Transgender - transracial. What is the essential difference?

In My Humble Opinion
421

Given the interplay between sexual orientation, biological sex, and gender identity, I’m not sure that this is a stable system. It would require a hard-wired psychological characteristic to be dependent upon a culturally-mediated behavior. Or would it?

All the discourse over the past few years have taught me something: That I don’t know what gender is, and over time, this lacunae has only widened.

I think I know what biological sex is. I think I know what sexual orientation is. I have no idea what gender is, and the more I hear about it, the less I understand what the significance and importance of gender is.

422

I don’t see how it would. Could you explain further?

I agree that the whole notion of gender is still very unclear, and I would say there’s a lot of mystery in the notion of sexual orientation as well. Even biological sex is on more of a non-bimodal spectrum than we generally perceive.

But it seems pretty clear that whatever gender and sexual orientation are, they’re not merely culturally mediated behaviors like who you hold hands with and what color and cut of garments you wear.

423

Since the beginning of this discussion, I have been talking about, among other things, psychological characteristics. It was you who insisted on lumping everything together as ‘gender expression’, and you made no distinction then between culturally mediated behaviour and psychological characteristics. This is exactly why I was reluctant to use your preferred terminology, because it does not make any such distinctions.

As I understood your earlier posts, you were saying that it’s impossible even in theory to determine whether some characteristic is culturally mediated or not, or to show that it has an innate component.

Now that you have acknowledged that this is possible in the case of sexual orientation, perhaps you could tell me what studies or criteria convinced you it is innate, so that we might apply the same test to other characteristics that commonly differ between the sexes?

424

Well, no: again, you seem to be confusing my posts with Riemann’s, and I don’t think you’re describing Riemann’s posts accurately either.

You evidently didn’t understand my earlier posts. What I’ve been saying all along is that culturally mediated behaviors can be very difficult when it comes to attributing their causes to biological versus social factors. Not necessarily “impossible in theory”, but often impossible in practice in the current state of social science research.

Of course, as I’ve repeatedly noted, some culturally mediated behaviors can be confidently identified as not crucially dependent on biological factors, because they don’t appear consistently across different human social groups that are biologically similar but culturally different. However, that doesn’t help us much with attributing the causality of other culturally mediated behaviors.

Sexual orientation and gender identity, as I’ve also repeatedly pointed out, are not just “culturally mediated behaviors”. They’re consciously identified aspects of the self. For each of them there’s some scientific evidence that they’re connected to brain characteristics and fetal development, but that’s not the primary reason that they’re considered more than “behaviors”. They involve how people innately feel about themselves, which is not the same thing as what people do in their social behavior (such as whether one does or doesn’t wear pink, and so on).

DemonTree, at this point you seem to be just picking out random phrases I’ve used (or that you’ve seen in somebody else’s posts and misremembered as mine) and putting them together in your own word salad that doesn’t have any meaningful relation to the points I was actually making, and then demanding that I defend the positions you made up. I’m not sure there’s much point to continuing that sort of discussion further.

425

Instead of rehashing all our old posts, please could you answer the question about what evidence convinced you that sexual orientation is innate?

(I hope that is clear enough for you, and not word salad. :roll_eyes:)

426

Speaking for myself, I have looked at it both ways at different moments — on the one hand, it felt to me like I was opting to follow the girls, not the boys, with the same kind of feelings of partisanship with which I gravitate to social libertarians and not social conservatives. It seemed like most people became who they were expected (and pressured) to be. The social pressures themselves were real and I was vividly aware of them, since I was running afoul of them (by affirmative political choice, mind you): I brought down upon myself lots of hostility and mistreatment for being this way, and I got to be Exhibit A to everyone else for why you shouldn’t ought to be acting in ways that left you open to accusations that you were like one of the girls. 'Cuz if you do, the shit that you see happening to AHunter3 is gonna happen to you too.

