to be the very antithesis of the philosophical spirit. Such an unjust attack on a junior colleague by people who publicly profess to teach philosophy makes me feel angry and sad.

Topher Gullen
Topher Gullen
6 years ago

I have not yet read Tuvel’s article (downloaded and waiting in the wings) but everything I’ve read about it references a plethora of Facebook posts, including the New York piece on how this has become a virtual witch hunt. All other factors aside, I wonder how this would’ve played out without social media…

Feminist Philosopher
Feminist Philosopher
6 years ago

Cressida Heyes issued the apology on behalf of the board of associate editors of Hypatia, and her own article is criticized quite convincingly in Dr. Tuvel’s article. Given Dr. Heyes’ personal interest in seeing this article retracted and denounced, why was she considered the best spokesperson for the associate editors?
I have published several articles and book reviews in Hypatia and regularly review articles for the journal. I am ashamed of my association with the journal not because it published Dr. Tuvel’s article, but because it apologized for doing so.
I will neither publish in nor review for Hypatia going forward, unless the associate editors who participated in the apology letter are named, offer a formal apology to Dr. Tuvel, and step down from their positions with Hypatia. Unless this happens, I believe that the journal has irreparably damaged its reputation as a serious venue for philosophical publications.

D
D
6 years ago

“Cressida Heyes, […] the member of Hypatia’s editorial board who wrote the apology (and publicly denounced the article on her personal Facebook page), is referenced by Tuvel, who criticizes Heyes’ work on transracialism and transgenderism in her article.”

Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/05/03/hypatia-throws-critical-thought-window-name-feminist-philosophy/

Chloe Taylor
Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

I most likely would never have read Rebecca’s article if it hadn’t been for this sickening debacle. Now I have read it, appreciate it, and will teach it in my courses–along with the story of its reception as an example of groupthink. As always, attempts at censorship merely generate enormous interest in that which the enemies of critical thinking would like to see silenced.
On the other hand, I have so utterly lost intellectual and political respect for those who have led and fueled this grotesque attack on Rebecca–including Cressida Heyes, Alexis Shotwell, Lisa Guenther, Rebecca Kukla, Rachel McKinnon–that I don’t know if I will be able to bring myself to take their work seriously in the future, or even be bothered to read it.

Sad Eyed Philosopher of the Lowlands
Sad Eyed Philosopher of the Lowlands
Reply to  Chloe Taylor
6 years ago

Thank you for speaking out. Clearly, Prof. Tuvel is lucky to have a mentor like you. And judging from the way other mentors of hers have behaved, it looks like she needs it.

Sabrina Hom
Sabrina Hom
6 years ago

This controversy has led me to read both Tuvel’s article and the Cressida Heyes article on a similar topic. Deadnaming is harmful and Tuvel’s article should be edited to excise it, but the case for retraction must be deeper: namely, that Tuvel’s article doesn’t engage sufficiently with relevant work in trans studies or race theory. That’s true and it’s a big problem, though it’s one that is pervasive in philosophy. FOR EXAMPLE. Heyes’ article *also* fails to cite huge, longstanding bodies of work in critical race theory, much of it performed by people of color. Heyes breezily describes passing as the “phenomenon… in which one is read as, or actively pretends to be, something that one avowedly is not.” But the metaphysics of passing are far more complex and contentious (and often include people who are not “avowedly” members of the race they pass out of). To back up her interpretation of passing, Heyes cites only two sources–a memoir, and the philosopher Adrian Piper’s excellent “Passing for Black, Passing for White”. Even the title of Piper’s article ought to give a reader pause in this facile interpretation of passing, but the only piece of information Heyes cites from Piper is *the existence of the one drop rule*! Meanwhile, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and James Weldon Johnson are passed over (no pun intended; but really, anyone interested in the sophisticated and arch discourse on passing in that era can easily find the full text of Hughes’ story “Who’s Passing for Who?” online.) Theorists like Samira Kawash, Harryette Mullen, Cheryl Harris, and Sara Ahmed are also omitted. Kawash and Mullen both take seriously the possibility of changing races, while Harris’ work challenges the implicit moralism of the word “pretending” by pointing out the weight of coercion that prompts blacks to pass. (Harris also points out that passing for white is still a real thing, which suggests that discussions of it also ought to proceed carefully and consider the real-life impact.) It would be interesting to see Ahmed’s more historicized and power-conscious arguments in conversation with Heyes’.

Mind you, Tuvel could have cited all these folks, too! But these citation practices are clearly a disciplinary problem, not an individual one–in fact, it’s not unreasonable to think that a junior scholar like Tuvel would model her citation practices on the work of the respected philosophers whose work she is in conversation with.

I’m not trying to attack Cressida Heyes personally, or argue that her work doesn’t deserve publication. Her article is an important riposte to some very wrongheaded and transphobic arguments that are made under the banner of feminism. And insufficient engagement with critical race theory and other interdisciplinary work, especially by marginalized people, is the rule rather than the exception in philosophy, so it makes no sense to “call out” Heyes specifically… of course, the same argument holds for Tuvel. My point is that the focus on retracting a single article sends the message that the rest of the work we’re publishing is okay. It’s not.