Every study except all the research cited in the extensive Wikipedia article, I guess.
I see no reason why discovering everything about your gender and sexuality as you mature is inconsistent with identity usually being firmly established early.
But I’m not a psychologist, I have only read what I take to be the mainstream scientific literature on the psychology of gender. I’m not competent to argue with you in detail, but I’m not going to take one pop sci article as a refutation of the extensive Wikipedia article on gender identity that cites dozens of research papers.
OK, I’ll try one more time, but if you don’t accept that transwomen are women, then I’m basically wasting my time.
A transwoman who grows up in Brazil or the US or India would consider herself a woman, even though she may be forced to live like a man and go into the wrong toilet, depending on where she was (even depending on what state in the US she’s in).
A person who grew up in Brazil may consider herself white, even though that same person growing up in the US may consider herself black, and her racial self-ID may be different still in India.
That’s why race really is a social construct but gender identity really isn’t. That’s the essential difference.
The idea that gender dysmorphia is just some game or some pretending seems ludicrous on its face, since discrimination and violence against trans women and men quite high and so are suicide rates.
There have been 12 studies done on ‘trans-kids’ and they all found the same result: the majority grow up to be gay or lesbian and a minority remain trans. Some studies are old or small or less reliable due to broader diagnostic criteria used in the past, but even the most recent found that many kids ‘grow out’ of being trans. The very first paragraph of the article I linked for you contained a link to a list of these studies.
Gender dysphoria in children is more heavily linked to adult homosexuality than to an adult transgender identity, especially with regard to boys.[2][3][4] According to prospective studies, the majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria cease to desire to be the other sex by puberty, with most growing up to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, with or without therapeutic intervention.[5][6][7] If the dysphoria persists during puberty, it is very likely permanent.[5][7]
It’s pretty plausible these gender non-conforming kids have incorrectly masculinised/feminised brains, since they act and feel different from a very young age, before they could have learned anything about gender. But they don’t all grow up to be trans. And then we have people transitioning in adulthood who don’t have any childhood history of gender non-conformity, and are in most ways more similar to other people of their birth sex. So there must be something more complicated going on than an ‘X brain in a Y body’ model.
The same person may identify as a trans woman if she grows up in the US, a travesti if she grows up in Brazil, and a hijra if she grows up in India, with a distinct social role in each country. And since we don’t know what causes gender dysphoria to resolve in some kids and not others, it’s even possible that the same person might grow up to be cis in one family/culture, and trans in another. This is why I said there’s a socially constructed element to gender, although there is obviously also some internal, presumably biological element as well.
It may not be exactly the same thing you are talking about, but in a different thread there was the example of the Balkan-style sworn virgin. Don’t feel like staying home and taking care of your husband and children? No problem! Just take an irrevocable oath and become a man. (Well, almost. You can’t marry or openly fuck anybody; that would be too gay.) Point is, nobody cares about your genitals or your brain or sexuality or whatever in that situation: you are a man because you say you are and act like a man. Completely social construct.
A trans woman (two words, they prefer it that way) who grows up in Brazil or the US or India grows up in society, and all three of those are societies with strong roots in common. She considers herself a woman only by first learning what a woman is.
If you want to comprehend how a person thinks of their gender identity in the absence of socialization and socially learned notions, we don’t have many models to look at, but one of the closest we’ve ever had was Kaspar Hauser. (The real person, not the SDMB member who uses, or used to use, that screen name). Was Kaspar Hauser cis? Was Kasper Hauser trans? Kasper Hauser was allegedly not aware of the existence of sexual differences and does not appear to have had any notion of sexual identity, sexuality, reproductive behaviors, gendered roles and expectations, or anything of that ilk.
