A couple years ago I wrote a post arguing that we should not be defined by biological categories. I stand by that post today. It focused on transgender (and did so before I came out as gender-fluid myself), but it also mentioned race: “I view the struggle for racial equality in the light of this ideal as well, as Prince Ea does: skin colour or related phenotypical characteristics should not define who we really are.”

Anyone who read that post could have come up with the reasonable question: well then, must you not also believe that we should allow transracialism alongside transgender? That people should be allowed to define their own race just as they define their own gender?

At the time I wrote the first post I would have refused to answer that question – for reasons that came down, in a word, to fear. I saw what happened to Rebecca Tuvel, who defended the idea of transracialism in a philosophy journal (Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist philosophy). After a smear campaign on Facebook and Twitter where Tuvel was accused of doing “violence”, more than 800 people signed an open letter demanding that the journal retract the article and publicly proclaim that publishing it was a “failure of judgement”. An associate editor immediately published an apology for publishing the article, followed by a spate of resignations that ultimately took the journal’s entire editorial staff.

While things turned out well enough for Tuvel herself in the end – wonderfully, she got tenure and became department head – in the broader context, a Twitter mob alone can cost you jobs, friendships, your entire life. When an academic editor lends credence to that mob, and when others lose their positions as a result of something you wrote, the sanctions can end up significantly worse. I didn’t want to expose myself or my loved ones to that kind of risk.

Now while in general the climate of free speech and academic freedom in the US has unfortunately got much worse in the past year, it is nevertheless at least less dangerous now to speak up on this issue. So now I’m ready to address the idea of transracialism. But before I get into the real substance of the issue over the next few weeks, I’d like to set the record straight about that claims of that open letter. After all, calling for the retraction of a scholarly paper is not the same thing as shouting down a speaker, doxxing a critic, or trying to get an enemy fired: some papers can and should be retracted if they turn out to be shoddy scholarship. So it is worth examining the claims of the letter. Because a letter calling for that sort of cancellation is not wrong in principle. If the letter had indeed revealed Tuvel’s scholarship to be shoddy, then it would have been a reasonable thing to put out. It just turns out that the real and embarrassing shoddiness is entirely within the letter itself.

Thus the first thing to note about the letter is that it admits, correctly, that “Many published articles include some minor defects of scholarship…” with the implication that one does not retract an article simply over those; at most, one offers corrections. So the signatories admit that their criticisms have to pass a bar higher than mere “minor defects of scholarship”.

That bar, however, is not at all passed by any of the letter’s four main points. Taking them in order, point 1 says of Tuvel’s article: “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…” “For example” is not enough to call scholarship into question, especially when your examples are this bad. I’ve explained before why deadnaming in this context is a perfectly defensible practice. As for “transgenderism”, there are obvious reasons to use the term – one, that it is grammatically bizarre to treat “transgender” as a noun, and two, transracial is never a noun, and in an article making the comparison to “transracialism” it provides a natural parallel. More importantly, in 2017 when the article was published, a leading journal in the field was still called International Journal of Transgenderism! Only since then, in 2020, did it change its name to International Journal of Transgender Health. Which is to say that the “transgenderism” vocabulary might not be adopted by the relevant subfields now, but in 2017 when both the article and the letter were published, it absolutely was, and it was an act of willful misrepresentation to pretend otherwise.

A similar response awaits point 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…” But the open letter did nothing whatsoever to show that this is a mischaracterization! Tuvel’s Judaism example seems quite right to me, as a religion scholar who has taught Judaism in an intro class but does not specialize in it; indeed, I find the Judaism comparison very helpful for thinking about changes in ethnic identification (and will likely write about that point in the future). If you’re going to claim that a work of scholarship engages in mischaracterization, the burden of proving that claim is on you – and demanding a retraction without that proof is serious scholarly malpractice. At that point it becomes clear that you are demanding a retraction because you disagree, not because of any scholarly flaws. And that is when we have crossed the line from scholarly contention into indefensible cancel culture.

