Another entry, this one by Ani Dutta. What’s interesting about this one is the nested hedging and qualifying, which is so recursive that you end up unable to figure out what the claim is.

I have a feeling that I’m not going to be riding any popularity waves with this one, but I wanted to register my discomfort with the way in which ‘trans / gender non-conforming’ and ‘people of color’ voices have often been essentialized and homogenized in the wake of the controversy on Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article that defends ‘transracialism’ and makes analogies between ‘transgenderism’ and ‘transracialism’. I do not say this ‘as’ a trans/gender non-conforming person of color (categories I use with discomfort given their US-centric hegemonic senses), as I don’t believe that occupying those positions necessarily justifies or gives more credence to the points I’m about to make. But I am referring to these categories, in which I’m often socially placed, simply to make the point that some of ‘us’ (though there’s no ‘us’) might have differing takes on both the Tuvel article and the question of transracialism than the general stance of condemnation and dismissal that ‘we’ have been associated with.

Between scare quotes and talk of essentializing and disavowals followed by avowals…we get lost in the forest. Dutta either is or is not a trans/gender non-conforming person of color, and either does or does not speak as such; I can’t tell which it is. Maybe it’s both. There is no us, but some of us might have differing takes – except that there is no us. Or ‘us.’ (If there is no ‘us’ does that mean there is an us?)

It’s one academic style, I guess, but my god it seems pointless. There might be a good point in there but I can’t tell what it is.

There’s the obligatory rebuke of Adichie, and an acknowledgement that identity is complicated, and then we get to Tuvel.

This brings me more specifically to the Tuvel article: I agree that it is simplistic and problematic on several fronts, and especially fell short in its understanding of trans issues. As critiques point out, it reduces trans identities to a medical-surgical model of transitioning to another “sex” and ignores the trans-GNC critique of sex assignment (using phrases like ‘biological sex’ and ‘male genitalia’); further, it admittedly ignores non-binary subjectivities or practices, makes the sexed body the basis for both cis and trans identity, etc. Ideally none of this should have made past peer review, but these are far wider problems with entire biomedical discourses of transsexuality and are replicated across many academic disciplines, and even in some trans activism, rather than just this article in itself, and her article is not fundamentally making claims on trans identity anyway so they do not necessarily invalidate her main argument (which could still be critiqued, but that is a separate question).

Yikes, that last sentence ran away. But what I’m wondering is what kind of peer review it is that “none of this” should have made it past. The discipline in question is philosophy, so I’m wondering what philosophical peer review has to do with any of that. What field or discipline is the authority on “non-binary subjectivities” or “the trans-GNC critique of sex assignment” or why it’s wrong to use phrases like ‘biological sex’ and ‘male genitalia’? Is any of that an academic subject at all?

Also, specifically responding to a public post by a colleague, the Tuvel piece has been accused of managerial whiteness and the violence of abstracting and controlling differences, deciding which differences are equivalent or not, etc. I do appreciate and agree with the argument that philosophy, and academic theorization more broadly, is often guilty of managerial violence and the violence of abstracting differences over material bodies and experiences that theorizers don’t inhabit or share.

The violence of abstracting differences? I think that’s an agreement too many. On the other hand Dutta does say Tuvel shouldn’t be singled out for that.

Last but not least, moving beyond the specific Tuvel case, it seems important to introspect about why many of us (POC or not) have such a gut reaction to ‘transracialism’, racial self-determination and the analogy between racial & gender identity, while gender self-determination seems to be much easier to accept (even Adichie who generalizes male privilege onto all trans women seems to accept some degree of gender self-determination). Going by my preliminary and not entirely fleshed-out train of thoughts, part of it may have to do with the different ways in which ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are socially constructed, and these differences need to be interrogated more than they have been in recent debates. Broadly speaking, there is a relentless social demand that ‘gender’ be personalized and interiorized. Both conventional cisgender and more trans-inclusive epistemologies of gender (especially in the West) *demand* that we associate gendered embodiments, expressions, behaviors, words / terms, with a deeply *interior* identity (recalling the argument that Foucault famously makes about sexuality) – our gendered actions or embodiments must *mean* something in terms of the ontology of our inner selves, must correspond with a deeply held personal identity (even if that is genderqueer or fluid or agender, inasmuch as these are ‘identities’). Much of our hard-won struggles against biological essentialism and for gender self-determination often remain imbricated in this potentially oppressive ideology, being in some sense the obverse of the cissexist idea that social sex assignment ‘naturally’ corresponds to a gendered essence…

And yet that’s the exact opposite of what the hated radical feminists think. We think there is no “gendered essence” and that saying there is is what’s oppressive.

