Once again, if both sex and race are social constructs, why is it okay to declare you’re of your non-natal sex, but not your non-natal race?

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, an 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 “since 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. The article’s publication had sent a message, the letter said, that “white cis scholars may engage in speculative discussion of these themes” without engaging “theorists whose lives are most directly affected by transphobia and racism”.

On 1 May the journal posted an apology on its Facebook page on behalf of “a majority” of Hypatia‘s associate editors. By the following day the open letter had 830 signatories, including scholars associated with Hypatia and two members of Tuvel’s dissertation committee. Hypatia‘s editor-in-chief, Sally Scholz, and its board of directors stood by the article.  When Scholz resigned in July 2017, the board suspended the associate editors’ authority to appoint the next editor, in response to which eight associate editors resigned.  The directors set up a task force to restructure the journal’s governance.  In February 2018 the directors themselves were replaced.

And of course Rachel Dolezal was also demonized when she was outed as having been born white although claiming she was black. She was fired as president of the local NAACP, and, as Wikipedia notes, “dismissed from her position as an instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and was removed from her post as chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission in Spokane over ‘a pattern of misconduct'”. All for saying she was black when she was born white. I do believe Dolezal assumed her black identity honestly. It didn’t seem to be a ruse, and, indeed, why would she fake being a member of an oppressed minority unless she really believed it. It surely wasn’t a trick or a ruse.

Richard has been writing about this disparity/hypocrisy for years, most notably in his website post, “Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary.”  The title is of course correct, but pointing it out on Twitter cost Richard the 1996 Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. And that was for simply raising the question of any relevant difference between being “transracial” or “transsexual”. The AHA acted shamefully in that case, and I’ve washed my hands of it.

Indeed, since race is more spectrum-ish than is sex, it would seem to be MORE JUSTIFIABLE to say you’re a member of a non-natal race than of a non-natal sex.  After all, people like Barack Obama are of mixed ancestry, and can claim whatever they want with biological justification (in his case, white or black).  But if he felt more Asian, why couldn’t he claim he was Asian? After all, race, like sex, is supposed to be a social construct.

This came back to me when I considered the case of Kat Grant and her essay for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which I documented here. That fracas resulted in my published response being taken down, with the consequence that I resigned from the FFRF along with Richard and Steve Pinker.  And the FFRF declared that it dissolved the honorary board of which we were all members (though, curiously, it’s still on the web). Grant’s essay, “What is a woman?” implicitly accepted sex as a social construct and ended this way (bolding is mine):

All of this is to say that there is an answer to the question “what is a woman,” that luckily does not involve plucking a chicken from its feathers. A woman is whoever she says she is.