
This an issue which may be old news to some. But I've talked with feminists who don't know anything about this debate so may be worth it to re-hash.
Feminists have long considered aspects of feminine identity to be constructed, something received, or otherwise ideologically motivated. These arguments have served to contradict essentialist ethics which would ground expectations of female behavior within biological definitions of womanhood. (Elam 42) Since these definitions have served to silence women, feminist scholars have worked to subvert them by calling into question the “natural” categories upon which they rely. But, in deconstructing natural categories, feminists have grappled with the question of what should replace them. How does feminism maintain its integrity as a tradition if women do not, in the last account, exist.[1] This question has led some theorists to abandon that integrity altogether. As Monique Wittig pointed out in favor of lesbian as a category over woman, we must “contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate...” them; (Wittig 251) or Judith Butler’s conclusion that the category of woman “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics.” (Butler 9) In addition to engaging the problem of categories in feminist discourse, these solutions have served to foment alliances between some feminists and trans theorists. Feminist embrace of Emi Koyama’s “Transfeminist Manifesto” (Heyes) or Julia Serano’s notion of trans-misogyny are examples of this convergence (Serano). That said, feminist rejection of ontological categories as grounds for identity has produced some controversy. As feminists have sought to apply the rejection consistently in other contexts it has produced new and different theoretical challenges. Such was the case in the so-called Hypatia controversy when Rebecca Tuvel used feminist notions of gender identity to understand notions of racial identity.
Her 2017 article “In Defense of Transracialism” published in the feminist journal Hypatia argued that considerations which “support transgenderism extend to transracialism” (Tuvel 2) such that reasons for adopting a new gender are logically equivalent to reasons for adopting a new race. At the time she published her article, the question was live in public discourse. Rachel Dolezal, a woman born white who passed as black was under fire for appropriating a black identity while, at the same time, Kaitlin Jenner was being celebrated for undergoing her famous transition from male to female. This led Tuvel to critique the “widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one’s race in the way it might be to change one’s sex.” (1) Her argument sparked a professional controversy among feminist, trans, and critical race theorists. It also led to an internal revolt of Hypatia’s associate editors, a calling into question of Hypatia’s peer review process, the subsequent defense of Tuvel by Hypatia’s editor, and the distancing of Hypatia by the board’s President from the opinions of the associate editors. (McKenzie, Harris, et al) At bottom, Tuvel’s opponents took issue with the symmetry she located between reasons for gender self-identification and racial self-identification. This, they argued, was a racist and/or transphobic conclusion, one which discounted the racial power dynamics at play (Oliver), mischaracterized the reasons trans people self-identify as such (ibid), and ignored the ways in which both identities are constructed differently. (Fernandez Botts) The debate exposed rifts among and within coalitions about the nature of social construction, performativity, and method.
Tuvel’s Reception
Initially the debate occurred online and in private professional conversation. However, in time, critical responses emerged and a special issue of Philosophy Today (Volume 62, Issue 1) was dedicated to the discussion. In it, philosopher Kris Sealy argued that while race and gender are social constructs in the way Tuvel identified, she failed to stress the social aspect of identity structure. (Sealey 24) It is through a necessary relation between the social and the individual, what Sealey calls a “collective co-signing,” that individuals perform and construct identities such that social acceptance plays a relevant role in governing which identities one can perform. While Sealey conceded that trailblazing individuals do emerge from social constructions to pave the way for new identities, a gradual, collective co-signing is necessary for public acceptance—and this is what people like Rachel Dolezal do not have.
