In the present I don’t think those records have much to do with folks’ personal experience. If someone grew up being treated by everyone as white, and being told they were white, and no one aside from some government record considered them anything but white, then for all intents and purposes they are white, no matter the records.
As long as I’ve been around, racial classification has been something that’s self-identified. I don’t think there’s any government entity that assigns them anymore, for at least the last 40 years or so.
@DemonTree, Biden did no such thing.
If this is true (and I am not asserting that it’s not true), then, taking it to its extreme, there is no such thing as a transracial person in modern society.
Yup. AFAICT, a major difference between transgender identity and transracial identity is that people who identify as “transracial” have no legal barriers to overcome nowadays. Our society no longer legally penalizes black people for being in places or conditions reserved for white people, for example, so somebody who identifies as “transracially white” doesn’t have to defend their identity in order to have the same legal status as people assigned-white-at-birth.
I think this may be true. For example, if all racism and sexism were completely eliminated, trans-racial would have little meaning. You could be part of this sub-culture or that sub-culture, with no implications for your advancement, etc., and no reason to claim to be something you’re not.
However, we would still have men and women, and cis men and cis women, and trans men and trans women.
Modnote: What are you referring to? Is this the disproven bit from your closed Op or something new but left unlinked?
This is not a good argument. Racial identity isn’t a medical or psychological condition, so of course trans-racial identity wouldn’t need to be.
I’m bothered by Rachel Dolezal and other white people who live as black people. It doesn’t bother me enough that I’d support legislating it away, or being unkind to them. I keep it to myself. But it does bother me.
I don’t have a good explanation for that, or why it bothers me where transgender really doesn’t. It just seems to me that transrace (if that’s a word) is trivializing someone’s ethnicity as a mere cosmetic preference instead of an oppressive stigma that shapes someone’s entire life and they cannot simply opt in and out of it like a fashion accessory.
He wasn’t adopted into the culture. He was hiding his heritage. My mother refused to talk about this because she grew up thinking he was NA as well. I guess our Band knew: my kids should be 1/4 Blood Quantum and belong in the Band even after they turned 18 but they aren’t.
So he himself would not have considered himself Native, is what I’m hearing.
I’m not sure how far it is from Doelzal to my GGP as far as living transracial. He lived the reservation life, claimed to be NA on govt. Census while denying his actual half white/half black lineage to the point his grandchildren didn’t know.
ETA: I have no clue if he considered himself NA by virtue of the above.
I’m assuming his wife and the people on the reservation when he got there knew, though.
Then neither is anything else.
She’s wrong about trans women not being women, but she does have a point nonetheless. I think there are situations and contexts where it is reasonable to differentiate between people who were regarded and treated as female since birth within a patriarchal context, and people who identify as women (and/or as female) now but weren’t always regarded and treated as such.
Wrong on both counts.
Gender identity is how one sees one’s self AND how others see one (if the latter weren’t part of it, why would anyone give a shit whether they get misgendered? We care because we wish to be seen as the gender with which we identify — i.e., other people’s perceptions are involved and invoked in one’s experience of one’s gender). Race is identically a matter of how one see’s one’s self and how others see and categorize one.
I disagree. Your gender identity is your gender identity no matter how others see you or treat you. Your race is your race (as in the sociological category of race) because of how you’ve been seen and treated by society for your whole life, no matter how you see yourself. It doesn’t matter if I were to see myself as black - I’m not black. I’m white, no matter how I see myself.
You are of course entitled to define the terms your way and use them your way, but your having done so does not make you right, and we are of course debating this very thing. So it’s kind of like you’re saying “I am right in this debate because the position I am holding is right, hence I’m right”.
I agree, but that doesn’t change my point. Cis women have different and sometimes unique challenges. That doesn’t mean trans women aren’t women.
Agreed.
I guess it’s semantics. That’s my understanding of these concepts. Apparently yours is different.
I’m surprised by your view about gender identity, though. I’m a cis man. It doesn’t matter if a million people tell me I’m not a cis man - I still am. It’s shitty and obnoxious if they do that, but it has no bearing on my gender identity. I’m a cis man regardless of what others say about me.
Yes, it is. I’m on board with what you’re saying about gender. I’d say the same things about race, and apparently you would not. Mine is certainly not an established belief with regards to race, but that’s not particularly relevant. Presumably you would not say that in 1975, trans women were not women just because back then it was not widely understood that such was the case. So these matters aren’t subject to a popular vote. The fact that I’m expressing an opinion about race that’s not common doesn’t make it wrong. And there’s no reason not to extend the same kind of understanding about a person’s authority to define their Selves in terms of these social categories called “race” that we have extended and recognized with regards to gender.
Neither race nor gender exist except as social constructs.