One difference between transgender and transracial is that the desire to be transgender seems to be much, much stronger than to be transracial. Transgender seems like an overwhelming need for the person and they will go through extraordinary lengths to achieve their goal, while transracial seems more of a casual personal preference. Denying someone the ability to be transgender seems much more harmful to the person than denying them from the ability of being transracial. But as society becomes more tolerant of transgender, it seems like transracial should also be accepted, since from the perspective of society, it doesn’t seem all that different. If you have a coworker who identifies as a man and as an Asian, then it seems like society should be accepting of both regardless of any sort of biological or genetic markers the person may have.
Agree pretty closely with @filmore just above.
Not replying to that, but just throwing out a different idea …
Given enough time, global large scale transportation and cross-breeding, we may get back to the idea there’s only one “race”: the human race.
I don’t think we’re every going to cross-breed to the level where sex and gender differences disappear. IOW, that’s a more fundamentally biological reality. For sure we already have altered our social expectations of gender presentation a bunch compared to 50, 100, or 1000 years ago. So presentation is demonstrably ephemeral.
Despite Rippon’s work, it seems pretty self evident that although there may not be male and female brains, there are male and female minds. And most probably quite a variety of shades in between the traditional archetypes that lie near the two ends of the spectrum.
I’d liken it, and much of non-sex specific human nature as well, to the grain of wood. There are some behaviors that go with the grain of humans in general and some that go against the grain. Not that against-the-grain behaviors never happen, but they’re less common, more costly, etc. Within the set of all human behaviors there’s also a subset that are more aligned with the male grain or more with the female grain. The two grains are not orthogonal. But they are distinguishable. If they were not, we’d not see either cis or trans people. And any given person may or may not have a higly consistent grain, and it may or may not align with their XX/XY nor with their external genitalia, etc.
Another unrelated point:
This is really key. It’s unfortunate that Dolezal the individual fills that mental slot for so many people, and has been spoken about upthread so much.
She’s certainly an example of something, but she’s not IMO an example of what an honest legitimate transracial person would be like as to motivation or as to behavior.
So we all should be careful to not throw out the transracial baby along with the dirty Dolezal bathwater.
I’m just guessing here, but I’m figuring you’re White.
I do not believe that is the case, for several reasons. Biologically speaking, white Black, Asian and other racial categories are no more meaningful than French and Polish. Genetically speaking, both the French and Poles are more closely related to each and Polynesians then Sudanese people are to South Africans. The significant things that make someone Black or white are all socially imposed. Females and males on the other hand have significant biological differences.
If you took a black or mixed race infant and through cosmetic treatments made them visually indistinguishable from a white infant and then raised them had them raised by a white family that did not know the baby as anything other that white, I do not believe some inner Blackness would come through and make them reject their identity. When something similar was done to male child that suffered a genital injury as an infant, it did not go as well.
Almost all religions allow conversions. If you are from an Italian family and you like traditions, language, and culture signifies of the French or Norwegians, then I would agree with you. But that is strictly a cultural thing.
Race is about more than culture though. It is about supremacy, dominance, and exploitation. Until that is eliminated, it is just not the same.
Like it or not, due to no fault or choice of her own, Rachel Dolezal is part of the self defined, centuries old oppressor group. She can embrace black culture all she wants and different blacks groups can accept her into that culture as much or as little as they want. But at the end of the day she has the social privilege and advantages of being white. She was not a black child experiencing the systemic racism in our institutions, and she can change back when ever she wants. She can’t claim the oppression of others for herself. It is no different then the son of billionaire presenting himself as poor orphan. Some people need to be the underdog and feel that they have overcome, even it life was handed to them. Or they need to win the persecution Olympics, even if they have to cheat.
What Strassia said. There are certainly many people who have been “adopted” into a different culture and identified with that culture. But that’s not the same thing as pretending that your racial heritage and experience is different from what it actually is.
There are some cultural groups in which you might say there’s a sort of “cis/trans” distinction, such as so-called “cradle Episcopalians” distinguished from people who have come to the Episcopal Church from other denominations as adults. Or so-called “birthright Quakers” similarly defined.
But race at present is not a category that is generally accepted as having “cis” and “trans” identification options. White people in particular have historically invested so much energy into policing imposed criteria for racial category membership that it is never going to go well when a white person defends deceptive claims about a different racial identification by invoking the concept “transracial”.
Exactly. A matter of self-identification, rather than a matter of biology.
