page_title: Hypatia transracialism controversy
section_title: Academic response
hierarchical_section_title: Hypatia transracialism controversy / Reception / Academic response
caption_attribution_description: English: Sally Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy at MIT
context_page_description: The feminist philosophy journal Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, a tenure-track assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis. The journal had published a peer-reviewed article by Tuvel in which she compared the situation of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. When the article was criticized on social media, scholars associated with Hypatia joined in the criticism and urged the journal to retract it. The controversy exposed a rift within the journal's editorial team and more broadly within feminism and academic philosophy.
  In the article—"In Defense of Transracialism", published in Hypatia's spring 2017 issue on 25 April—Tuvel argued that "[s]ince we should accept transgender individuals' decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals' decisions to change races." After a small group on Facebook and Twitter criticized the article and attacked Tuvel, an open letter began circulating, naming one of Hypatia's editorial board as its point of contact and urging the journal to retract the article.
context_section_description: The academic community came out in support of Tuvel, particularly on two popular philosophy blogs, Justin Weinberg's Daily Nous and Brian Leiter's Leiter Reports. Leiter wrote that he had "never seen anything like this in academic philosophy". Mark Newman, chair of the Rhodes College philosophy department where Tuvel teaches, expressed the department's "complete and unconditional support" for her. Paul Bloom called the episode "a bizarre and ugly attack". The associate editors' letter had twisted the concept of harm "beyond all recognition", according to the philosopher José Luis Bermúdez.
  Commentators blamed social media's call-out culture for the speed with which the dispute unfolded. In the view of Suzanna Danuta Walters, editor-in-chief of the feminist journal Signs, the associate editors had undermined "the whole process of peer review and the principles of scholarly debate". The philosopher Dan Kaufman blamed the profession's "increasing obsession with identity politics" and "purity-purges". Rogers Brubaker, author of Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (2016), described as "epistemological insiderism" the idea that as a white cisgender woman Tuvel had no standing to argue about transgender or transracial issues. There had been tension for some time between Hypatia and women-of-color philosophers, who believed the journal did not take their work seriously, according to Tina Fernandes Botts. Botts was critical of the Hypatia peer-review process, which she said had allowed the paper to be published without ensuring that it was "situated within contemporary scholarly discussions".
  Sally Haslanger, later co-chair of Hypatia's governance task force, complained about poor working conditions and the narrow focus of philosophy journals; she wrote that there are days she can "hardly stand the arrogance, the ignorance, the complacency, in short, the bullshit, of the profession". The situation was not Tuvel's fault; she had been unfairly targeted, in Haslanger's view. Of 13,000 professional philosophers in the United States in 2013, she wrote, only 55 were black women and 30 percent of those were PhD students. Citing sexual-harassment complaints and figures showing that, in 2016, 75 percent of APA members identified as male and 80 percent white, Shannon Winnubst, editor of PhiloSOPHIA and one of the open letter's top signatories, wrote that the publication of Tuvel's article had brought "all of the systemic problems" of philosophy and feminist philosophy to a head. Oliver Traldi argued in Quillette that the dispute was partly attributable to the influence of continental as opposed to analytic philosophy, and the idea that philosophy should be a vehicle for social change, rather than an impartial search for truth.
  Philosophy Today published a symposium on Tuvel's article in its Winter 2018 edition, with contributions from Chloë Taylor (Alberta), Lewis Gordon (UConn), Kris Sealey (Fairfield), Sabrina Hom (GCSU), Tina Fernandes Botts (Fresno State), and Tuvel. Tuvel's contribution includes responses to Sealey's and Botts' critiques.
caption: Sally Haslanger
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