[3][4] By the following day the open letter had 830 signatories,[6] including scholars associated with Hypatia and two members of Tuvel's dissertation committee.

[22] The associate editors, who appointed the editors-in-chief and advised on editorial policy, consisted of Linda Martín Alcoff (CUNY);[23] Ann Cahill (Elon); Kim Hall (App State); Cressida Heyes (Alberta); Karen Jones (Melbourne); Kyoo Lee (John Jay); Mariana Ortega (John Carroll); Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir (SFSU); Alison Wylie (Washington); and George Yancy (Emory).

Tuvel attributes her interest in justice partly to the loss of family members during the Holocaust; both her grandfathers were survivors.

Jenner became one of Glamour magazine's Women of the Year and appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, while Dolezal lost her position as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter in Spokane, Washington, and became, in her view, unemployable.

[34] Tuvel writes that the same argument applies to trans women, especially before surgery; that someone could return to male privilege should not preclude their transition.

[35] The paper thanks J. Baird Callicott (UNT), Andrew Forcehimes (NTU) and David Gray (UofM) for having read earlier drafts.

[40] The scheduled commentators were Kris Sealey (Fairfield), a Hypatia reviewer in 2016,[41][42] and Tina Fernandes Botts (Fresno State).

A friend of Oliver's described one of the Facebook apologies as "like something ISIS makes its captors read in a hostage video before beheading them".

Dissenters were, allegedly, silenced or afraid to speak up; several people who wrote sympathetically to Tuvel in private attacked her in public.

Oliver writes: "Through every medium imaginable, senior feminist scholars were pressuring, even threatening, Tuvel that she wouldn't get tenure and her career would be ruined if she didn’t retract her article.

[24] Nora Berenstain, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee, wrote on Facebook on 29 April that the paper contained "egregious levels of liberal white ignorance and discursive transmisogynistic violence".

[4] An open letter requesting a retraction appeared on 29 April 2017; its point of contact was Alexis Shotwell of Hypatia's editorial board.

[26][52] Delivered on 2 May to Hypatia's editor-in-chief,[6] the letter urged the journal to retract the article; avoid deadnaming; open its editorial procedures to scrutiny; release a statement about improving its review process; and undertake to involve in future "people targeted by transphobia and racism and scholars who specialize in the related relevant subfields of philosophy".

It uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields; for example, the author uses the language of "transgenderism" and engages in deadnaming a trans woman; 2.

It fails to seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color) in its discussion of “transracialism”. ...

[50][11] Tuvel did not identify Charles Mills as a "defender of voluntary racial identification"; Weinberg wrote that this allegation was "just plain false".

It continued that "clearly, the article should not have been published" and blamed the review process, which had exposed Tuvel to criticism that was "both predictable and justifiable".

[4] Tuvel issued a statement on 1 May 2017 saying she had written the article "from a place of support for those with non-normative identities", because she had perceived a "transphobic logic that lay at the heart" of the attacks against Dolezal.

Citing scholars who have adopted sympathetic positions on transracialism, including Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Melissa Harris-Perry, she argued that failing to examine the issues would "reinforce gender and racial essentialism".

[56] Condemning the personal attacks on Tuvel, the directors said they stood behind the editor-in-chief, that the associate editors had apologized without adequate consultation, and that the article would not be retracted.

[4] The associate editors' letter had twisted the concept of harm "beyond all recognition", according to the philosopher José Luis Bermúdez.

[5][17][18] In the view of Suzanna Danuta Walters, editor-in-chief of the feminist journal Signs, the associate editors had undermined "the whole process of peer review and the principles of scholarly debate".

[60] Rogers Brubaker, author of Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (2016), described as "epistemological insiderism" the idea that as a white cisgender woman Tuvel had no standing to argue about transgender or transracial issues.

[8] There had been tension for some time between Hypatia and women-of-color philosophers, who believed the journal did not take their work seriously, according to Tina Fernandes Botts.

Botts was critical of the Hypatia peer-review process, which she said had allowed the paper to be published without ensuring that it was "situated within contemporary scholarly discussions".

[5] Sally Haslanger, later co-chair of Hypatia's governance task force, complained about poor working conditions and the narrow focus of philosophy journals; she wrote that there are days she can "hardly stand the arrogance, the ignorance, the complacency, in short, the bullshit, of the profession".

[61] Citing sexual-harassment complaints and figures showing that, in 2016, 75 percent of American Philosophical Society members identified as male and 80 percent white, Shannon Winnubst, editor of PhiloSOPHIA and one of the open letter's top signatories, wrote that the publication of Tuvel's article had brought "all of the systemic problems" of philosophy and feminist philosophy to a head.

They also announced that a task force would restructure the journal's governance, and that anyone holding an editorial or non-board position with Hypatia would be "required to sign a statement of adherence" to COPE guidelines.

[16] Linda Martín Alcoff and Kim Hall, two of the associate editors who resigned in July,[13] became, respectively, president of the board of directors and chair of the search committee for the new editorial team.

[16] As of March 2020, the journal was led by four co-editors, Bonnie J. Mann, Erin McKenna, Camisha Russell, and Rocío Zambrana, and published by Cambridge University Press.