I want to preface this by saying that we have a zero tolerance policy for transphobia. Your comment will be removed and you will be banned if you spout transphobia here. Our existence is not up for debate.
That said, how do you differentiate being transgender and being trans racial?
I’m curious how to answer this question in a good faith debate with someone. Emotionally I know that they’re not the same and that one is wrong and the other is not wrong, but I’m unsure as to why that is and am curious if anyone else has given any thought about it.
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I don’t understand the question - race and gender are fundamentally different concepts.
Absolutely. I guess I can see how someone might make a bad faith argument about “born X transition to Z is fine for gender, but a white person can’t identify and transition to Afro-American? ThEy’Re BoTh GeNeTiCs!”
I was trying to think of a good car analogy, but it wasn’t coming to me.
I guess the idea is that if you can change your gender identity, why not your racial identity, but to me that’s absolutely absurd.Edit: besides gender is a pretty broad spectrum even ignoring the topic of transitioning.
Race is an overloaded term like sex/gender used to be. Are they talking about phenotypes? Genetic ancestry? Family ancestry (including adoption and found family)? Culture? Nationality?
If people are arguing they’re culturally one thing, but people respond “but genetics”, that sounds incredibly similar to " you’re not that gender because genetics!". I can’t claim to be genotypically female, but I am a woman, so perhaps there’s room for something similar regarding race. I’d have to ask people who identify as transracial though.
That’s a really good point. I guess where I’m coming from is based in the thought that gender is, to my mind at least, less loaded than race. I’m part First Nations Canadian, but not Status. There’s a real issue in Canada and the US of white people claiming Status, and pulling funding or land from reparations programs/treaties(historically and today) that should rightfully go to the descendants of the people that were and are still the victims of genocide and systemic racism.
I don’t see anything wrong with someone of a different genetic heritage taking on the culture, and being part of the communities, but there’s verifiable damage that can be done by saying:
Yes, you’re First Nations now, here’s your Status card.This is happening.
And with gender, there’s no real loss from opening the definition, and everything to gain in terms of equality and fair treatment for everyone.I hope I was coherent, the coffee hasn’t quite kicked in yet.
I’m not trans so my opinion may be different on this, but I don’t think anyone asking you this is participating in good faith debate.
I have had people IRL who just don’t know better and ask questions about this, not knowing much about either topic and I can see why they might superficially think they could be similar.
In particular I had a white liberal friend ask about Rachel Dolezal’s experience and how that compares to a transgender experience.
What helped clarify things was to examine where Dolezal’s transracial feelings came from:
Dolezal was born at home in 1977, “on the side of the mountain” in rural Montana, to a pair of white Christian fundamentalists called Larry and Ruthanne; they entered “Jesus Christ” on her birth certificate as the only other witness to her birth. From a young age, Dolezal and her older brother Joshua were put to work on the family homestead, weeding vegetables, foraging for berries and hunting elk; in full-length homemade dresses and dog hair sweaters, she “looked like something out of Little House On The Prairie”. Dirt poor and uneducated, her parents lived by the Bible, spoke in tongues and beat her.
“I felt like I was constantly having to atone for some unknown thing. Larry and Ruthanne would say I was possessed and exorcise my demons, because I was very creative and that was seen as sensual, which was of the devil. It seems like everything that came naturally, instinctively to me was wrong. That was literally beaten into us. I had to redeem myself,” she says with a light, mirthless laugh, “from being me. And I never felt good enough to be saved.”
Blond and freckled, “like Pippi Longstocking”, she recalls choosing brown crayons to draw pictures of herself with dark skin and curly hair, like the Bantu women she saw in National Geographic. She would hide in the garden, smear herself in mud, and fantasise that she had been kidnapped from Africa. What she describes as a profound sense of not belonging followed her to school, where the other children wore trainers and had Doritos in their packed lunches, not elk tongue sandwiches. She did everything she could to fit in, picking huckleberries to earn money to buy Nikes, “but I knew I wasn’t one of them. I was always on the fringe.” The only person who really understood her life was Joshua, but he was the favoured child, the son, and her relationship with her brother grew increasingly uneasy.
I walked my friend through the story of Dolezal’s formation of an African identity as a form of fantasy escapism while living under extremely brutal and abusive conditions, and how this kind of transracial identity seems to have more to do with her psychology and the need for that identity as a coping mechanism than something truly innate or biological. It at least seems like a plausible explanation for where her transracial identity comes from.