‘Race’, in contrast, is etymologically linked with ideas of common descent and collective lineage, deriving from one’s position within a collective rather than a deeply held personal identity…

Now there we’re onto something. We’re onto why trans activism is revealing itself to be such awful politics: it’s because it’s about “a deeply held personal identity,” which is about as opposed to the political as you can get. Basing a politics on an intensely anti-political idea is a recipe for disaster, and disaster is what we’ve got.

The editor of Hypatia repudiates the apology by the Associate Editors.

Critics blasted the article as a product of white and cisgender privilege, said it discounted important scholarly work by transgender and black academics, and accused its author of using harmful language.

Hundreds of scholars signed their names to an open letter calling on the journal to retract the article.

The journal didn’t go that far, but the apology, which came with a pledge to reconsider Hypatia’s review process, still seemed like an extraordinary step. Some academics applauded the swift response to widespread criticism; others criticized the unorthodox action of a journal in condemning its own publication of an article.

And, especially, the venomous lie-filled attack on an untenured junior colleague.

Meanwhile a divide in opinion has emerged not just among academics in the field, but also within Hypatia itself. Despite the public stance taken by the majority of the journal’s associate editors, Hypatia’s editor, Sally Scholz, stands behind the article’s publication and the integrity of the journal’s review process.

In a statement sent to The Chronicle, Ms. Scholz said she believes it is “utterly inappropriate for editors to repudiate an article they have accepted for publication (barring issues of plagiarism or falsification of data).”

“Editors must stand behind the authors of accepted papers,” said Ms. Scholz in the statement. “This is where I stand. Professor Tuvel’s paper went through the peer review process and was accepted by the reviewers and me.”

She added that the associate board of editors had “acted independently in drafting and posting their statement” on Facebook.

Miriam Solomon, president of the board of directors of Hypatia Inc. — the nonprofit corporation that oversees the journal and other activities, such as conferences — echoed Ms. Scholz’s disavowal. The apology did not represent the views of Hypatia’s editor, its local editorial advisers, or its editorial board, she said. “The associate editors are speaking for themselves.”

But they’re doing it on Hypatia‘s Facebook page, so it looks as if they are in fact speaking for Hypatia.

[Solomon] cited several concerns about how the statement arose. She was worried that it had not been clear to readers that the statement did not represent the views of the entire Hypatia editorial system. (Indeed, many observers either congratulated or condemned the journal after the Facebook statement appeared.) She also said she was aware that the post “was produced in a rush, in response to outcry on social media,” which she described as a “new challenge for the community.”

“Everything seems terribly urgent, and people feel like they have to make a response right away,” she said. She also noted that she did not know “how seriously an attempt was made to mediate the issues with the editor. I think the editor was blindsided by it.”

These are philosophers though. They’re academics. They’re adults. You’d think they would know how to take an outcry on social media with some degree of detachment. They don’t have to jump just because Zoé Samudzi says jump.

Like Ms. Scholz, Ms. Solomon defended Hypatia’s review processes, which she said are in line with the standards of the American Philosophical Association. Submissions to Hypatia are received by a managing editor, who anonymizes them before forwarding them to the editor. The editor then selects two reviewers to assess each article. The final decision to accept, revise and resubmit, or reject a piece lies with the editor. To her knowledge, Ms. Solomon said, there was “nothing unusual” about the process for the review of the article by Ms. Tuvel.

Well, maybe they should revise the processes, to add ten additional reviewers for any submission that discusses trans issues or race, with at least five of those reviewers being tweeters with a minimum of ten thousand followers.