So yeah, I tend to see it as social (and political), and I tend to have a bit of attitude to the sex-expectation conformists (“cowards, puppets”) although I’ve outgrown a good portion of that. I hope I have, anyway.

So, the flip side… what made me take this path and other kids not? Isn’t it likely that there’s something innate about my personality and inclinations that made me a particularly bad fit for the boy-expectations, and hence to feel pinched by them and wrongly seen by people who had those expectations of me? And if it’s innate, hey, either I’m inherently different from the other boys or else all that boy-expectation stuff is a bad fit for everybody and they’re all like me inside, in which case why am I inclined to push back and be a rebel against it and the others are not?

So at a minimum, the possibility that I have a genetic or otherwise-biological built-in difference has to be acknowledged. It could definitely be.

I really don’t like enshrining it as The Truth, though, because I don’t know it to be true and because of the political context, where there’s an established notion that it’s only okay to be different from the normative mainstream if it’s built-in, meaning you can’t help it. As if we’d be to blame for bringing it on ourselves by our choices and our self-selected behaviors, and that absolves society of having done bad stuff to us. No it fucking doesn’t. This is an important point, okay? No it fucking doesn’t. If my difference, whether self-selected or built-in genetic, isn’t hurting anyone, isn’t hurting society, then no, it isn’t okay for society to shun and be all hostile just because I’m not a goddam carbon copy clone-puppet of the rest of you. Do you get that? You on board with that? Good, then can we please discard the implicit political notion that we should believe such diffs are built-in?

Radical feminists, whose focus has been 90% on the question of female compliance vs. revolt against the girl-expectations, and only marginally on the boy-stuff, have been even more inclined to see all female people as not fitting the expectations, to see the expectations as ideological and imposed as part of patriarchal oppression.

I think that useful social-political intellectual conversation, as well as scientific research on the topic, still benefits from considering the “innate versus socialized” matter to be an unresolved question and to continue to explore what it could and might mean for us either way.

427

Ultimately I think your reasoning is the correct one. People should be allowed to do what they like if it’s not hurting anyone else or hurting society (how much latitude they should have to hurt themselves is a bit more arguable). Whether someone is ‘born this way’ is an empirical question, not a moral one.

To take two opposing examples: there’s good evidence that sexual attraction to children is inborn, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to act on it. It does inform how therapists try to treat people who experience it. And on the other side, being a furry is probably strongly influenced by growing up watching animal cartoons, but it doesn’t harm anyone, so it’s not okay to be hostile and shun them.

Yet the ‘born this way’ argument is presumably an effective one, or it wouldn’t be pushed so strongly. Most people know about the evidence that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate because campaigners have brought it to public attention, and we have become comfortable with the idea, whereas research on other characteristics is far less well known and understood. I strongly suspect this is the real reason for @Kimstu’s contradictory beliefs.

428

@Kimstu, since you haven’t answered this straightforward question, I’m going to conclude you are ignorant of the scientific evidence and prefer to remain so.

429

Well, this thread has already amply demonstrated that I can’t prevent you from drawing unjustified conclusions, even about arguments that have been explained to you multiple times. I said in post #424 that I don’t see much point in pursuing a discussion based on that sort of obstinate misunderstanding, and nothing I’ve seen in the thread since then suggests otherwise.

430

:roll_eyes:

I perfectly understand your argument. The problem is that you are ignoring the evidence in order to make it. Will you be honest enough to tell me whether you have actually looked into these issues, or are you simply repeating the conventional wisdom as popularly reported in newspapers etc?

431

Here: " The American Psychological Association distinguishes between sexual orientation (an innate attraction) and sexual orientation identity (which may change at any point in a person’s life).[[47]]"

432

Please stick to criticising posts, not posters.

433

This post immediately follows one in which @Kimstu says that we don’t know exactly what’s innate. So it’s not only a bit combative, but totally inappropriate. Please stop engaging with @Kimstu in this thread.