Furthermore, you can point out that transracial identities are not a common cross-cultural phenomenon, and scientists have not found a physical basis for anything like a transracial identity, and even further, race itself is not biologically real, so it’s unclear what it would mean for someone to have an innate sense of race.
Meanwhile, transgender people have existed throughout human history and across cultures, and scientists acknowledge they are a natural part of human variation, with physical evidence of correlated genetic markers and autopsies of brains that have found consistent differences in trans brains. Furthermore, the current evidence is that gender identity is a biologically real thing, and not able to be altered by psychological and social influences (so you can take someone like Dolezal and make them a different race, but you can’t change her gender identity; one is biological, the other isn’t).
My friend seemed satisfied with this kind of answer because it clearly delineates why transracial identities are not like transgender identities, and there just wasn’t much left to discuss at that point. She just hadn’t ever considered it and didn’t know much about either topic.
That said, online it is clear that people who want to debate transgender folks with topics like transracial are usually not acting in good faith, so I don’t want to dismiss your intuition - I just wanted to offer my experiences with a person IRL who was well-meaning but by coincidence did ask about transracial identities.
It may be worth pinging OP or posting this as a top level comment. This is very well thought out.
that’s a great idea, I pinged OP, hopefully I did that right!
@[email protected] hoping you see this comment ^
I did see it and i think it’s a really insightful reply. I hope to have some free time soon to digest all of these replies and respond thoughtfully. Been extremely busy with schoolwork. Thank you for your thoughtful response!
Transracial is only brought up by racists who try to deny transgender rights. I personally wouldn’t entertain that topic of conversation because it’s a waste of energy.
Race is, like gender, a social construct. That said, race isn’t typically something it is normal to consciously perform, the way gender is. I never do anything to make sure people know what race I prefer to be regarded as, but I dress and act my preferred gender more often than not.
Being transracial (to me) seems therefore necessarily ideological, and living one’s life according to the tenets of a racial ideology seems like something only terrible people do.
I think this is the actual answer- one is performed by the actor and one is assumed by the audience. Culture isn’t race, so eating soul food or reading James Baldwin is not performing a race.
I think both being social constructs of social animals, there is probably same shared neurology or biology, or psychology in our actions around our gender, culture and race.
However, as a construct, we don’t deem a white person who grows up in black culture to be black. We don’t consider a tomboy, who climbs trees with boys to be a boy (despite the name).
We know that people change their accents and language subconsciously around different subcultures, like code switching.
From a biological standpoint, we don’t really understand the purpose of being trans or gay. There are theories about nurturing and village raises a child etc. However, we know that transition gives better lives to trans people, similarly, we know gay people don’t respond well to conversion therapy. For someone like Rachel, it seems to be a fantasy and the general thinking around that is enabling it feeds into the fantasy and encourages unhealthy thought processes, rather than the opposite in transition for trans people. However, I’m. It sure that psychologists or psychiatrists would agree, or if that’s just pop psychology.
That doesn’t make her beliefs invalid. However, they are not common enough to have a recognised course of action. In the end, as it’s all a construct, can’t we just let her be who she wants to be if it’s not hurting anyone and we don’t know any better? I’d agree that those who are using her for comparison aren’t doing so in good faith.
I feel like there’s a point to be made about the historical use of the term transracial, which described the experiences of people who were adopted into families of a different race than oneself as a child. In these cases, even though there may be superficial differences present, the culture the person was raised into is that of the adoptive family, and as a result it’s what they tend to identify with based on lived experience.
I think there’s a difference between idolizing a different race or its culture thereof, and having formative experiences as a member of that community, even if there were indicators that marked you as an “other” both to those within and without. I don’t know if it’s really worthwhile to tell people how they can and can’t feel about their identity in this way, but there are definitely nuances that make racial identity experiences distinct from gender identity experiences.
Race is external, it’s something imposed on you, while gender is internal
My experience of gender is not purely internal
The internal component is probably the most important, but yes, there is a social element. We tend to use the internal component to justify changes in the social component (like telling people to use the right pronouns).
Mine isn’t either. I was talking about where it gets its definition. My own gender is defined by me, it’s something I’m working out internally with myself. The experience is both internal and external, but the knowledge of what I want or what I am comes from within.
Isn’t gender both external and imposed on you at the same time though?
There are expectations imposed on you, but ultimately what defines your gender is internal. Race was invented by European courts to justify the slave trade.
I’m gonna try and level the same benefit of the doubt that I wish people would give us: this would be a matter between a patient, their community, and their health providers, and if transition would in fact improve someone’s quality of life to the extent that gender transition does, I wouldn’t oppose it. This is the same conclusion I came to about transabled identities once I thought about it for a while.
