To say that a hypothetical “transracial” identity is a different category of identity to gender identity is not to reject it. I don’t reject the fact that someone identifies as (say) a Democrat or a Buddhist, but I don’t treat these things as in the same category of identity as gender identity.
What can be toxic is a failure to distinguish the category difference. To suggest, for example, that sexual orientation is in the same category of identity as political affiliation - a choice.
Personally, I think a pretty important component of un-slipperying the slope is the recognition that these different hypothetical “identifications” are massively disparate in their physical absurdity.
When you think about it, it is absolutely bizarre (not to mention pretty sexist) that anybody should seriously argue that the differences between a man and a woman are in any way realistically comparable to the differences between a human and a helicopter, or even between a human and a cat.
Fundamentally, AFAICT transgender identity exists because male and female human beings are damn near identical, in biological terms. Both XY and XX (and other) fetuses have phenotypically female genitalia during their first couple months in utero. Hormone levels and the ability to process them can determine primary and secondary sex characteristics irrespective of whether the individual has a Y chromosome or not.
Even well after puberty, a normal XY male individual taking female hormones, for example, will develop breasts and a more typically female distribution of fat and muscle mass, along with softer skin and loss of facial and body hair. There are no hormones humans can take that will allow them to get anywhere near that close to realistically resembling a cat, much less a helicopter.
My dismissive response to stupid transphobic tropes like “I identify as a helicopter” is generally something like “Did you have rotors when you were in the womb? Because you had a vagina then” (this is addressed to male transphobes, natch). Usually their disbelief and horror at the notion that they themselves ever had sexually ambiguous genitalia distracts them from the helicopter bullshit.
I apologize if I misunderstood, but my impression of the thread so far is that it’s been about why transgender is a real and valid thing that we should accept and support, but transracial is not. It’s a lie or a delusion that we should reject. Starting with the premise in the OP: “I am trying to think through why it is generally accepted that people can be transgender, but people cannot be transracial.”
That is, we’re not talking about whether transgender and transracial are different categories of identity (which of course they are because gender and race are different things), but about why one of them is valid and one is not.
Your whole post is a good response to the helicopter nonsense. I singled out this line because it seems to also support the idea of transracialism. That is, people of different races are as alike (or more alike) as people of different genders, biologically.
Well, yes.
Personally I don’t have much conviction about whether we should accept or reject the notion of “transracialism”. It’s seems largely hypothetical - the debate derives from a single example of dubious behavior, and I’m not sure that people are working from a consistent definition of what it means.
But however we come down on accepting or rejecting the phenomenon of “transracialism” is entirely unrelated to our respect for the dignity of trans people. I don’t agree with your suggestion that they are different just because one’s about race and one’s about gender. The two things are not analogous, they are different in a much deeper sense. They are in different conceptual categories.
Conceptually there really is no difference.
This seems like bunkum to me. If all my fellow [insert race here] suddenly decided that I was no longer accepted as [race], that would have zero impact on whether I am that race.
Race, as far as it has any meaning at all, is a function of a whole host of physical and cultural attributes, including skin colour, appearance of your hair, facial bone structure, communication styles, food tolerances, etc.
Racial groupings are certainly a kind of fuzzy logic rather than discrete groupings, but Lebron James would never be considered anything but ‘black’ regardless of how many other black people say he’s not.
Would it be immoral to be gay if it was a choice rather than being inborn?
If not, then why does it matter?
Seeing as people can feel multiple ways about their bodies then I’d have to say “yes”. And seeing as those feelings are located in the brain then I see no obvious reason to draw a hard difference between race and gender.
If there were no discernable mis-match in brain makeup/function for someone claiming a transgender identity would you say they were not really transgender?
Any supposed biological differences between people are just a red herring when it comes to dictating what clothes one is allowed to wear, what jobs one can take, whom one can legally marry, what behaviours are acceptable, etc., which are corollaries of gender roles.
I recall reading about a family who moved from Brazil to the USA. Some time after moving, they were surprised to discover that their new neighbours saw them as black, whereas in Brazil they had always seen themselves, and been regarded by others, as white. (This was due to the different social rules defining race in the two countries.) So who gets to decide what race they are? Them, or the people around them? What box should they tick on forms? If one of them wanted to change their appearance so other people saw them the way they saw themself, would that be some kind of faking?
It would not be immoral to be gay even if it was a choice, since it doesn’t harm anyone.
There is also considerable evidence of a genetic basis for political affiliation, so I don’t think this is as much of a distinction as @Riemann claims.
I agree there are strong parallels. That’s why I said the lack of sincere transracial people is why it is not accepted as a concept. And even more so the people identifying as attack helicopters, because they are very obviously not sincere.
However, this is not true of otherkin; many sincerely believe they have some kind of essense or soul of the animal they identify with. This is pretty similar to the belief of some trans people, and indeed there is considerable overlap between the two. I’m sure no one thinks a human could have a cat brain, but all living things share a considerable amount of DNA, so it’s not unreasonable to think certain areas could develop differently to normal and cause these feelings. At any rate, I think otherkin identities should be respected because they are genuine, not people faking.