434

Seems like this thread has jumped the shark, but I’ll respond to the OP.

“Race” and “Gender” are both social constructions based on biological phenomena. A crucial difference is that there are real significant biological differences between men and women, but not between different “races”. Also, the existence of people who don’t fit neatly into one of the major categories is much more widely accepted in the case of race than of sex.

I’ve never heard “transracial” used analogously to “transgender”, to refer to a person who was raised as and/or appears phenotypically as a member of one racial group, but who decided at some point to identify as a member of another group. I’ve heard it used sometimes as an adjective describing a group of people of various races, but that’s not common usage.

So one obvious essential difference is that there isn’t a group of people in the real world identifying as “transracial”. There are people who change their racial identification over the course of their life, but AFAICT they generally explain this in terms of their own life experience; i.e. in exclusively psychological and sociological terms. They don’t claim that they are members of some distinct group of people who have a biological imperative to change their race, and that such people exist in all cultural contexts.

An essential similarity, IMO, is that, in almost all contexts, you should just treat people as being what they say they are, because it’s the polite thing to do and who really cares, anyway? In a few very specific contexts (for example, people who appear “white” claiming to be entitled to benefits under affirmative action programs), things get trickier.

435

Okay, but: doesn’t that just push it back a step? You can honestly say, right now, that you’ve never heard it used in that analogous way; and you can note, at present, that you’re not aware of a group of people in the real world who identify as that. I guess those are relevant points today; but do you figure they’d stop being relevant if, say, five people, maybe ten, show up tomorrow and tell you and me that (a) they’re using that word that way, and (b) they do so identify?

436

OK, now I’ve read these cites. So the number of people making claims like these is very, very small, not zero. I don’t think that changes my opinion.

In general, I think that the Boston Reader article was excellent, but I paused at one sentence in particular:

We leave space for unique circumstances in which someone who has deeply invested in a Black community and been forthcoming about their racial history is nevertheless accepted within that community as Black.

I don’t have personal experience of this, but does this ever actually come up? If a white man marries a black woman, moves to a black neighborhood, raises black-identified children, consumes primarily black-produced cultural products, and works, studies and worships in black-majority settings…it would be IMO ridiculous to say that this guy isn’t a “member of the black community”. But would a person in this position, or his black friends and family, demand that they be recognized as actually being black? Would they feel that this was necessary to validate his cultural identity? As far as I can tell, that isn’t a thing that commonly happens.

437

This is an excellent point; the cultural autonomy of the group needs to be respected, not just the “right” of the individual to self-identify.

In the case of some groups, like Jews and Native American tribes, there are clear rules about who is in and out of the group, which have been accepted by the vast majority of the group for a very long time, and claiming to be “in” when the group doesn’t recognize you as such could reasonably be viewed as unacceptable cultural appropriation.

But in the case of broader racial groups like “white” and “black”, especially when the definitions of those groups have changed radically in the fairly recent past, I don’t think that’s as much of an issue.

438

No, that demonstrates that in racist societies, the dominant race makes the decision. If the majority of black people 100 years ago had collectively decided that some subset of black people weren’t “really” black, white society would have gone right on treating that subset just like all the other black people.

439

I doubt they’re thinking about white people marrying in. More likely, they’re talking about people who have always legitimately believed that they were Black, but find out as adults that their parentage isn’t what they thought it was. BLM activist Shaun King appears to be an example of this, and is likely what inspired that exception. King’s mom is white, and was told growing up that his father was a particular, light-skinned Black man. Turns out, it’s likely that his father was a different person entirely, and was white.

440

I was thinking about the reggae singer Snow. I don’t know too much about his personal life, but according to his lyrics he grew up in a serious ghetto and all he knew were “pure black people.” He speaks Jamaican patois, and people would always ask where he was from, or assume he was Jamaican. But notably, he seems comfortable enough with his own identity and never claims to be Black, or White for that matter, nor any kind of Jamaican.