James Dyer

Rebecca Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism” argues that many of the reasons commonly offered for accepting transgender self-identification also support (at least some) forms of transracial self-identification (Tuvel, 2017). The paper provoked intense backlash, but the philosophical question it raised has not gone away: If we accept transgender identity claims, what principled grounds remain for rejecting transracial ones? In this article I defend the structural stability of Tuvel’s analogy by examining prominent responses to her paper, especially those by Dembroff and Payton, Sealey, and Botts, and by asking a consistency question: Do the premises of each objection apply to race but not gender, or to gender but not race? I argue that they typically do not. Appeals to intergenerational inheritance, to having lived the relevant oppression, to entrenched social meanings, to collective harms, and to privileged crossing can be made with equal coherence against transgender identities. This does not show that transracial identity claims are always legitimate or should always receive social uptake. It shows that the familiar objections, as stated, do not secure a non-question-begging asymmetry between the two cases. If we want to deny transracial claims while affirming transgender ones, we need a better account of the difference.