Longtime readers may recall that a couple of years back, as Bruce Jenner was transitioning to Caitlyn Jenner, I found myself puzzling over something else.
As I mull this over, something else occurs to me. Jenner has expressed a desire, for now, to be referred to as a male; presumably, that will change at some point in the future, and he will ask that he be referred to as a female, and by whatever new name he gives himself. As an editorial matter, and mindful of the difficulties he has overcome along the way, I see no reason why his wishes should not be respected.
But here’s the thing: After all of Michael Jackson’s famous bleachings, could it ever be appropriate, if it were editorially relevant, to speak of him as a ‘white man?’ Something about that bugs me, though I can’t say what exactly …
Soon afterward, one Rachel Dolezal got herself thrown out of a leadership position at the NAACP because she is actually Caucasian but passing as black.
Well, what do you know? Taking transgenderism as her starting point, a philosophy professor named Rebecca Tuvel has addressed these questions with a piece in the philosophy magazine Hypatia, concluding that transracialism ought to be accorded the same respect as transgenderism. Unhappily, there is no direct link to the paper, In Defense of Transracialism, though if you’re interested and look around it’s easy to find instructions for downloading a bootleg copy in .PDF format.
Poor Ms. Tuvel is taking a terrible beating on the Internet, mainly, so far as I can tell, because blacks don’t like people who pretend to be black, transgenders don’t like being compared to transracials, and academics don’t like anybody who annoys blacks or transgenders. As you might expect, Ms. Tuvel has received lots of hate mail.
But so much wrath on electronic media has been expressed in the form of ad hominem attacks. I have received hate mail. I have been denounced a horrible person by people who have never met me. I have been warned that this is a project I should not have started and can only have questionable motivations for writing. Many people are now strongly urging me and the journal to retract the article and issue an apology. They have cautioned me that not doing so would be devastating for me personally, professionally, and morally.
Well … damn. Since I had found myself thinking about these very things at the time, I was gratified to learn that a serious academic had agreed there were legitimate questions here and published a paper about it using transgenderism as her entry point, and went looking for the article; that’s when I learned about the hubbub it had created.
In all of the discussion, I see no acknowledgement that virtually every biologist on earth rejects the concept of race; there is skin color, but no such thing as race. This puts us in the uncomfortable position of comparing a hugely complex real thing, sexuality and gender, to an unreal thing, race — which, however consequential, is merely a shorthand for skin color. The effects of the former are ontological, they go to who you are; the effects of the latter are projected upon you by others. So, as I continue to think about the matter, it occurs to me that perhaps the one should not be analogized to the other after all.
But it is not illegitimate to think about such things at all, and the goal of the lynch mob now howling after Ms. Tuvel’s scalp is to make it illegitimate. Why? Cui bono?
Just as a couple of years ago, something about transracialism nags at me in a way that transgenderism doesn’t, and I can’t put my finger on what that is exactly; perhaps it’s the ontology/projection divide I pointed to above. It’s worth thinking– and talking about, and Ms. Tuvel doesn’t deserve being tied to a stake for doing so.