We live in a world where it is very very difficult even for someone who intellectually believes that being physiologically female does not imply anything whatsoever as far as behaviors, attitudes, feelings, personality characteristics, and so on, to not project onto a person a different set of thoughts and expectations and associations when they think of them as morphologically female. Trans activists do it. I do it. You do it. The average person out there very definitely does it. And because we all do, that makes the fact of being perceived as one sex or the other significant: it’s not about being recognized as having a penis or a vulva, it’s about being perceived as a man or a woman. But that’s all social. It is the way it is not because it is inevitable and hardwired that it be the way that it is, but because that is how it has been and it’s interwoven extremely deeply into our culture.
For all that it’s that pervasive and strong, it is also changing, and has changed quite a bit in my own lifetime.
The existence of trans women and trans men gives people pause when they perceive a person to be male of body or female of body. Knowing that trans people exist means they may take that into account and it offsets their first-tier assuptions by creating an “unless” condition in their expectations.
It’s still a fairly conservative cognitive state though. It preserves gender and detaches it from physical sex only in a folded and refolded way that practically requires negating a person’s physiological sex in order to manage to conceptualize them as the gender that normally goes with a different physical configuration.
Aah, you read “race” and you, entirely unprompted, mentally substitute “one drop rule”, got it.
I mean, the focus on skin colour over everything else that makes socially-constructed race is one thing, I generally expect that in these kinds of threads - but I have to admire your laser-like focusing on an imaginary line no-one else raised at all… that’s some Wickerman-level straw construction you have built up there.
I think you have something of a misconception of what it means for something to have a genetic basis. It does not mean that in an empty universe, the genes will somehow manufacture everything from scratch. What it means is that given a certain environment, if you hold all the environmental factors constant, then genetics determines the phenotype within that environment.
For example, suppose that there is a strong genetic component to whether you are good at crossword puzzles (I have no idea if that’s true, it’s a toy hypothetical). This will obviously be completely irrelevant to people who live in cultures where crossword puzzles are not part of the culture. The phenomenon will only be apparent in societies where there is a cultural tradition of doing crossword puzzles. And the existence of crossword puzzles is obviously entirely cultural, the genes don’t manufacture the crossword puzzles. But there can nevertheless be a significant genetic component to whether you are good at them.
So although gender presentation, gender roles etc. are culturally determined social constructs, that does not mean that a person’s behavioral phenotype within a given “gender culture” may not have a signficant genetic component.
And I should have added: this is why “having a genetic basis” does not equate to deterministic inevitability. The environment always matters, even if something is technically 100% genetic. Because the very statement that something is 100% genetically determined requires that some environmental context be specified where the statement is true, and in some other environmental context it may be untrue or irrelevant.
This tends to be overlooked for classic examples of genetics like (say) eye color, because eyes tend to develop in a pretty constant environment - provided (say) key nutrients are not lacking. But it’s much more important to remember this for genetically determined behavior, where the background cultural environment may vary widely.
Interesting thing about TR, the only cases we seem to know about are ones where people who were born and grew up “white” attempt to cash in on jobs, awards, or opportunities focused on dealing with our nation’s history of multi-generational racism that did not impact their ancestors in any way.
For all we know, there are a million previously white Americans happily living black lives*, perfectly accepted by their communities because they’re not trying to cash in on something that they shouldn’t be eligible for. There may also be a million previously black Americans living white lives***, right under our noses.
Thank you for this correction. The rest of your post is basically a restatement of your previous posts and relies heavily on the Blank Slate hypothesis, which @Riemann has already taken apart, so I won’t repeat his arguments.
I fancy you are absolutely right and that seems like a sensible way to approach it. Such a “transracial” existence probably happens a lot without us being aware of it or passing much comment on it. (why would we? cultural and racial mixing is a net benefit to human society). I’m not a fan of closed cultural communities that say, no, you can never be one of us. That rubs me up the wrong way, always has.
Where it becomes an issue is indeed when benefits or accommodations are sought on behalf of a specific trait that you do not possess and have not suffered discrimination for.
I’m not sure what the logical end point of that thinking is in regards to transgender individuals.
Oh, there are. I’ve met a few. And we’ve all seen them depicted, mostly in not-very-accepting ways.
