I am trying to think through why it is generally accepted that people can be transgender, but people cannot be transracial.
Most famously Rachel Dolezal lived as a black woman, but there are many other cases.
Both are spectra / clines, that have some cultural involvement and some genetic involvement.
Transgender is widely recognized by medical and mental health professionals as a real thing. Trans racial is not.
Michael Jackson?
Yes. My question is, how come? What is their reasoning, their explanation?
Because race, unlike gender, is entirely a social construct, there is no biology way someone can be “the wrong race” in the way they can be “the wrong gender.” There are not brain differences between, say white and black people, but there are between men and women. There are no hormonal differences between white and black people, but there are between men and women.
That’s not to say there’s not an argument that both should be (eventually) accepted, just that there is no medical issue involved, so there’s not some pressing need.
I would say that, if you subscribe to the theory that it is living as part of a class that makes you part of that class, and a trans black person lives like a black person, in a black community, and faces anti-black discrimination, that would seem to be an argument for saying it could be acceptable in some cases.
However, I suspect we’ll need to deal with a lot more racism-related stuff before society would be willing to consider such. Again, there is no pressing medical need, unlike with trans folk for whom transitioning is often (but not always) treatment, who got the ball rolling to explore gender for everyone else. It’s hard to argue there’s any harm in not accepting trans racial folk at this point. There don’t seem to be many, and not allowing racial transition doesn’t seem to cause psychological harm.
A person with dark skin who regards themself as white and tries to act white and so on, and who might even have a significant amount of European ancestry, will still be subjected to anti-black discrimination.
Modnote: Not really a debate, more of an IMHO thread.
It was my understanding that the entire philosophical underpinning of transgender recognition was that gender is a social construct that’s distinct and separate from one’s biological sex.
This is similar to how a person who is male-to-female transgender may still be subjected to anti-female discrimination to some degree.
It may not be as bad, but it seems to me to conceptually be the same.
Oops, I mixed up the genders. I meant a female-to-male transgender person.
I may be missing something critical here, but is there not a very glaring and obvious biological difference between someone with dark skin and someone with light skin?
I’m not sure we should be so certain that someone cannot be “the wrong race”.
I’ve pondered on this and can’t quite put my finger on why someone could not, in all honesty, feel legitimately that they are “black” even though their skin tone and ethnic background would suggest they are not.
And facial features? And hair?
There is a very glaring and obvious biological difference between someone who measures 5 feet and someone who measures 6-and-a-half.
Well, hence my confusion around whether the biological differences between men/women, male/female or irrelevant to gender identification whilst other (to me, rather smaller) biological differences between ethnicities are more relevant to ethnic identification.
The racists know who the undesirable ethnicities are and make up fake differences to distinguish them, like Benjamin Franklin when he discusses how great it would be to keep non-White people out of America, meaning all Africans, Asians, and Europeans excepting Saxons and English. In his case the undesirables are either Black, Tawny, or Swarthy. The only relevance is to them, to know whom to harass.
Rachel Dolezal makes a pathetic poster child for the notion of being transracial. She occupied a position that rightfully belongs to a person who has been regarded and treated as black for a lifetime and hence understands firsthand the issues that black people in this culture face. That was not her experience.
That doesn’t (in my opinion) negate the possibility that we could come around to embracing the notion of being transracial.
“Real thing” is not something they get to assess. It’s not their wheelhouse, it’s that of sociologists. If gender exists as something separate from genitalia (and I of course think that it does), the place where it does exist is not likely to be the physical, but the socially shared world of beliefs, notions, roles, expectations, etc. Nobody has ever been born with a built-in affinity for either panties or boxer shorts, nor a built-in craving for any of the overwhelming mass of things designated “masculine” or “feminine”, insofar as most of them are solidly known to be cultural and not biological in origin, and contrary to popular science clickbait, the jury is still out on the rest, things like built-in biological differences at the brain level constituting “gender”.
Gender is also a social construct, that’s exactly what it is. If we succeed in establishing a world in which preconceived notions about people’s behavior are not projected onto each other on the basis of our genital morphology, there will most likely be no notion of gender. It’s composed of generalizations — some would say “stereotypes” or even “sexist stereotypes”, but let’s suspend the judgmental aspects for a second. It is possible that male people in general have certain behavioral tendencies and personality characteristics that set us apart from female people in general, but even if that is so, if people are sufficiently conscious of the minority who are exceptions to that rule, including not only the inverts like me but the huge swath of people who fall into the middle and don’t have much more in common with the generalized pattern exhibited by males than they do with that exhibited by females in general — and that consciousness extends to an awareness of the hurtful result of imposed gendered notions and expectations on people who don’t fit the mold — then where and how would gender persist?
No. Gender presentation is obviously a social construct, but not gender identity. It makes little sense to suggest that a trans gender identity derives from social construction, when trans people insist on their identity despite immense social pressure to “conform” to a cis identity.
Gender identity is a mental state that appears to be settled fairly early in life through some unknown combination of genetic and environmental factors; but it’s clearly not just socially constructed, since it’s generally in opposition to social factors.
This model makes absolutely no sense with regard to gender identity. Historically, the world has aggressively tried to impose the preconceived notion of a cis identity onto every child; yet a significant minority of people have always insisted on their trans identity despite this pressure.
The model that best fits reality is that humans are naturally sexually dimporphic in both physical sexual features and mental state. And that some people (for unknown reasons, whether genetic or environmental) develop with a “male brain” and a “female body” or vice versa. If the notion of a “male brain” is entirely a social construct, trans people would surely not exist at all.
I know this firsthand and probably a lot more vividly than you do. I’m a part of that significant minority of people.
I see nothing inconsistent between my experiences and what I’ve asserted. The fact that gender is social doesn’t mean it isn’t coercive. Quite the contrary. What did you think I was saying?
If gender identity is a social construct as you claim, then people are only trans because of social pressure to be trans. Does that conform to your experience? It’s my exprience that the world places immense coercive social pressure on all children to conform to the cis-binary. Yet trans and non-binary people exist despite this.