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Notes -
In hindsight, one of the things that struck me as odd and continues to strike me as odd about Tuvel's paper was the way that defenders sought to minimise the significance of the paper itself. I remember some of its defenders saying things like "this isn't very significant, it's trying to nitpick a slight clarification about the way we use language, this is what philosophers do all the time", and so on.
It seemed strange to me that philosophers would be so critical of the significance of their own profession. What Tuvel does in the paper is argue for an equivalence between transgenderism and transracialism. That would seem to leave two options, if we wish to be intellectually consistent. Either 1) we ought to treat transgenderism and transracialism equivalently (whether affirming both or denying both), or 2) we assert that Tuvel's argument is wrong somewhere (and implicitly ought to show where it goes wrong). Those are your options, if you take philosophy remotely seriously. Either Tuvel is right, in which case we should treat the two situations the same, or she's wrong, in which case it's incumbent on the objector to show where she's wrong.
Either way, that isn't a minor clarification of a point of language - it's an argument that leads to either radically revising what we think it means to be of a particular race, or else rejecting transgender identities along with transracial identities. If that argument is correct, it's a big deal. It's not a silly linguistic game.
There's actually a long tradition within philosophy of doing just that! Although in this case, that's irrelevant; it's clear that all of the criticism of Tuvel's paper was politically motivated.
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