Point 3 says, “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…” Again, for something as serious as a retraction the burden of proof needs to be on the retractor; examples do not count unless they are provided. Here, the only one that is provided, the claim about Mills, is just false: nowhere in the article does Tuvel say Mills does defend voluntary racial identification. She only says two things about Mills: one, that he “identifies at least five categories generally relevant to the determination of racial membership”, a list that she then quotes, and two, she directly quotes him to the effect that ancestry is crucial not because of biology but because it is taken to be crucial. She takes up both of these claims to support her own argument for voluntary racial ID, but she nowhere portrays him as supporting that argument. Which is to say that that claim of “incorrectly citing him as” is false; she does not cite him as that at all, whether correct or not.

That leaves point 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.

This hardly seems like a fair-minded objection. While most would agree that it’s better to cite more non-white women in philosophy journals where feasible, the analytic nature of most philosophy articles doesn’t lend itself to having a large number of academic citations at all – as opposed to the journalistic citations Tuvel has on the situation, which do quote and engage with “women of colour” like Tamara Winfrey Harris. Anyone familiar with philosophy journals knows that the vast majority of articles published in 2017 would not meet this test. Tuvel is clearly being unfairly singled out here, for reasons that are not actually about this objection.

All four of these objections are entirely specious – and moreover, none of them have anything to do with the established standards by which philosophy journals judge quality scholarship, like precision or rigour of argument. They are not about bad scholarship, and they fail on their own grounds of whatever they are about.

It seems pretty clear that none of these objections would ever have been made without what comes across as the objection the letter-writers really care about: namely that the article’s “continued availability causes further harm”, and “these failures of scholarship do harm to the communities who might expect better from Hypatia.” It is significant that it is not even remotely specified what sort of harm is presumed to be done here. In a field like philosophy, where argument is the bread and butter, without such specification the obvious answer should be: none at all. As far as I can tell, some of these self-proclaimed philosophers seem to think themselves “harmed” by the mere existence of reasoned disagreement with their position. Here as with deadnaming I must insist that to the extent that that is the case, that is a you problem. Perhaps your arachnophobia causes you genuine emotional harm, but that does not constitute a reason for zoology journals to stop mentioning spiders. The courts of Athens had no less reason to proclaim that Socrates was harming the youth by corrupting them. Socrates in his trial noted that the Athenians, too, were not able to be specific about their charges. (That the letter identified “harm” in such a dangerous way is a major reason I react with suspicion, at best, to similar recent claims like Willow Starr’s that “the repetition, framing, sources and standards for ‘answering’ the questions do cause harm…”)

One other criticism the signatories offer is that “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.” But there’s a simple response here: well, that’s too bad for critical race theory and trans theory, in their present form at least. The article wouldn’t have been endorsed by referees working in Catholic natural law either, and that field is also directly relevant to this article, since it makes arguments about why people’s gender roles should correspond to biology. Critical race theory is no more entitled to a veto than natural law is. Philosophy, at its heart, is about busting paradigms. (That’s why Neil DeGrasse Tyson is so threatened by it.) That people in particular navel-gazing subfields would not endorse a philosophy article is no slight against that article.

Finally, the signatories spell out one more concern at the end: “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.” Well, if that’s the worry, then consider this blog post its own form of engagement from a brown-skinned gender-fluid theorist – one who has been directly affected by transphobia and racism. I think that, whether or not you agree with her, Tuvel was doing exactly what philosophers are supposed to do, and that there is not even the slightest bit of merit in any of the open letter’s claims. I didn’t speak up about this at the time because I was terrified of what the white cis people would do to me if I did. But I couldn’t stay silent about it forever.

As a brown-skinned gender-fluid philosopher, I was not at all harmed by Tuvel’s reasoned and thoughtful argument. I was harmed (at least in the emotional way that seems to concern the signers) by the terror that smear campaigns like this provoked in me – and that is the reason I am saying it all now, instead of in 2017. I am sure most of the letter’s signatories were motivated by a sincere desire to help transgendered and non-white people – but if you’re one of them, then, please, Jesus Christ, stop helping. I want every signatory of that open letter to know that from my lived experience as a gender-fluid brown person, in your endorsement of such an anti-philosophical letter, you do not speak for me. And you never did.

EDIT (1 Dec 2025): the sentence about Catholic natural law originally said it “makes arguments about why people’s gender roles should correspond to gender ideology.” I mean “biology”, not “gender ideology”, and changed it accordingly.