So why is it different if Laverne Cox identifies as female and is a trans person, versus if say… Barack Obama decided to identify as white? (no shade intended on either; I’m just picking a prominent trans person and a prominent biracial person to make the comparison). Or for that matter, if someone like Shaka Smart was to decide to identify as white?
It sure seems to me that saying that either of them HAS to be black is redolent of the “One Drop Rule”, which IMO is racist garbage best left in the past.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans need biological males and biological females. How that effects behavior and social interactions aside, male and female sexes are real, provable categories that exist outside of social constructs. Gender as the behavioral and social expressions signify or caused by those differences is a wide open field of study and understanding, but it is based on real biological category. Gender expression exists in all known societies across time.
Race has no biological basis other than superficial visual markers that do not line up well with genetic diversity (An indigenous black Australian is more closely related to my white self and a Hmong from SE Asia than black African, yet I am sure they are not considered any more white).
Humans have tribal instincts. We want a group to identify with. If we find that the group that we belong to by definition is responsible for some very bad things, we either double down, deny, try to reform, or leave the group.
The United States was founded and largely still remains a society where race is a basic defining aspect of your place in society. And one self-defined race has treated all the humans they designated a different race very poorly for several hundred years. It would be great to just say, I am not white, I disavow all that and be free and clear. But I can’t because it is still happening and the long term effects are still being felt. And I can show unity and support. But if I can’t claim the black community’s suffering and legacy as my own, no matter how much less guilt I might have.
I would still have the benefits of whiteness in my past and the way society has treated my up to the point I wanted to “transition”. And I could easily gain those advantages back any time I wanted. A black person does not have that option.
I don’t think Barack Obama “deciding to identify as white” would be considered equally disrespectful as, say, Rachel Dolezal pretending to be black. Obama does have one white and one black parent, after all.
But obviously, Obama’s experience and heritage are significantly different from those of most people who identify as white. Our current understanding of race has no way to mark that distinction, in the way that we can distinguish between “cis” and “trans” when it comes to gender.
And this is also true for transgender people. A boy-presenting child will be treated as a male and may be encouraged in math and science, aggressive sports, to go into high-paying fields, etc. This person may display negative traits commonly associated as male oppressive, such as sexual aggression, domineering conversation, etc. If this person transitions to a woman later in life, they will have had all the benefits of being male up until that point and can go back to being male at any time. It doesn’t sound all that different from the concept of a white person transitioning to black. But since society is accepting of transgender, then it seems like society should also be accepting of transracial. The negative issues you describe would be the same for transgender or transracial. If those issues are okay for transgender, then it seems like they should be okay for transracial.
I honestly think the main reason is that there are lots of transgender people, but very few people sincerely claiming to be transracial. Most of the time when we hear about someone living as a different race they were doing it for some practical advantage, not a deep-seated feeling.
Well, this is where science comes in. We as a society accept transgender (to some extent) because there is strong evidence that perceived gender identification is a particular neurobiological phenomenon, and that transgender identification is a natural variant of that.
AFAICT there is no evidence that membership in other human-defined categories, such as race, religion, native language, social class, etc., is a similarly innate process in the brain. So while we acknowledge that individual experiences in those categories are very varied, we as a society don’t declare that the individual perception of identity in those categories takes precedence over externally imposed criteria. We don’t acknowledge the label of, say, “native French speaker” just on the basis of individual self-perception.
It’s one thing to say that we have a very poor understanding of the way brains work, and the evidence is not overwhelming. That’s true of pretty much all of neuroscience. But it’s Rippon that seems to be the one make the bold and unjustified claim here - she equally has no compelling evidence to support her assertion that there are no differences between male and female brains.
And she has a burden of proof that’s obvious to any biologist to demonstrate that there are no differences. This is not a sensible null hypothesis, since innate behavioral differences between males and females are ubiquitous among non-human animals.
The existence of trans people is consistent with significant sexual dimporphism in human mental state. She acknowledges this contradiction without actually addressing it or offering any alternative hypothesis about why trans people exist. She speaks as though her hypothesis is a problem for trans people, when in fact trans people are a problem for her hypothesis! The very existence of trans and non-binary people is compelling evidence that gender identity is not a purely social construct, since as we’ve mentioned several times in this thread, there has historically been immense social pressure to conform to a cis-binary social expectation. The social construct has historically always been cis binary, and failure to conform to this constuct has usually resulted in persecution and misery.