One charge levied against the journal was that Ms. Tuvel’s article [might] not have been approved if Hypatia had asked a black or transgender scholar to review it. The associate editors’ apology appeared to entertain that view, pledging “to develop additional advisory guidelines to ensure that feminist theorists from groups underrepresented in our profession, including trans people and people of color, are integrated in the various editorial stages.”

Would one expect trans people to be much represented in their profession? There aren’t many academic philosophers total, and trans people are a tiny percentage of the population, so how represented could they be?

Although Hypatia has not retracted the article, it issued a small but significant “correction” on Thursday. At Ms. Tuvel’s request, the journal removed a parenthetical reference to Ms. Jenner’s birth name. The “deadnaming” of Ms. Jenner, as the practice of identifying transgender people by their birth names is known, was among the objections raised in the open letter.

“I regret the deadnaming of Caitlyn Jenner in the article,” Ms. Tuvel said in a statement issued before the correction’s appearance. “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.”

I don’t think they should have done that. I don’t think Tuvel should have said that. I’m not just being bloody-minded about it; the thing is that it’s highly relevant who Jenner was before transitioning, so that shouldn’t be concealed out of some hyperbolic Sensitivity.

Tina Fernandes Botts, an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University at Fresno, first read Ms. Tuvel’s paper before the January meeting of the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division, where Ms. Tuvel presented her work. Ms. Botts found the work to be “out of step” with research in critical philosophy of race and the black experience. She was scheduled to be a commenter on the paper but was unable to attend.

In a paper presented to the Res Philosophica conference at Saint Louis University last weekend, however, Ms. Botts presented her refutation in full.

She said Ms. Tuvel was correct in her assertion that both race and gender are socially constructed but had failed to understand how they are constructed in different ways. Ms. Botts argued, contra Ms. Tuvel, that race is a function of ancestry, while gender is not — which makes gender more of an individual experience. Put plainly, because race is tied to ancestry in the world, a person cannot declare being a black person trapped in a white person’s body, as Rachel Dolezal has described herself. Only someone with black ancestors can count as black.

That’s one argument, but there are others. It’s an argument; it’s not a proof or a slam-dunk demonstration or anything like that. I don’t find it remotely convincing. I think this stuff is wildly arbitrary and flimsy, while it’s being forced on us with threats and punishments. That’s not a very philosophical situation.

In the days after the article first attracted attention, a backlash to the backlash coalesced. Scholars and other critics argued that Ms. Tuvel had been the victim of a “witch hunt” and was punished for her work’s perceived political incorrectness, not its actual content. “The idea that any article in a specialized feminist journal causes harm, and even violence, as the signatories to an open letter to the journal claim, is a grave misuse of the term ‘harm,’ wrote Suzanna Danuta Walters, editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, in The Chronicle Review.

Brian Leiter, director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago, argued that Ms. Tuvel could weigh a defamation suit against the Hypatia editors who publicly dressed down her scholarship. “I wonder,” he wrote on his influential philosophy blog, “did any of those professing solidarity with those who specialize in taking offense consider the very tangible harm they are doing to the author of this article?”

Nora Berenstain, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, took issue with many of those criticisms. “It’s disingenuous to claim that this is an issue of free speech,” she said. “The criticisms of the original paper were calls for accountability.”

Ms. Berenstain wrote a critique of Ms. Tuvel’s article on Facebook before the publication of the open letter calling for the article’s retraction. The post, which she has since made private, described the article as having “egregious levels of liberal white ignorance and discursive transmisogynistic violence.”

Wouldn’t you just love to have her as a colleague?

Her post itself got some backlash, including from conservatives. (Duh. If I were a conservative this would be like a box of diamonds to me.)

In response, she said, “I think that people who have no real stake in this issue and no relevant expertise have been using this issue as clickbait.”

Ms. Berenstain said her post “was a call to feminist philosophers — particularly cisgender white women — to hold ourselves to higher standards. It wasn’t aimed at anyone outside of the discipline.”

“Most of the people who responded did not have the conceptual competence to engage with the post,” she said, “as is evidenced by the reaction to my use of the word ‘violence.’ ” She said her use of the term was a reference to the scholarly concept of structural violence, which describes “a range of systemic harms that go beyond direct interpersonal physical contact.”

