One of the more revealing moments in what we now call “Woke 1” was the firestorm around the philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel’s paper “In Defense of Transracialism.” Tuvel began by observing the contrasting progressive reactions to the gender transition of Caitlyn Jenner, which was widely celebrated, and the racial “transition” of Rachel Dolezal, which was just as widely reviled. Given that Tuvel later became an anti-woke cause célèbre, it is noteworthy that she presented her defense of Dolezal as an extension of existing progressive assumptions about trans identity. “Since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes,” she asserted, “we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races.”
Despite the efforts of activists and some of her fellow academics, Tuvel’s paper was never retracted, but nor did her argument prevail; nearly ten years later, the disjunction she pointed out persists. In the years since, prominent figures in various fields and institutions have continued to face a backlash when it was revealed that they had misrepresented their ethnic origins. Meanwhile, in the same spaces, changing one’s gender identity is more commonplace and socially accepted than ever.
This divergence, as others have noted, bespeaks a selective application of opposed conceptions of social reality. In the dominant progressive understanding, gender and sexuality are the realm of what Judith Butler called “performativity”: As soon as individuals declare an identity, it assumes the status of ultimate reality. But race and ethnicity don’t work this way: A statement about one’s racial or ethnic identity must evidently correspond to some pre-existing reality that can be externally verified. Thus, identity is at once essential and fixed and malleable and constructed, depending on which part of it you focus on.