The essay is well-argued and worth reading but I will try to summarise:
1. A person's membership of a given gender is determined by their self-identity and the identity society assigns them, determined in large part by phenotype and circumstance.
2. Gender is vague and ambiguous and no given attribute can be isolated which consistently identifies a person's membership. (In Wittgenstein's language, the set is defined by a family resemblance.)
3. The practical possibility of changing gender is influenced by what we think gender should be and whether we think a person should be able to transition, and be recognised as having done so. Consequently it depends on the medical and social resources available to the person who wishes to transition.
4. Points (1)-(3) all apply to transracialism. Therefore, there is an inconsistency between our treament of Caitlin Jenner and our treatment of Rachel Dolezal.
5. Therefore, we should accept the notion of transracialism as both possible and acceptable.
Rebecca Tuvel wrote:I think we have stronger reasons to accept individuals’ self‐identities than to force them to feel beholden to an identity thrust upon them at birth. The argument for this point is broadly Millian; as a rule, we should encourage “different experiments in living” and not interfere with others’ liberty unless doing so would prevent harm to others [...] I hope to have shown that harm to members of a race is not an inevitable or obvious consequence of transracialism and, importantly, no more inevitable or obvious in the case of race than of sex.
Rebecca Tuvel wrote:I have taken it as my task in this article to argue that a just society should reconsider what we owe individuals who claim a strongly felt sense of identification with another race, and accordingly what we want race to be.
Tuvel also populates the paper with pre-emptive responses to various criticisms, which I will not lay out in full here. I think there are three possible prongs to this fork:
1. Accept transracialism as legitimate.
2. Reject transgender identity as illegitimate.
3. Demonstrate some logical or moral difference between the two types of trans identity.
Part of the job of philosophy is to ask the difficult questions, so I trust that anybody who is outraged will have the patience to read the piece before reacting. I am interested to read your analysis.