Searching for a similarly grounded approach, one which does not, as Sealey put it, create “ahistorical roles for individual agency,” (ibid) Sabrina Hom made a methodological appeal, calling attention to categories used in Critical Race Theory. According to Hom, Tuvel’s argument is distorted by a failure to appeal to relevant literature. Hom thought Tuvel overlooked the notion of passing, that by use of this category Tuvel could have engaged the lived experience of those who perform racial identities in the literature, and thereby avail herself to an existent tradition of inquiry. (Hom 33) In addition, Hom cautioned Tuvel by reminding her that an analogy between gender and race has a history, one which has been used to discredit transgenderism on the basis of the impossibility of changing races. (43) Because this language is embedded in a transphobic discourse, said Hom, Tuvel risked supporting it, offering Foucault’s observation as a warning: that “we are often trapped by the very discourse we mean to resist.” (ibid)
Tina Fernandez Botts also offered a methodological critique. Seeing problems at the macro level, Fernandez Botts claimed Tuvel’s use of analytic philosophy in general was poorly suited to the task, that she should have used continental methods for unraveling the apparent contradiction her paper tried to reconcile. Arguing from Hans-Johann Glock’s thesis that the analytic tradition, as developed by Frege and Moore, was, at bottom, a “decompositional project,” and embodies a “scientific spirit” which is “self-consciously removed from context.” (Fernandez Botts 57) Fernandez Botts argued that the end result of this project, especially in questions which are inherently historical and existential, “entails a hubris about the human capacity for objectivity that is responsible for much harm… including the effects of fascism, genocide, silencing, and…oppression.” (ibid) That being said, Fernandez Botts also engaged Tuvel on analytic grounds, arguing that there is no symmetry between reasons for gender self-identification and racial self-identification. She illustrated this by arguing a parody, substituting the words transgenderism and transracialism with the word centaurism, trying to show that Tuvel’s argument works with an entity that doesn’t exist. This, if true, would mean that her argument can’t successfully be made with something that does, i.e. transgender people. (62)
Tuvel’s Response
These and other arguments were levied with fervor against Tuvel and her supporters. In response, Tuvel claimed that many of her critics had failed to engage her actual arguments. These, she said, were ad hominem attacks which unfairly jeopardized her reputation. Agreeing with Lewis Gordan’s defense of her paper, Tuvel said those attacks were made in bad faith, “suggestive of a conflict on the part of [her] critics who wished to defend transgender identity but denounce transracial identity despite background commitments to both.” (Tuvel 75) In other words, the vitriol she endured was because her “article exposed a conflict among [her critic’s] philosophical commitments.” (ibid) In this, she insisted that because a symmetry exists between a self-identification of gender and a self-identification of race, one cannot reckon race as biologically, historically, or culturally essential, while maintaining that gender is in some way non-essential in the same respects. In fact, Tuvel asserted that her argument “sought to name and challenge an underlying transphobic and racially essentialist logic at work” (73) in our rejection of those who honestly self-identify as a race other than that which society labels them. Thus, her reason for writing the paper was to solve a problem: “if transracialism is to be condemned, I wanted to identify non-transphobic reasons for that condemnation.” (74) This is to say, it was in her failure to break the symmetry, and thus save transgenderism from the condemnation of transracialism, that she chose to embrace transracialism for the sake of transgenderism being logically justified. Per the rejection of ontological categories for identity, if one can perform gender then one can perform race too.
In so arguing, Tuvel explicitly appealed to a classic feminist assertion, that which she seemed to locate as the background commitment held by her critics, that which made their position contradictory when they asserted a non-performal aspect in racial identity. In this, she appealed to Chloe Taylor who recognized a convergence of her thought with Judith Butler and Eli Claire. Despite the fact that both thinkers signed an open letter against Tuvel’s publication, Taylor joined Tuvel in recognizing in their thought a basis for the symmetry Tuvel identified. Tuvel reminded her critics that “by reflecting on his experience as a trans person who had healthy breasts removed, Clare [was] able to extend compassion toward transabled individuals who wish to remove their limbs.” (75) However, “if Clare’s own experience as a trans person enables him to sympathize with those undergoing other types of transition, perhaps Clare would extend similar compassion toward transracial individuals.” (ibid) Hence, Tuvel thinks that performativity as such is that which enables one to assert their identity, regardless of its type. In fact, she joins with Gordan by saying “that the most vehement policers of identity are often acting in bad faith,” and that goes for racial identities too. (76) Quoting Judith Butler, Tuvel echoes
that culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity about gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated (Butler 528:1988 qtd in ibid).
Thus, it is by virtue of rejecting ontological categories as possible ways of thinking about identity that Tuvel sees transracial identities as legitimate. This is why Hom, though she disagrees for other reasons with Tuvel, noted that arguments against Tuvel cut against “philosophical work on transracialism [and transgenderism] like that of Cressida Heyes and Christine Overall.” (Hom 41) Tuvel wondered why justifications for transracialism and transgenderism she agrees with—namely, the rejection of ontological categories for identity in favor of performativity—reasons she argues substantiates a symmetry between the performance of both identities in question, were rejected by those who maintain those identities as possible. Tuvel’s answer was that her opponents are guilty of special pleading, failing to thoroughly apply the notion of performativity in all relevant cases.
