But wait, there’s more. One of the people who signed the letter attacking Rebecca Tuvel – one of the “colleagues” who signed it – wrote a piece for the CHE saying why the signers were right to sign it.

As one of the many scholars involved in writing the open letter calling on Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy to retract the essay “In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rebecca Tuvel, I am compelled to come forward and attempt to reclaim a narrative spinning increasingly out of control.

Five words in the bullying starts – she has to make clear that it was many scholars. (I’m not sure they are all genuine scholars; I think some are adherents rather than … Read the rest

Commenter helterskelter alerted us to a Facebook post by Zoé Samudzi on April 28 vehemently dispraising Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article and suggesting a letter.

It turns out it’s a public post, so we can all read it.

who’s on the editorial board over at hypatia? i honestly want to talk about this absolutely disgusting and harmful legitimization of “transracial” identity beyond adoption. what kind of garbage de-raced and probably trans-exclusionary gender studies professor wants to pretend that socially constructed identities use the same logics and are interchangeable? is gender suddenly inheritable the same way race is?

who wanna put together some kind of letter because i refuse to allow this garbage to gain traction. if anyone has institutional access

Kelly Oliver, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt, tells us about the backstage maneuvers in the Ostracism of Rebecca Tuvel.

The dust-up on social media over Rebecca Tuvel’s article, “In Defense of Transracialism” published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, has given a new meaning to the public/private split central to the history of feminism. For decades, feminists have argued the personal is political, and explored the politics of our private lives. The split between what people wrote to both Rebecca Tuvel and to me in private, and what they felt compelled to say in public is one indication that the explosion of personal insults and vicious attacks on social media is symptomatic of something much bigger than

Brian Leiter collected some responses to the monstering [he calls it the defamation] of Rebecca Tuvel. They are consoling after reading the dreck from the Hypatia Associate Editors and that open letter. A few snips:

Philosopher José Luis Bermudez (Texas A&M):

I am deeply concerned about what appears, on the evidence available, to be an egregious episode of collective persecution that breaches longstanding norms, not just of academic life but of civilized behavior. I have no comments on Dr. Tuvel’s article, but the correct response to an article with which one disagrees is surely to write a response pointing out perceived flaws in argumentation and evidence.

You would think. You would especially think that in the case of academics. … Read the rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesse Singal this morning:

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

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

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

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

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

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

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

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017

5/therefore

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

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

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

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

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

Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept the following premises