I guess that explains why you can’t answer then. Never mind.
Exactly. Any legitimate “feeling” of blackness, or whatever, relates to one’s own personal experience of being treated by others as black (or otherwise). I feel “white” because I’ve always been treated as white. If someone feels “black” without this personal experience, history, heritage, upbringing, etc., then they’re either delusional or making it up.
Then you may not have a strong gender identity. If so, that’s absolutely fine, and nothing wrong with it.
But some of us do have a strong feeling of gender identity. I certainly do – I feel very much, and very strongly, a man.
“pretend”? Who said anything about pretending? Were we not just accepting that some people could genuinely have such feelings? Are transgender people merely pretending? if not, wherein lies the difference?
Replace black and white with woman and man and you sound exactly like a transphobe.
The difference is in the difference between gender and race. They’re not the same things. They have very different histories and roles in society. Apples and helicopters. Why on Earth would they be treated the same?
Yes, when you change the words in something, you change the meaning entirely. Replace various words with purple, bicycle, monkey, and helicopter, and you’d get a brand new paragraph.
Welcome to the wonderful world of human language!
I’m only slightly joking, but “I don’t know what being White feels like” is possibly the Whitest thing a person could say…
I definitely feel like a man, just like I feel my sexual identity.
Here are just a few things being white feels like:
-No significant feelings of fear or nervousness if law enforcement approaches.
-Generally being trusted to be acting in good faith by authority figures and institutions.
-Being assumed by others to know what you’re doing, and “belong” in the place you are, in most situations.
Trans women, by living as women, forego many “male privileges”. Where they don’t necessarily give them up, such as in athletics, there is considerable debate about how to include them under the umbrella term “women” without harming opportunities for cis women.
Trans blacks, formerly white people living as black, do not give up their white privileges. They do not change their upbringing, their ancestral history, other people’s perception of them. Their self identification as black does not involve any baggage, they have the privilege of choosing this change and taking only the positives with them.
Trans women and trans men do not have the same luxury. I think this is part of the reason transrace (particularly transblack) is viewed more suspiciously than transgender.
These are not feelings white people have, they’re feelings about white people.
Okay, add “having the feeling of…” to the beginning, then.
Seeing as you are a white male hetrosexual, I don’t see why anyone should give any credence to your opinion on this subject.
Yes, this is a good way to put it. Thanks.
Yes, the real people I know don’t match the towering effigy of dessicated culms you’ve tried to construct. A brusque and hollow “Never mind” isn’t going to paper over that gap, though.
So my youngest has two friends who are trans women. And I’m not arguing that they are anything but women - that is how they choose to identify and I respect that. But both were raised with male privilege. And neither has not taken any steps to present as female - if you look at either of them you see a guy (one wears a beard). Except to a few friends, they both use their male name and dress as men - except in private. Their self identification as a woman does not involve any baggage, it does not involve any of the history of being a woman (who could not have a credit card in my own lifetime, who face pay inequity, and have a hard time getting taken seriously in many professions). It involves only choosing this change and taking the positives.
It’d be hard to judge from afar. Maybe they’re just pretending for some reason. Maybe they’re in the process of transitioning. Maybe they’re trans and comfortable in the way they present, and only plan to disclose their gender identity to those close to them (i.e. they don’t plan for the rest of the world to see or treat them as women). Maybe there’s some other explanation. Even if they’re faking it for some reason, as long as they’re not using any resources or anything else that other women could use, there wouldn’t be any broad negative effect. If they are planning on using it to get into bathrooms or locker rooms or whatever, hopefully they will be exposed as frauds. But who knows from several degrees separation?
That sounds to me like being mostly closeted instead of “out”. Of course there can be gender-nonconforming trans women, even bearded ones, but generally out transgender women publicly identify as women, whatever their choices about gender conformity.
Similarly, there are still quite a lot of closeted gay people who identify as gay in their private social circle but keep that on the down low and pass for heterosexual in their public lives.