Here’s an interesting fact. Something can be a “scholarly concept” and still be bullshit. It can also be a non-bullshit “scholarly concept” and be misapplied.

There’s a lot of that going on in this quarrel.

A series of useful comments at Daily Nous:

David Wallace:

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.

That’s useful because it confirms the impression many of us have that the Associate Editors did a wildly unprofessional thing.

My friend Udo Schuklenk:

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:

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.

That’s insulting. And from a philosopher! Of course it’s “about her” – it’s not possible to trash her in public without its being about her. Yes it damn well is about her, and that “absolute” condemnation is not worth spit.

But another, less personal thing. This:

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.

Who is “they”? How does anyone know which members of a given “they” to listen to and read? How does anyone then know how representative the chosen members of “they” actually are? Do all trans people think the same thing? Do they all have the same experiences? Do all non-white people?

Good evening.

The CHE has a piece by Suzanna Danuta Walters, the editor of Signs, on the Hypatia mess.

A young philosopher, Rebecca Tuvel, writes an article in which she considers claims to transracial and transgender identities. The result is a firestorm of condemnation — nasty emails, a petition to retract the article, and, worse, a journal that will not stand up for its own peer-reviewed articles. (That last point is complicated by an internal rift within the journal, Hypatia. The editor, Sally J. Scholz, does stand by the article. It was, she writes in a statement, the associate editorial board that disavowed Tuvel’s paper.)

“Disavowed” meaning they shat all over it.

There are scholars whose work needs to be not only critically engaged with but rendered moot, who, through fabricated data or improper vetting or suspicious funding, have produced work of demonstrable falsehood, with clear intent to mislead and to provide ammunition for retrogressive policy. The poster child here might be Mark Regnerus, a sociologist who argued the innate inferiority of gay and lesbian families, data be damned.

Tuvel’s paper — which I actually read — does not even remotely reach that bar. It uses the case of Rachel Dolezal as an entry point to explore questions of identity, the body, biological determinism, social constructionism, and analogies between racial and gender classification. It is a wholly legitimate, if provocative, philosophical endeavor. One can agree or disagree, or wish the author had done more of this or less of that. But the assertion that broaching the very subject produces inevitable harm is specious, to say the least. Indeed, the idea that any article in a specialized feminist journal causes harm, and even violence, as the signatories to an open letter to the journal claim, is a grave misuse of the term “harm.”

And we know why they do it, of course. It’s to justify their own shitty behavior, and to make Tuvel appear to deserve their venomous attack, and to pretend that they’re not poisonous colleagues and human beings. It’s to give them an excuse for doing a revolting, unnecessary, mean thing. It’s to pretend it’s ok to harm Tuvel.

By any measure, Tuvel is a committed feminist philosopher who repeatedly and clearly states her absolute support of trans rights. She is not Coulter or Murray or even the predictably contrarian Camille Paglia. Surely, Tuvel should not be immune to critique — none of us are. But to organize a petition and demand retraction should be an action reserved for work that is willfully erroneous, improperly vetted, and riven with demonstrable falsehoods. 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. Our eyes aren’t on the prize but on mutual evisceration in the name of holier-than-thou rectitude. This isn’t substantive intellectual debate. It’s schoolyard name-calling.

Wouldn’t you think these people would be old enough to know better? And philosophical enough?

As a feminist journal editor, I am not only shocked by the policing move of the signatories and their weak, vague, and easily refutable argument. I am astonished by the immediate and hyperbolic “apology” by the associate editorial board of the journal, an apology that the editor herself did not sign and has in fact rebutted. Indeed, the apology doubles down on the notion of the “harms” caused by the publication of the article. Nowhere does this apology challenge the inaccuracies and empty accusations made by Tuvel’s critics. It simply reiterates them as if they were fact. And nowhere, but nowhere, does this “majority” of the associate editorial board defend the right of a junior feminist philosophy professor to make an argument.

