I would agree. In fact, I would think you could be ethical and unbigoted, and express a preference for restricting your dating pool to tall black Unitarian heterosxual cis-women between the ages 30 and 45.
Dating is more personal and intimate and emotionally fraught than hiring a person, or renting them stuff, etc.
I’m not asking either way. I was simply offering a suggestion as to why the term “doctor’s note” seemed to be a point of confusion or discussion in this thread. In the context of a child needing something for school, doctor’s notes tend to be something simple and easy to get.
I think the problem here may be that you don’t understand what the word “component” means. Yes, it is quite true that genetic heritage doesn’t completely or reliably determine the socially constructed racial category of individuals, and I’ve never said otherwise. But genetic heritage is indeed part of the social construction of racial categories: in other words, it’s the biological component of those categories.
I said (and have said all along) that gender has a biological component. “Component” and “basis” are not the same thing: see above.
“Magically”? I thought we were talking about a black person’s skin being lightened by vitiligo, not magic.
In any case, magically changing a black person’s skin white would not make them racially a white person, because race is about more than skin color.
Just as if your penis were somehow magically changed into a vagina, that would not make you a woman, because gender is about more than genital configuration.
Do you ever see the opposite happening, where a transgendered man dates a cis woman and she finds out, reacting badly?
Again, your cavalier use of language is the issue here. You didn’t say genetic heritage is a biological component of race, you said genetic heritage IS THE biological component of race. Big difference. And even if you had said that, race doesn’t have a “biological component” because it is a social construct. Genes inform race, but the are not a component. Just as genes indirectly inform poverty, hairstyle, and choice in career, but are not components of any of them.
Okay, what is race about?
Um, no, there isn’t. Genetic heritage is the biological component of race. It is the part of socially constructed racial categories that is biological. To the extent that biology influences socially constructed racial categories, it does so through genetic heritage. I don’t understand why you’re having so much trouble with this.
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
And even if you had said that, race doesn’t have a “biological component” because it is a social construct. Genes inform race, but the are not a component.
[/quote]
You really are not understanding the words you’re using here. The various influences that shape the construction of racial categories are its components. Race has a biological component (i.e., the genetic heritage that causes genetically related people to share physical traits), an ethnicity component (i.e., the association of different individuals in the same kingroup, social group, etc., within the same racial category), various cultural components (e.g., arbitrary decisions in a particular culture about what degree of mixed heritage or skin darkness, etc., “makes” somebody a particular “race”), etc.
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
Okay, what is race about?
[/QUOTE]
All the stuff I just said, plus a lot more. Race is not a simple concept.
What about gay men/women? I know among certain cadres of lesbians, there’s the perception that translesbians are just straight men going through insane lengths to rape lesbians to punish them for not being straight, but I don’t know how prevalent it is. And then there’s the pseudo-flipside, where gay people who dare to date a trans-person get denied their identity and told they’re not “really” gay if they date a (esp. pre-bottom surgery) trans* of their preferred gender, which I’m sure hurts acceptance just due to fear.
Are things getting any better there?
Again, no. This is where racialists, and apparently you, get confused. There are no Black genes and White genes beyond basic stuff that controls for skin color, and that has only a rough overlap with race. There is no set of genes or “genetic heritage” that equates to one being Black or White or Asian or whatever. Even putting aside the fact that the term “genetic heritage” is basically a nonsense phrase, race has almost nothing to do with genes. That why people with the same genes can be considered to be of different races. Hell, your race can change just by moving to a different place. One informs the other, but even that is filtered through the lens of whatever society you happen to be in. This is why the Irish were not considered White for a long time. Now if you mean to argue that genes produce phenotypes that people use to make racial assessments, fine.
So what race is a Black person whose skin turns White, and why is that person that race?
I have personally been told of it happening, by the transmen involved. While it still is an awful situation, in every case it was resolved by yelling, recrimination, and tears - rather than a beatdown of the transgender person. So preferable, but it still causes a lot of hurt on both sides.
I do know of a case where a friend of mine, a transman, dated a gal and before they were about to have sex, he told her the truth. She appeared to take it ok - she broke up right then and there, but there wasn’t a lot of yelling etc. A week later the woman’s ex-boyfriend, acting out of some bizarre sense of his own personal chivalry, broke a beer bottle over the head of the transman and would have done far worse except the boyfriend’s friends jumped him and pulled him off the transman.
It depends upon the community and region. The Kansas City metro area is incredibly accepting of LGBT persons, and especially of transgender persons. Although there is some friction between the LG and the T communities (a “B” community here doesn’t really exist as an identifiable entity), I continue to be pleasantly surprised by the acceptance of the LG community towards us. All of the “for lesbians only” events I have ever been to accept transgender lesbians. I can’t speak for the “for gay men only” events.
But my understanding is different cities, different communities, are, well, different.
A friend told me a funny story about that. A transman he knows was dating a woman (presumably cis, but it doesn’t really matter, more importantly, she he was trans) and he said, “I guess we’ve reached the point in our relationship where I should show you my penis.” She expressed interest. So he said, “they are in the drawer over there, pick one you like.”
That seems fair on the face of it - the one with the issue bring up their issues. The flipside is the level of surprise factor. There’s a certain amount of “expectation” that goes into social interactions, those expectations being culturally driven.
I don’t think there’s an easy out here. I would hope people would be reasonable enough to realize early in the discussion process topics might arise, and someone isn’t who you thought, or your hangups get in the way of proceeding, or whatever. One would hope people could do that graciously. However, reality seems to show that is an unrealistic expectation. Hell, people take it personally when someone is not attracted to them, of course they take it personally when someone they think they’re attracted to is jarringly not what they thought.
