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Hypatia, a prominent feminist journal, has apologized for publishing an article on "transracialism," the idea that people may identify as members of a different race, as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, the former Spokane, Wash., NAACP chapter leader who declared herself to be black although she is white. The article compared transracial identities to transgender identities in ways that critics said demeaned transgender people and black people, among others. Many scholars called on the journal to retract the article.
An apology posted on Facebook said in part, "We, the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors, extend our profound apology to our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy, especially transfeminists, queer feminists and feminists of color, for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused. The sources of those harms are multiple, and include: descriptions of trans lives that perpetuate harmful assumptions and (not coincidentally) ignore important scholarship by trans philosophers; the practice of deadnaming, in which a trans person’s name is accompanied by a reference to the name they were assigned at birth; the use of methodologies which take up important social and political phenomena in dehistoricized and decontextualized ways, thus neglecting to address and take seriously the ways in which those phenomena marginalize and commit acts of violence upon actual persons; and an insufficient engagement with the field of critical race theory. Perhaps most fundamentally, to compare ethically the lived experience of trans people (from a distinctly external perspective) primarily to a single example of a white person claiming to have adopted a black identity creates an equivalency that fails to recognize the history of racial appropriation, while also associating trans people with racial appropriation."
Rebecca Tuvel, the author of the original piece, has posted a response, criticizing those who have attacked her article for engaging in "ad hominem attacks."