My first encounter with it in any kind of ongoing way was Scott, a guy I knew as an undergrad student in the 80s. He was a gay white guy, not out to the general campus but thought he could talk to me openly. At first I thought he was, what do you call it, when someone has a sort of fetish about folks of another race or ethnic appearance and get all drooly about them? So I felt kind of judgmental, like he was objectifying young black guys and not seeing them completely as people. But over time it seemed more to me that he really felt like he belonged there and pined after the black urban community. He wasn’t ostentatious about it or trying to get folks to accept “Hey I’m actually black” (he sure didn’t look it, pasty white fellow). But he felt pretty alienated from the gay and mainstream white cultures and spent his time hanging on the periphery of black campus society, where folks were used to him being around and accepted him as being someone they were used to having there.
Second time I encountered it rather strongly was when I went with my performance-artist girlfriend to a monologue show by one of her acquainances, ostensibly about a black woman’s relationship with her mom. But the monologue was actually about her intense “don’t belong here” rejection of the South Bronx habitat she grew up in, and how she spent all her time on the Lower East Side, hanging with the countercultural artistic folks. Then in the late 70s moving to France and living as an artist there. Towards the end she talked a lot about not having anything in common with this “black” identity and how the overwhelmingly-white lesbian hippie feminist crowd she’d hung with had been her people, and had accepted her and not (for the most part) treated her as different due to skin complexion, and the music she listened to, the rhythms of her speech, her thought processes, food she ate, shared history, all the stuff that makes a person who she is, was anchored there, and it was this, the rift between her mom’s culture and identity and the one she found for herself, that was at the root of her lifelong issues with her mom.
Interestingly, a cluster of other art/dance folks went back with us to my partner’s apartment for drinks and snacks to discuss, and several said “Well I was disappointed that she didn’t really address what it was like growing up black”. And I found myself dissenting, “Well she didn’t, I think that was the point she was making. She didn’t explicitly say ‘I am not black’ but she made it plain that it’s not how she ever thought of herself and she told us where her community was and where she fit in. All her girlfriends have been white, you notice.”
In artistic representation we’ve got The Human Stain about a professor born to a black family who “passes” and lives his life as a white academic. It’s not a very sympathetic portrayal but it’s at least three-dimensional and you get some sense of his tensions and the complexities involved. It’s mostly couched as “see he’s betraying his people, and see, it doesn’t make him happy to do so, he’s conflicted”. Well, in a world that doesn’t accept such things, he would be, wouldn’t he?
Then you get things like the hints surrounding Michael Jackson and the general ridicule attached to white guys who go around listening to rap and talking ghetto and apparently doing all they can to mesh with black urban culture.
Disclaimer: I am at no point arguing that there are built-in characteristics and traits of behavior or thinking or personality etc tied to one’s race and in contrast to which these folks are exceptions. But why ought there to need such a thing to be in order for this to be legitimate? I think the resistance to trans race identity is actually fertilized by a bit of leftover assumptions that you come from “your people”, that it makes you inherently different and that people who find a home in another culture are “pretending” or fakes.
This is a good point. There is a lingering racist ideal that people should be “loyal” to their race, or else be a “race traitor”. The worst racists apply it to everything and often loudly, but we need to be careful about letting it unconsciously affect out behavior. We need to reject such things.
I think that there is an inherent human behavior to generalize, categorize, and label things into groups. This has served us well in trying to understand the world. But it becomes problematic when applied to people, both oneself and others. A person should be accepted for the individual they are, not what groups they claim membership or what label you feel applies to them.
As someone who’s been accused quite frequently of being a coconut, who has happily played in some rather heavily melanin-deficient subcultures like European medievalism and Goth, but never really fit into the culture and folkways of my own ethnic community, and also as someone whose White mother has spent the last 6 decades living in the Coloured community (I didn’t know my mom was White until I was in my 20s), I’m intimately familiar with the idea of cultural adoption and cultural alienation.
Neither of those are what I would consider transracialism, IMO.
The anecdote of the artist alienated from Black culture is just that - alienated from a particular culture. A very common occurrence. But culture is not race.
