Yeah, I am definitely calling individual white women making up individual histories of black descent liars. But note that what I said in my caveat is that I’m not arguing that transracialism, as a concept, is intrinsically “a lie or a delusion”. We could have a concept of race that acknowledges “cis” and “trans” options.
Maybe. But I sure don’t think the societal acceptance movement should begin with white people demanding to be accepted as non-white people.
Many hard-fought individual rights were won because someone with privilege stood up and demanded their rights. Laws that discriminated by sex, for example, first got thrown out when a man was the defendant.
Dolezal is not by any means the first person to live as another race, merely the most recent high-profile example.
I mean, clearly when she said that a particular black man who was not her father was her father, that was a lie. But the question to me is: Was it a lie because everything she said was a lie, or was it a lie that was necessitated by the intolerance of society.
If a transwoman who lives in an intolerant society lies and claims not to have a penis, that doesn’t make her less of a woman, right?
I also note that you keep coming back to the fact that Dolezal was a white woman claiming to be black as problematic, but I have a hard time with that. By parallel reasoning, it seems to me that that sort of standard would mean that, say, transmen should have been accepted sooner than transwomen. Because a transwoman is someone who appears to be part of the dominant powergroup dictating to a less empowered group what it means to be a member, while a transman is not. But I don’t think you’d agree with the above on gender, so you shouldn’t on race either.
I believe that it works for the same circular reasoning I pointed out above. If Dolezal is a white woman claiming to be black, then she’s a liar and also a member of a privileged class dictating the rules to an underclass. But because you believe transwomen are the women, they’re not. But if Dolezal is a black woman who society used to treat as white, then those power dynamics are no longer relevant.
I’m very much in agreement with this. The other question I’d ask is what you want me to do about recognizing your identity? Transgender folks want to use their preferred bathroom, be called by their preferred name and pronoun, and be treated as regular people of their identified gender.
What do transracial people want? I’m happy to talk about it, as long as what they ask for isn’t directly harming someone*, it’s all good.
*Such as taking a scholarship or government program intended to help people whose ancestors were legally discriminated against. If your ancestors were not in these groups, I’d think this is a reasonable limit to acceptance of your identity.
Bit skeptical about your analogy here. Overturning legal discrimination may be guaranteed to cut both ways, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
No, but if she does have a penis, then that makes her somebody who is lying. I have lots of sympathy and slack-cutting for transgender women (or men) who are driven by the violent intolerance of their societies to lie about their transgender status, but that doesn’t turn a lie into a fact.
Again, you can only make this parallel work by arbitrarily deciding that the issue of innate identification doesn’t matter. I’m not persuaded by your decision.
Warning for Ashtura; Continuing on a subject not part of this thread and ignoring pretty specific mod instructions.
You are now instructed to stay out of this thread going forward. Any further ignoring of my instructions on this will result in a suspension for 1 day.
In a lot of the high profile cases, though, that’s not exactly true. Rachel Dolezal didn’t just claim a “black identity,” she fabricated a personal history, then used that fabricated history as evidence that she had personal experience that qualified her for a well paid position in the NAACP. The other cases where lying about your race is seen as a big deal is in academia, where, again, people have lied about personal experiences to bolster their professional credentials.
Outside of deliberate lying for professional advancement, what does a “transracial” identity looks like, and what sort of treatment are transracial people asking for? Among the things trans sexual people are asking for are things like the ability to dress as the gender they identity with, without being discriminated against. Is there are serious stigma against white people dressing “like a black person” (for whatever value a given individual assigns that phrase)? Trans sexual people would like access to medical procedures that would help them live as their identified gender. For a trans racial person, this is what? Skin bronzer and a home perm kit?
I’m trying to think of ways that a genuine trans racial identity might express itself, and all the hypotheticals I’m coming up with are things that are largely accepted in mainstream society. Is it an interest in Black history and culture? Black art? Black politics? Is a genetic white person presented with any serious barriers to, or punishment for, pursuing and expressing an interest in any of those things? If “trans racial” doesn’t mean any of those things, what does it mean? Short of being allowed to wear literal black face, what are these alleged trans racial people asking for that they don’t already have?
I wasn’t claiming the two things are identical, I was saying I think there is a social element to what gender someone identifies themselves as. The hijra are a better example.
And the Brazilian family was intended as an example of how someone could reasonably feel their internal racial identity did not match their external one, without there being any kind of innate element to it.
Assuming by ‘real women’ you just mean you have defined trans women as such, that is a circular argument. You could equally define ‘trans black’ people as real black people.
My claim is that this is largely because transracialism isn’t accepted by society. Many transgendered people, for example, have lied about their past in order to be accepted in societies that don’t accept them. If society accepted them, they wouldn’t have to lie.
I admit that I’m a little fuzzy on it too, but looking at the example of Dolezal and the parallel of transgender people is a good start. Dolezal didn’t want to express an interest in Black culture, she wanted to be a Black person. Just like transwomen don’t want to explore the concept of femininity, they want to be women.