I suppose all the relationship angle is a bit of a hijack for this thread.
Okay, that’s a reasonable argument. School administrators are responsible for how schools adapt to the situations as a whole and the policies they set, and how individual cases are evaluated. Because the school district has responsibility not just to that individual student, but to all students and all the parents in the district. A doctor’s evaluation and recommendation (with all the due diligence that implies) is the baseline for accepting the student’s identity, but the policy of how to address the situation is a larger issue.
I think we’re at a bit of a cultural crossroads, where awareness and sensitivity is putting a spotlight on the issue of transgenderism. A lot of people are caught up in social expectations of dismissing the issue, of finding it discomforting and “icky”. And a lot of body hangups that affect our society are also entangled in the issue.
I don’t think it’s as simple as saying “she’s a girl in a boy’s body”. You are correct that our current divisions on bathrooms and locker rooms and whatnot are based on body type more than mental state. Otherwise, we would already be chasing this over gays and lesbians. Mainstreaming them is, to a degree, easier because the body lines are at least clear. With transgender, you have a scale of possible situations that don’t fit neatly into one or the other on a physical basis. And personal identity is a factor in a new way.
Because skin tone is not the only phenotype that contributes to determination of race. Sure, it is the strongest one, but it’s not the only one.
One way is to look at parents and family members for their phenotypes.
No, being fully male or fully female means having a gender typical name in the opinion of many transgender people.
Think about this: if you are trying to be invisible, why do you cling to a label that points an arrow at you?
I think it might be noticeable if the person in question is waving his genitalia about, or starting to whack off. That’s generally the predatory behavior most seen. And more to the point, the concern is even more about rape and other aggressions occuring, and those are not being reported. So either they are happening more often but nobody wants to report them out of fear of being labeled a bigot (“I won’t report this rape because the guy wore a dress, and might have just been a transwoman” :dubious:), or else it isn’t happening.
Feeling your needs and desires are being ignored is a different issue than sexually predatory behavior.
People tend to take surprises like that as saying something negative about their own identity. Men tend to externalize that anger, and react with violence. Women tend to internalize the anger. They’re less likely to physically attack, and if they do, it tends to be culturally tailored to slaps versus punches and kicks.
I never said that there was. What I said, which is true although you inexplicably don’t seem able to grasp it, is that genetic heritage is part of the social construction of racial categories.
In other words, the actual physical traits that people unsystematically, inconsistently and somewhat arbitrarily use as indicators of various socially constructed racial categories are all ultimately expressions of various genes. (Although it should probably be pointed out, to stave off the confusion you seem so prone to, that this is not the same thing as claiming that similarity of physical traits always reliably correlates with similarity of genetic heritage, which is not true.)
If you’re still not understanding this, then there’s really nothing more I can do to help you with it.
If, as is starting to seem likely, you are simply incessantly picking at this issue as a bad-faith tactic to avoid acknowledging that I made a reasonable point when drawing a specific and limited analogy between gender and race, there’s definitely nothing more I can do to help you with it.
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
So what race is a Black person whose skin turns White, and why is that person that race?
[/QUOTE]
To answer that, we’d first have to know exactly what skin color you’re calling “White”, how the person’s skin came to change color, how the person’s racial self-identification was established and whether and how it’s affected by the skin color change, and the purpose and context for which we’re trying to assign a racial category to this person in the first place.
But since I suspect this is just more of your uninformative incessant picking as a bad-faith diversionary tactic instead of actual substantive discussion, I don’t expect this pointless hypothetical to be successfully resolved.
I completely agree. I take a very definite stance on the issue because I believe there’s value in drawing an ethical line in the sand, and insisting on the validity of what people should do even if it’s not always a realistic prediction of what they will do.
And I think that the very clear ethical issue here is the recognition and acceptance that human beings are very diverse and complex, and that doesn’t entitle us to police their private parts. To wit:
1) People need to recognize that, with a small but finite probability, what’s in somebody else’s underwear could be a huge range of stuff that they didn’t in the least expect. Transgender, intersex, hypogonad, hypergonad, color, texture, hairiness, everything is up for grabs, so to speak. Nobody is ethically obligated to warn you in advance or apologize to you because what’s in their underwear is different from what you expected it would be when you expressed interest in seeing it. Not even if your expectations were probabilistically very reasonable.
2) People need to recognize their traditional etiquette obligation to refrain from snooping into the underwear contents of others who haven’t explicitly consented to it. Being in a same-sex locker room or even on a nude beach is not a license for obvious staring or rude comments. In a situation where genital nudity among strangers is socially permitted, as long as people are behaving appropriately and not demanding attention to their nudity and/or their genitals, you should not appear to pay any attention whatsoever to their genitals. (Any super-secret side glances that you can truly get away with unobserved, and keep your mouth shut about, are your own business.)
I really like your second point. Having accidentally walked onto a nude beach once or twice, I’m a big fan of the “don’t stare” rule.
(Only about half the bathers were nude, so I, in my swimsuit, was unremarkable.)
Again, you said that genetic heritage is the biological component of race. Not that genetic expression was part of how many people identify race. Those are two separate things. Once again, “genetic heritage” means nothing. Define genetic heritage using a reputable source, then describe ANYONE saying that is the biological component of race? There isn’t a biological component of race strictly speaking.
So are you now denying that phenotype has a biological component in the genes?
No.