Research

My research explores the metaphysics and ethics of identity change with a particular focus on efforts to change one’s race. Not long ago, sex and gender transitions were thought mere signs of mental illness (as homosexuality before). Today the same is true for racial transitions. I argue against simplistic efforts to pathologize and homogenize all transracial individuals. In so doing, I engage philosophical debates in feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and ethics. 

Book Manuscript

• Transracialism: The Ethics and Metaphysics of Changing Race. In progress.

Blogposts

• Changing Identities: Are Race and Gender Analogous? Blog of the American Philosophical Association, Black Issues in Philosophy Series.

Articles & Chapters

• Putting the Appropriator Back in Cultural Appropriation. British Journal of Aesthetics, 2021.

• Racial Transitions and Controversial Positions: Reply to Taylor, Gordon, Sealey, Hom, and Botts, Special Symposium: Rebecca Tuvel and her interlocutors, Philosophy Today, 2018

  Links to Special Symposium Replies to my Work:

  • On Intellectual Generosity: A Response to Rebecca Tuvel’s ‘In Defense of Transracialism’, Chloë Taylor

  • Thinking through Rejections and Defenses of Transracialism, Lewis Gordon

  • Transracialism and White Allyship: A Response to Rebecca Tuvel, Kris Sealey

  • (Dis)Engaging with Race Theory: Feminist Philosophy’s Debate on ‘Transracialism’ as a Case Study, Sabrina Hom

  • Race and Method: The Tuvel Affair, Tina Botts

• In Defense of Transracialism, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2017.

  • French translation: Pour Défendre Le Transracialisme, Les ateliers de l’ethique, translated by Vincent Duhamel, 2018

• Sourcing Women's Ecological Knowledge: The Worry of Epistemic Objectification, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2015

• Against the Use of Knowledge Gained from Animal Experimentation, Societies, 2015

• The Case For Feminism in College Ethics: A Reader on Moral Issues That Affect You, ed. Bob Fischer, Oxford, 2016.

  • The Case for Feminism, Ethics Left and Right: The Moral Issues That Divide Us, ed. Bob Fischer, Oxford, 2019.