No, this is not just semantics. I am claiming, as a matter of objective reality, that trans women are real women - based on our knowledge of the experience of trans people and supported by the scientific background laid out extensively by myself and others such as @Kimstu in various posts above. Do you dispute that?
It’s unclear to me exactly what “trans black” means, and I reserve judgment on whether the concept has merit. @Miller laid out well the questions I would share. But since race is almost entirely a social construct, in this case it really is just a subjective matter of semantics whether we would deem such a hypothetical person to be “really” black. That exactly why, whatever it means to be “transracial”, it does not have the same grounding in objective reality as gender identity, it is in a different conceptual category.
It sounds like many of the folks who consider transgender to be factual and real, but transracial to be spurious and fake, anchor their belief in transgender identity’s realness on the foundation of it being connected to biology — that trans people have a biological difference in the brain that makes them identical at the brain level to people of their gender and nonidentical to people of their physical morphology at birth.
That’s harmful and dangerous, in my opinion.
a) If science had not found any such brain-based corroboration, you would then regard transgender identities as invalid and fake? Seriously?
b) I hope you’re not about to hear this for the first time from me, but Transgender is an umbrella term that covers not only your classic “male to female” / “female to male” folks who transition (socially if not necessarily medically) and present as “the opposite sex” from what they were assigned at birth; it also covers nonbinary trans people who simply don’t regard their gender as being the same value as the sex they were assigned at birth. THUS: a person assigned female at birth who now identifies as agender and asexual. And a person assigned male at birth who now identifies as a genderfluid demiboy, varying between agender and on the masculine spectrum. And a person assigned female at birth who turns out to actually be medically intersex and identifies as a man, but wasn’t female to begin with. And a person who was assigned female who still considers her body to be female and does not present as male but who identifies as a butch masculine gal.
Are you going to regard all these people as having an illegitimate / fake identity because science has not as of yet verified any kind of built in corroborating difference in our brains?
c) What if the scientific community generally comes to accept that there are actually no meaningful differences between the male brain and the female brain, and that popularly touted findings to the contrary are not in serious regard by neurologists? Would that cause you to rescind your belief in the legitimacy of (binary) trans people’s identities?
I think you should also unpack your reasons for being skeptical and suspicious whenever someone suggests a given identity is social. Nearly everything is, you know. Even things anchored in physical origins are mediated and interpreted by our culture, which is where they are imbued with meaning and significance, and not in the physical in and of itself.
I suggest that maybe you folks are thinking “Well gee, if it’s ‘social’ that means you could just set it aside and ignore it, because if it only exists as a social belief it isn’t real!” or something of that ilk. Perhaps you think language is not real since the only place it exists is in shared beliefs about what certain vocalizations and/or scribblings on paper mean - ?? In other words, no, “social” does not mean “is not real”. It does mean “could perhaps be configured quite differently under different social circumstances”, but that’s not at all the same thing as “not real”. The laws of the land are strictly social – things we socially agree to be true, along with notions of authority and law enforcement – but I don’t suggest you ignore the traffic laws or disregard the role of the police officer who subsequently chased you with siren.
Social is quite real, and we have to deal with social or face grave consequences. It is the desire to articulate a different social understanding that causes trans activists to wish you to understand, and to use the correct pronouns for folks and so on. Just being ourselves doesn’t require your cooperation or your permission; being ourselves and being perceived and treated correctly / as we wish, on the other hand, does.
In the context of trans gendered people, though, “not being accepted” often meant being physically assaulted and arrested. And we can look back a hundred years ago, before “trans gender” had been identified as a concept, and see people who were probably transgendered, and who were assaulted and arrested for trying to express their gender identity.
What’s the equivalent trans racial experience? The closest analogue I can think of are black people who had passed as white being exposed, but that doesn’t seem like a useful comparison to what we’re discussing.
If all Dolezal wanted was to be perceived and treated as Black by society, it seems to me she could have largely done that. Judging by pictures of her, if I had passed Dolezal in the street, I think I would have identified her as black. If we were talking, and she told me she was Black, I certainly wouldn’t have questioned it. Admittedly, if she told me, “My parents are both white, but I identify as Black,” I’d probably think, “Well, this woman is clearly a nutcase,” and if trans racial identities are a real thing, I suppose that makes me prejudiced, but it seems a sort of prejudice that would be trivially easy for her to avoid. The only circumstance in which it would be relevant to dig into her racial identity deeply enough that it would “force” her into an unambiguous lie (such as claiming that her parents were also black) are situations such as the one she found herself in, where she was falsely claiming to a lived experience she didn’t actually have - which would be an issue regardless of the validity of trans racial identities.
I think perhaps you are projecting. Nobody who actually understands biology makes the correspondence that you are suggesting that innate = real / environmental = not real. It’s a naive but common misconception among people who don’t understand the science - into which category I would place many social scientists.
This is a complete mischaracterization. We have the data: that transgender people assert a gender identity that is usually firmly established in the first few years of life, that they usually assert this identity consistently and persistently despite strong social pressure to conform to conventional cis-binary norms.