That’s my point. The bar for whether someone’s identity should be recognized and accepted isn’t “Is there scientific evidence of a genetic predisposition towards it”, it’s “does acknowledging it hurt anyone”. Whether someone was “born this way” isn’t relevant, which is why I lean toward accepting someone whose racial identity doesn’t match their family tree.
Do you have an internal feeling that you are the race you actually are? I don’t have any such internal feeling of race, of any kind, at least not in anything like the way that I internally sense myself as male. When I fill in a form, I check ‘male’ because I feel that’s what I am, it; on the race/ethnicity question, I have to think about what category I fit into, based on how it is defined.
Doesn’t this really illustrate that race is really a social construct? I don’t think you’ll find a situation where someone considers themself as female and then is shocked to find that they may be considered male when they move to another country.
Irish and Italian people were not considered white in the USA back at the turn of the last century – when that changed, were all those Italian and Irish people suddenly transracial? Lots of people still don’t consider Jewish people to be white. If a Jewish person moves from NYC (where they are likely accepted as white) to some evangelical enclave (where they may not be), are they suddenly transracial?
(Note: I understand that some places still require people to be identified as the sex that’s on their birth certificate, so may be classified as male in some areas even though they self-identify as female, and vice versa, due to remaining anti-trans prejudice)
I’m not sure that transracial people are as rare as you think. Sure there are very few high profile cases, but there are lots of people silently living as a race that they weren’t “born” into. It’s possible that all those people are just faking. They don’t really think of themselves as another race, or feel they belong, but I am doubtful.
There could easily be many people who might be sincere in these kinds of beliefs, but they were never exposed to the sort of philosophical framework in which they could ponder them. Just as a child born with a penis, say, 40 years ago, who might have once said “I think I’m a girl” would have gotten the response “That’s ridiculous. Of course you’re a boy. Look, you have a penis” and then grown up with a concept of gender that’s as rigid and externally defined as our concept of race appears to be.
Strong endorsement of this. All the science about how the brain chemistry supports transgender is interesting as an explanation of why and how this human variation exists, and plausibly relevant to helping individuals understand more about themselves, but the presence or absence of scientific knowledge should not be the basis of our morality.
Isn’t this an affirmative answer to your first question? Except for the “shocked” part, but the only reason the shock is not there is that transgender isn’t yet widely accepted enough that someone trans in any country would grow up and be unaware of some people who don’t accept them. I imagine it won’t be that long before someone trans could grow up in a sufficiently accepting community that they’d actually be shocked to travel somewhere where their gender wasn’t recognized.
I think it illustrates how much of a social construct race is – you can think of yourself as black or white depending on where you grow up – in Brazil, you’ll think of yourself as white, but had you grown up with the same skin color in Detroit, you’ll think of yourself as black. If you’re Irish American born in 1870, you’ll think of yourself as non-white, but not if you’re the same born in 1970.
However, if you’re a transman, you’ll think of yourself as a man whether you’re born and raised in Brazil or Detroit.
In some perfect theoretical world, it should not matter whether sexual orientation is a choice. In the homophobic world we actually live in, it makes an immense difference whether (say) a parent understands that their child’s sexual orientation is part of their nature and not a choice.
For a trans person, especially for a trans woman who asserts the identity of the female gender that suffers oppression from the male, it obviously makes an immense difference that people understand that this female identity is not some whimsical choice or a delusion. TERFs do claim that accepting trans women as real women does harm to them.
And no, this kind of vague attempt to imply that all aspects of identity are on a similar footing is nonsense. Everything in our nature is some combination of genetics and environment. It would be challenging to find any personal trait for which there is not some degree of genetic predisposition.
How we vote can certainly become more than a rational choice based on the merits of the ideas, it can become tribal - and when it does, that tendency should be challenged and resisted. It’s a bad thing when our politics ceases to be about ideas, and becomes our identity. That kind of tribal identification that ignores the merits of the ideas should not be accepted or tolerated in a civilized society.
And that’s why we need to resist the kind of obfuscation that you are attempting here. We need to be very clear on distinguishing between different conceptual categories of identity.
I think that’s only the case if you grow up somewhere where you’ve heard of the concept of transgender. David Reimer didn’t realise or insist he was a boy as a child, he just knew he really really didn’t fit in as a girl. And someone who might become a transwoman if born in the US may instead identify as a hijra if born in India. So there’s still a social element to it.
I agree. Further since all people are more or less identical racially, a person may choose to be whatever race they might like. Americans have long had an understanding that one may be whatever they wish to be.
Sure some choices seem unwise. Some puzzle the rest of us. There are awkward moments. But we really ought to mind our own business and let others get on with their own lives.
You’re making my case for me. David Reimer (whoever that is) knew he wasn’t a girl. Maybe he didn’t have a name for transman or realize that’s what he was, but he knew something was different. There’s nothing equivalent to that when it comes to race.