Not only do the board members insult Tuvel; they undermine the whole process of peer review and the principles of scholarly debate and engagement. Hypatia presumably followed its rigorous and standard review process here. No one is claiming that they didn’t. To state, as the apology does, that “clearly, the article should not have been published” indicts the good-faith labor of peer reviewers and the editorial decision-making of the journal itself. I can’t recall a similar capitulation. Do the signatories really believe that this article shouldn’t have been published because some readers contest it? I thought edgy, challenging, thoughtful work that elicits debate was exactly what feminist journals should be publishing.

Not when it comes to trans issues. No way. On that subject you had better repeat the Authorized Formulas and nothing else.

I read manuscripts submitted to Signs every day. I read hundreds a year. So let me state categorically that this attack is way out of line; that nothing in the article merits it, and that both the attack and the apology feed into the right-wing discourse of lefty thought police, at a moment when we can ill afford it.

The right-wing discourse isn’t altogether wrong on that subject, is it.

There’s one thing about the Hypatia Associate Editors’ attack on Rebecca Tuvel’s paper and self…

From Justin Weinberg’s post:

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.

A friend pointed out to me that Tuvel discusses an argument of Heyes’s in the ostracized paper.

In her argument defending the moral permissibility of transgenderism but not of transracialism, Cressida Heyes makes just this point. Heyes suggests that arguments in defense of transracialism, like that of Christine Overall (Overall 2004), discount the fact that society’s dominant belief structure limits the available resources one has to claim different forms of identification. As Heyes puts it, “beliefs about the kind of thing race is shape the possibilities for race change. In particular,… the belief that an individual’s racial identity derives from her biological ancestors undermines the possibility of changing race, in ways that contrast with sex-gender” (Heyes 2009, 142). According to Heyes, because sex-gender has been understood to be a “property of the individual’s body,” the possibility of changing one’s sex-gender through bodily modification is acceptable in our society. However, because race has been understood to be a matter of “both the body and ancestry,” one cannot alter one’s body to become a different race (139; emphasis added).

The problem with this argument is that it dangerously appears to limit to the status quo the possibilities for changing one’s membership in an identity category. Indeed, American society has not always granted recognition to those who felt their gender did not align with their sexed bodies. Would Heyes’s argument imply that, during this time, a person born with male genitalia, but who identified as a woman, would not be permitted to affirm her self-identity, because the available social resources were not yet in place? Or, imagine a transgender person born in a country today where such forms of identification are not tolerated, because the understanding of sex-gender identity is firmly restricted to the genitalia one possesses at birth. Would that person be justly forced to renounce her felt sex-gender, because she was born into a society where “beliefs about the kind of thing [sex-gender] is shape the possibilities for [sex-gender] change” (142)? The implications of such a position for the normative question of whether one should be allowed to change race are more radical than Heyes might appreciate. Indeed, if we hold the legitimacy of a particular act hostage to the status quo, or to what Heyes calls the “range of actually available possibilities for sustaining and transforming oneself,” it is difficult to see how we can make any social progress at all (149). Accordingly, to say “this is how racial categorization currently operates in our society” is to provide a very poor reason to the person asking how racial categorization should operate. And this type of reason is even more disappointing when it comes alongside Heyes’s acknowledgment that “the actions of individuals, now and in the future, will be constitutive of new norms of racial and gendered identity” (149).

And Heyes wrote that attack on Tuvel smarmily disguised as an “apology” for Hypatia.

My friend pointed out that that looks a lot like a conflict of interest.

There’s a guest post at Crooked Timber on the Hypatia wharblegarble by Holly Lawford-Smith, a political philosopher at the University of Melbourne. She starts with a comparative versions exercise.

Something bad happened recently. Here’s what I thought it was: a member of a marginalized group within our profession (a pre-tenure woman) published a paper; a group of philosophers were angry about the paper; those same philosophers signed an open letter to Hypatia calling for retraction of the paper; Hypatia issued an apology for publishing the paper; another group of philosophers rallied in defence of paper’s author, against both the journal and the group of philosophers who were angry about the paper in the first place. This would be bad, because the way we deal with disagreement in our profession―both about form and about substance―is not to demand retractions but to write replies. Also, we generally try to encourage and support junior and marginalized scholars, not pile on in attacking them when they make mistakes.

