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“We recognize and mourn that these harms will disproportionately fall upon those members of our community who continue to experience marginalization and discrimination due to racism and cisnormativity,” reads the apology, signed anonymously by a “majority” of the editorial board. “Clearly, the article should not have been published, and we believe that the fault for this lies in the review process.”

They also apologized for the journal’s Facebook posting about the affair, which characterized the controversy as “sparking” a new “dialogue.”

Requests for comment to members of the board were not acknowledged on Tuesday, including one to a Canadian board member, Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta.

Tuvel also declined to comment, but issued a statement. “I wrote this piece from a place of support for those with non-normative identities, and frustration about the ways individuals who inhabit them are so often excoriated, body-shamed, and silenced,” she wrote.

She described receiving hate mail and anonymous expressions of disgust, largely from people who had not read her paper.

In it, she acknowledges that Dolezal’s claims of transracial identity strike her as “decidedly odd,” but seeming odd is not the same as being false. She rejects the idea that there is some constant, universal experience of gender that can exclude people who do not share it. Feminists, for example “have long attempted to show how reductive and problematic it is to assume that all women share some core, let alone some biologically based, kernel of experience,” she wrote.