As far as critiques of her methodology go, she resists both Hom and Fernandez Botts. Hom’s claim that the notion of passing is sufficient to address the idea of transracialism Tuvel grapples with, is rejected by Tuvel on logical grounds. She says,
it is important to maintain a distinction between 1) a self-identified X—labeled Y at birth—who is or seeks to be perceived as an X and 2) a self-identified X who is or seeks to be perceived as a Y. The latter characterizes several cases described in the literature on passing, where self-identified black individuals passed as white to escape oppression. (Tuvel 78)
This real distinction clarifies the intent of racial transition from the intent of passing. In the first case someone self identifies as one thing, where they have been labeled as something else. In the second case, someone self identifies as one thing, but seeks to be perceived as something else. Wanting to be perceived as black, though one identifies as white is a different kind of intent than someone who asserts their Blackness in the face of social insistence that they are white. It's for this reason, Tuvel argues, that her notion of transracialism can’t be absorbed into the notion of passing, and her contribution to the categories of critical race theory should be taken seriously.
Moreover, Tuvel engaged Fernandez Botts macro claim that her methods were ill-suited to her project. By insisting on the absence of analytic philosophy from the question of race and gender, Fernandez Botts created a “methodological monopoly.” (79) Moreover, Tuvel argued that Fernandez Botts presented analytic methods in a reductive and uncharitable manner. This is not to say that continental methods are ill-suited, just that “different philosophers ask questions differently; and different methodologies shed light differently.” (ibid) As far as Fernandez Botts claim that analytic philosophers are blinded by a Nagelian “view from nowhere,” Tuvel emphasized that she has been trained in both methods, a background which helped her select analytical methods for the question at hand. Tuvel said that “my paper is a philosophical examination of the metaphysical and ethical possibilities of transracialism, not of the lived experience of African American and transgender persons…” (80) She contended, it was because of the nature of her inquiry, not some methodological blindness, that led her to use the tools she did. She also thought it is these tools which disallow the parody Fernandez Botts presents, that one can substitute transracialism for centaurism. The parody assumes, Tuvel reminded her readers, that her argument is that self-identification alone is sufficient to ground an identity. However, this was not Tuvel’s criteria. Moreover, the symmetry between centaurism and transracialism breaks when one considers that “since it is not possible for any human to access what it is like to be treated as a centaur, then, [Tuvel’s] argument quite evidently does not apply equally to centaurism. [She is] interested in human social categories like gender and race. Centaurs, however, are not an actual ‘humankind’” (81)
Conclusion
It’s notable that Tuvel saw her commitment to rejecting ontological categories as that which motivated her promotion of transracialism. Recall that she said, “if transracialism is to be condemned, I wanted to identify non-transphobic reasons for that condemnation.” She found that she couldn’t and thus, by affirming the legitimacy of transgender existence she found herself compelled to affirm transracial existence as well. However, her critics chafed against this possibility precisely because, in the case of race, it undermined the ontological integrity of the identity which the victims of racism are routinely punished for possessing. Hence, by rejecting the legitimacy of ontological categories for identity, she leaves theirs with no ontological value. Hence, the Hypatia controversy forces us to ask a question: how thoroughly should one go in rejecting ontological categories of identity?
This question is live, not just for problems of race. For feminists it runs like this: if the subjugation of women is the result of ontological categorization—that which de facto limits their freedom and political movement in society—then a rejection of the existence of those categories is necessary for their political liberation. However, in accepting this proposition, the usefulness of the pronoun they/their in the previous sentence begins to erode. Is feminism, at bottom, a political movement advocating for the liberation of those who merely prefer to perform an identity? If true, this suggests that women reconsider what it is to experience political violence. It is not the hatred or apathy of men infringing upon the rights of women to exist as women, but the malignant performance of one identity infringing upon the rights of others to perform an identity of their choosing. Exactly who or what is being victimized? Does it matter in any real sense? Because of these questions, the rejection of ontological categories of identity may leave women in the position Tuvel’s critics argued she left black people: without metaphysical recourse to identify in their own suffering. As such, the Hypatia controversy illuminates the real challenge of putting feminism into practice—the challenge of where feminism goes after it has argued women out of existence.
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[1]The same problem has persisted in lesbian studies. As Bonnie Zimmerman noted, “lesbian criticism continues to be plagued with the problem of definition…” for “all-inclusive definitions of lesbianism risk blurring the distinctions between lesbian relationships, and non-lesbian female friendships…” (Zimmerman 456)
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