In seeking a scientific hypothesis we are seeking to explain these facts. The facts are not “anchored” on the hypothesis, the facts would not change if the hypothesis were wrong, any more than gravity would stop if our theories of gravity were wrong. But a scientific account may provide insight into the facts.
You provide no credible alternative hypothesis for why transgender people exist in just repeating “it’s all socially constructed”, while ignoring the point that has been made repeatedly - that it makes no sense to suggest that gender identity is socially constructed when trans people’s identity defies intense pressure to conform to social norms.
Nothing in any of the scientific accounts above excludes non-binary identities. It has been stated several times in rebuttal that a hypothesis of sexual dimporphism does not mean some rigid checklist of features that are always present in every male or female. Dimporphism refers to general typical properties and correlations, not a rigid binary. The fact that identity is naturally a diverse spectrum, bimodal but including non-binary identities, has been stated several times.
Perhaps you should actually read the thread rather than patronizing everyone.
I think that’s a gross oversimplification both of the science on this subject, AIUI, and the positions held by most supporters of trans rights, as Riemann has explained.
Again, with regard to this perhaps you should read the thread. A relevant example here would be otherkin, which I brough up earlier - some of whom claim (in some sense) to actually be non-human animals.
And no, I do not think it is scientifically credible that a human really does have a cat brain, at least not in remotely the same way that a trans woman really can as a scientific matter have a brain that develops more similar to a typical cis female brain than a typical cis male brain.
As an ethical matter, that doesn’t mean that I would treat otherkin as “fake” or “invalid”. I would absolutely respect their right and dignity to identify and act any way they choose. But their claim to “be” a cat simply does not have the same grounding in objective reality as the fact that a trans woman is a real woman.
I was born male. I’d place the timeframe as between first grade (when I don’t recall any awareness of it) and second grade (when it was) as when I became cognizant of gender expectations and feeling strongly at odds with them. Specifically that who I was was more akin to being one of the girls and I was proud of that.
Now let’s look at your assertion: that there was all this social pressure on me to be a normal boy. Hence that gee, there had to be something innate in my biological makeup to make me react that way or else I would have turned out like the other boys did.
I think it’s a lot more complicated than that though. (So, I suspect, do you; we all oversimplify to avoid doing the Wall-o-Text thing, and I should do so more than I do, but I still overgeneralize and oversimplify… so I’ll apologize for that as per above comments). Anyway, even given the existence of social pressures in a certain direction, there are often compensatory rewards for embracing a contrary identity. In my case, I saw around me a world in which girls were considered to be more mature than boys at that age. And I felt like I could keep up and compete with them. And I found the boys to be an embarrassment, and didn’t want to be thought of as like them.
Does that mean I didn’t have built-in differences at the neuro level? No, I might have those. But I don’t know that I do and I don’t regard them as a necessary hypothesis, just a possibility.
Switching to the race thing for a sec, let’s posit that both stereotypes and cultural norms exist and both are social not biological diffs, but real diffs nonetheless as also above-described. A person may find that they fit the notions and mesh well with the cultural norms of a different racial group than the one that their complexion and related physical features woudl classify them as. In some idealized world there might not exist notions of such a difference (or of gender differences), but we’re not in that world, and an individual may recognize (or at least feel) that they’d be treated and regarded closer to who and how they actually are if perceived as a member of one of those other groups than when regarded as the group to which they’ve been conventionally assigned. I think it works for race for the same valid reasons that it works for gender.
(Apologies to Kimstu for my oversimplifying generalizations as well, btw.)
Of course I respect your description of your own experience, and I would obviously hope that that greater freedom to express a diversity of potential identities becomes the norm in our society. I also absolutely endorse your reminder that emerging identity is always a complicated interplay of innate characteristics and environment. As I noted in an earlier post, the fact that we’re talking about something as part of somebody’s “nature” here is not the nature/nurture distinction - it does not imply that it’s entirely (or at all) genetic; more that it settled early in life from some combination of genetic and environmental factors, but not principally social.
But the fact remains that, historically, trans people have been horribly persecuted. I just don’t find it convincing that “compensatory rewards for embracing a contrary identity” can adequately explain why people would persist in asserting a trans identity in the fact of such persecution.
Yes, I do. You’ve established that it’s a reasonable hypothesis, but you haven’t offered any proof. And the data I have seen and my own and other’s experiences make me doubt it.
I’m also far from convinced that it is relevant to trans acceptance in the context of this thread. Imagine if future scientific studies showed the majority of trans people have sexually dimorphic brain structures typical of their birth sex, not the sex they identify as. I don’t think society would suddenly stop accepting them. Would it change your opinion?
To be clear: you dispute that trans women are real women?
That’s not clear at all; I don’t know what you are asking here. I don’t believe trans people are crazy or lying, but I don’t think that all or most transwomen have female brains - supposing we can define such a thing - if that is what you meant. This is a question that at least in theory can be answered scientifically, but I think it would probably be off topic for this thread.
Relevant to the thread is whether the belief that trans people have a ‘man’s brain in a woman’s body’ or vice versa, is an important factor in why the idea of being transgender is accepted by society, unlike being transracial. Which you didn’t answer my questions on.