Here’s what actually happened: a member of a marginalized group within our profession, but of a privileged group relative to much of the population (being both white and university-employed) published a paper; a few philosophers together with a great many more non-philosophers from marginalized groups within society at large were angry about the paper and expressed this in online venues; Hypatia’s initial response was dismissive; as a result of Hypatia’s unsatisfactory response an open letter to Hypatia was written, calling for retraction of the paper, and attracting more than 500 signatures; finally Hypatia issued an apology for publishing the paper; and then many philosophers rallied in defence of the paper’s author.

It’s useful, in a way, that she spells out this peculiar idea that “cis white” women are now among the oppressors. Yes, women can have many forms of privilege, as anyone can. Caitlyn Jenner makes a nice illustration of that all by herself. The house in Malibu, the gold medals, the fatal traffic accident with no prison time?

Also, that “a few philosophers together with a great many more non-philosophers from marginalized groups within society at large were angry about the paper” – really? A great many non-philosophers were angry about the paper? I don’t believe that. Philosophy papers are not a matter of interest to a great many people.

Hypatia is a journal of feminist philosophy explicitly committed to both ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘diversity’, positioned as both ‘accessible’ and a resource for ‘the wider women’s studies community’ (see their website). It’s true that some of the anger was directed at Tuvel, but much more was directed at Hypatia for not catching many of the offensive aspects of the paper during the review process (or, some think, for not outright rejecting the paper). The open letter was addressed to Hypatia, not to Tuvel. Journals that are explicitly interdisciplinary are bound by the norms of all of the disciplines they include, so whether a retraction of the paper is warranted is not settled by the fact that it wouldn’t be warranted in Philosophy. More importantly, Hypatia does something that no other journal in Philosophy does, with its commitment to diversity. Hypatia is like your male best friend, who calls himself a feminist and an ally, and who suddenly does something horribly misogynistic. You’re not surprised that there are misogynists in the world, you just feel betrayed because you didn’t think your best friend was one of them.

Nice illustration except that Tuvel didn’t do anything that’s the equivalent of “horribly misogynistic.” You can see examples of “horribly misogynistic” on Twitter without getting your hair mussed, and they don’t look anything like Tuvel’s paper.

What are the risks of a ‘dangerous idea’ like Tuvel’s?

First of all, trans people and activists for trans rights might worry that the structural analogy Tuvel draws between race and gender will undermine claims to the social acceptance of trans identities. That is to say, that although Tuvel herself thinks we have good reasons to accept transgender identities, and that those same reasons support accepting ‘transracial’ identities, others may take the parallel as a reductio ad absurdum. Many people find ‘transracial’ claims absurd, so drawing a parallel between the two might have the effect of weakening the former rather than strengthening the latter.

But if the two are parallel, if the two do rest on the same basic idea (a particular idea of identity for instance), then how can we not discuss them in those terms? Ideas about trans identity are very new, and it seems way too early to close off discussion of them.

Second of all, black people might worry that Tuvel’s conclusion will legitimize more Dolezal-type cases, which they find problematic for a whole host of reasons.

Ah. There we have it. Yes, so they might, but so might women. So might women, and it is not obvious that the worries of black people should be taken seriously while the worries of women should be treated as evil and contemptible.

Even if the paper had been published in Ethics, Philosophy’s problem of being dominated at all levels by cisgender white men entails that many members of marginalized groups (including trans black people) will be located outside the discipline, and so, conversely, work done outside the discipline may in fact be philosopy. In that case, the problem of whose work must be read and engaged with becomes a lot more difficult. At the very least, it should include those who identify as philosophers, wherever they work.

Really?? I thought that was one of those reductio ad absurdum claims we weren’t supposed to make, like “anybody who identifies as a pilot / neurosurgeon / dentist should be accepted as such.” There are countless Twitter jockeys who identify as philosophers; does Lawford-Smith really think their work must be read and engaged with?

Jimmy Lenman commented:

So let me see if I understand.

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

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

No. Surely, that can’t be it. Can it?

Yes, sadly, it can.