Finally, this is obviously a straw man:
Nobody is claiming otherwise. Human nature is obviously extremely diverse, gender identity is a spectrum. But it’s not a completely amorphous spectrum. It’s bimodal, and when we postulate dimporphism we talking about characteristics that are associated to some degree with a male/female identity. It’s a ridiculous straw man to suggest that the dimporphism hypothesis means that every male has some identical checklist of features that are always present.
Does that mean you believe there are categorical differences between male and female brains?
Yup. Same for, e.g., same-sex sexual orientation. Gay, transgender, nonbinary, etc. people as a group are not just making up their self-perceptions for shits ‘n’ giggles. These are realities that they’re acknowledging, often at huge personal cost.
The undoubted existence of significant numbers of physically intersex individuals also lends credence to the reality of transgender identity. If anatomical sex exists on a spectrum that’s not perfectly bimodal, then it makes sense that perceived gender identity would too…
I can’t tell what you mean by “categorical differences” in this context. Individuals assigned male on average have different degrees of some physical characteristics, both in external anatomy and in brain structure, than individuals assigned female. And there’s evidence that the same holds true on average for individuals identifying as male compared to ones identifying as female, irrespective of assigned gender.
But that doesn’t mean that the brain of every assigned or identified male individual will have a different degree of some particular characteristic than the brain of every assigned or identified female individual.
Does that mean that I “believe there are categorical differences between male and female brains”, according to your interpretation of that concept?
By categorical differences I mean something where to a first approximation you can say all (typically developing) men are A and all (typically developing) women are B. As opposed to a trait where there are statistical differences only. For example height differs statistically between men and women; men are taller on average but there is a considerable overlap. Whereas penis/clitoris length is a categorical difference, since in normal development there is no overlap between male and female values.
Which were you meaning?
I don’t think these two cases are as distinct as you suppose, especially since they seem to be dependent on the very problematic qualifiers “typically developing” and “in normal development”.
There are in fact some clitorises on genetically XX individuals that are longer than some micropenises on genetically XY individuals. Fine, if we declare such situations to fall outside the criteria of “normal development”, then we can call penis/clitoris length a “categorical difference” between male and female humans.
ISTM that all that means is that your definition of “categorical difference” is somewhat circular.
I haven’t read the entire thread, but I wanted to share a personal anecdote.
My family has talked about race and identity. We’re a mixed-race family; I have mostly European ancestry and my spouse is (presumed) entirely Korean. The kids are old enough that these things come up among their peers. They wanted to know if they should call themselves White or Asian. We told them it’s their choice and they can change their choice whenever they want to. They are a part of both races and cultures, and they can push back against anyone trying to exclude them from either.
In contrast, I have some Native American ancestry (1/32, plus more distant on other lines), but I cannot claim to be Native American. My ancestors have lived as White for the past 150 years and it is offensive to claim a heritage that we have no part of. It’s okay to bring it up when talking about genealogy or history, but not as something relevant today.
Race is a combination of ancestry and cultural heritage. It’s possible to immerse oneself in a new culture, enough to pass as a member. It’s not possible to change one’s ancestry.
Another anecdote: some Armenians in SoCal self-identify as White, but some do not. They could pass as White if they so chose; sometimes even if they don’t. Identity can be complicated.
And I think I may not have made it clear that what I meant in saying “there is strong evidence that perceived gender identification is a particular neurobiological phenomenon, and that transgender identification is a natural variant of that” is just that individuals seem to have innate gender identification, just as they seem to have innate sexual orientation, for some poorly understood physioneuropsychological etc. reason(s).
Sexual attraction to women strongly correlates with having biologically male sex, and so does male gender identification. (Likewise for their counterparts correlating with biologically female sex.) But in both cases, the correlation isn’t perfect, although we don’t know for sure why.
But this sort of biologically innate orientation/identification AFAICT doesn’t seem to exist for other categories such as race or religion.
I think without being circular we can say that the qualitative presence or absence of primary sexual characteristics are more strongly bimodal than gender identity. Brains are more complex than genitalia, so it’s not surprising that gender identity, while still bimodal, should exhibit greater diversity.
With regard to gender identity I suppose it might turn out that there is some single critical sexually dimorphic feature in brain development that usually turns out to determine whether someone feels that their identity “is” essentially male or female, notwithstanding a diverse variety of other attributes. Or there may be no such single feature, it may be some quantitative combination of multiple features that usually tip the balance toward a male or female gender identity (or occasionally do not, for a non-binary identity). I’m not sure what hinges on this. @DemonTree, why do you think this is important?