That is a complicated question. I worked for an Indian tribe and their rolls, where they decided who was considered a tribal member and who wasn’t, were controversial and a large source of conflict. Much of it was political, and there was always fighting. See here:
As a general principle an Indian is a person who is of some degree Indian blood and is recognized as an Indian by a tribe/village and/or the United States. There exists no universally accepted rule for establishing a person’s identity as an Indian. The criteria for tribal membership differs from one tribe to the next. To determine a particular tribe’s criteria, one must contact that tribe directly. For its own purposes, the Bureau of the Census counts anyone an Indian who declares to be such. By recent counts, there are more than 2.9 million Native Americans, including Native Alaskans and Native Hawaiians.
But to pick up Biffster’s point, what’s to stop a white person calling themself black and justifying it by saying that a black person is simply a person who identifies as black?
It really only matters when it really matters. If your coworker wants to be known as black by other coworkers, who cares? Just like if someone wants to be known as a Cowboys fan but they never watch the games. But if your coworker wants black-specific scholarships, affirmative action consideration, minority status for tax purposes, etc. then it’s important for those things to be specific about what exactly they mean by black or minority (e.g. heritage from Sub-Saharan Africa).
We stop them by publicly identifying them as racist transphobic morons, because this entire idea is only something that a blithering idiot would think is a clever point of debate.
It’s stupid, and you’re stupid, and you’ve made all of us incrementally stupider by forcing us to read it.
Why? Why is it that someone can self identify as a different gender but not a different race? Or a different age, for that matter? Have a little think, and come back to me with something more than overly defensive bluster.
There is a LONG history of people passing as a different race in order to get benefits or avoid persecution, which is why I’m immediately skeptical of anyone claiming they genuinely identify as a different race.
Second, what does it mean to identify as a race when you have few, if any, shared experiences with people of that race, and no family history of that race?
Third, this always comes up as a moronic hypothetical in discussions of transgenderism. So… fuck your hypothetical, and stop being an asshole.
Given what we’re talking about, I don’t think it’s a question that needs answering. But if you insist on an answer I suppose the best I can do is “I don’t know”.
That said, I’d be happy to treat a transwoman as a woman in real life and respect their pronouns etc…
Why not? Maybe he’s got white skin, but was raised in an all-black family. So he might very well identify as black. Would he tell his doctor to always treat him as though he were biologically black? He shouldn’t. Just like a transwoman shouldn’t tell her doctor to offer treatments as though she were assigned female at birth.
Yet there are people who do, and those rare individuals seem, almost universally, to be white, so we can rule out getting benefits and avoiding persecution as possible motives. If anything, they’d be losing benefits and inviting persecution by identifying as another race, which would strongly imply that they were sincere (albeit, perhaps, not especially well balanced).
If sincere self-declaration is all that’s necessary to change one’s gender in the eyes of the world, why can’t the same be true of changing one’s race?
You might well ask a trans woman the same question. There are countless experiences that cis women have that trans women can’t ever share. If a lack of shared experience isn’t sufficient to invalidate the identity of a trans woman, why should it be sufficient to invalidate the identity of someone who sincerely claims to be of a different race?
I think it’s perfectly possible to “queer” normative conceptions of age. I can’t imagine being the kind of person who’d want to do so, but it might be fun to try