I’m skeptical of it in concept, but it’s not really my place to cast judgement as someone not familiar with the experience (also white) and I’m sure someone willing to come out as transracial is going to hear a lot of arguments against their existence already. they probably wouldn’t need one more from me.
Tbh, I’d honestly just be really interested to talk to them about it to the extent they’d be willing. I haven’t heard from anyone I can trust is being earnest and genuine about it but I won’t assume they can’t possibly be out there. I can’t think of a source of dysphoria for transracial people that wouldn’t be steeped in false racial hierarchies dreamed up by white people, but just maaaayyyyybe someone out there has a different experience. No way to know without hearing from em directly I guess is my point.
Racial identity seems to be heavily tied to culture from what I gather from people, so I assume transracial means changing what culture you identify with.
Immigrants that culturally assimilate are an interesting case to look at. Suppose I, a white American, moved to China and assimilated there. Would you call me white? American? Chinese? If “race” means phenotypical characteristics, then we shouldn’t care about race and “transracial” is stupid, but if it means like your culture, then it is worth caring about and “transracial” seems more understandable. I don’t know what definition people use in practice though, probably a mix of both (because things can never be simple). A difference from gender is that culture isn’t a purely internal thing, you kind of have to be a part of it IRL.
I don’t have good language for this, all the terms are overloaded and confusing. It feels kinda like talking about gender/sex without having distinct words for them. Without distinction, we blend conceptually different things and then get confused when we mix the concepts in edge cases.
the only people who care about race are racists, it literally does not matter what race you are (if you insist it does because society treats different races differently, then that’s a racist sentiment that you should not hold), it does not affect your life as a person, except in ways imposed by racists.
gender is something that will affect your life as a person no matter what, sure there are also societally imposed notions about gender that on a surface level could be compared to race, but they function very different on a fundamental level.
think about it this way, if we lived in a society with no racism or sexism then what color your skin is would not have a significant impact on your life, where as the gender you have would have a significant impact on your life.
edit: i want to clear up some confusion, our society is fundamentally built on racist ideals, im not trying to erase that or suggest that it isnt a reality anymore, or that we, as a society, can just stop being racist, that isnt how this works of course.
im not trying to say that you should not care about being oppressed by racists, or that your life isnt affected by people holding racist ideals, only that it shouldnt be this way. this is idealistic and not the reality we live in, but the reality i want to live in.
instead of saying “it literally does not matter what race you are (if you insist it does because society treats different races differently, then that’s a racist sentiment that you should not hold)” it would be more accurate for me to have said that “saying racism matters because racist say it matters is stupid”.
this is more in line with the intent i wanted to convey to the reader, however i can see how my original statement could be interpreted very different than i intended. thanks everybody for helping me state my argument more effectively
if you insist it does because society treats different races differently, then that’s a racist sentiment that you should not hold
Is it racist to acknowledge my white privilege?
I’m sure it’s possible to be racist about it, but I think your actions are up to you. I don’t know you.
my point was you have to choose to engage in racism for it to be a thing, it doesn’t exist if we don’t let it, unlike gender.
You absolutely do not. Implicit and unconscious racial bias is a huge part of the issue
participating in institutionally racist system, that position racism as the norm, is indeed a very large problem that most people don’t know they are participating in yea
unfortunately that institutionally racist system is society, and most people don’t fully understand the consequences of their actions, and non participation in society isn’t the answer.
we can’t just flip a switch and end racism by just pretending it all went away, but I do believe that if we keep making progress then one day, we can move on and create a society that works for us all.
unfortunately that institutionally racist system is society, and most people don’t fully understand the consequences of their actions, and non participation in society isn’t the answer.
This directly contradicts your first reply, in which you say the only people who care about race are racists. If are part of an institutionally racist system that targets them (which they are), then they are going to think about race, because it impacts every aspect of their life, and saying that it’s only racists that think about it completely erases that reality.
Like saying the only people who think about gender are transphobes and sexists. It’s just blatantly incorrect, and erases the lived experience of many people who are actively targeted by institutional bias against them
The ideal world you’re talking about in your first reply is made actively harder to achieve by denying the reality in which we’re currently living, and it comes across as a racist dogwhistle. The only reason I haven’t removed it is because your later posts make it clear that it isn’t intended that way, but I am going to need you to edit your first post so it doesn’t come across as erasing the experiences of people targeted by racism
your either targeted by the system, or you benefit from it, my comments about the people who dont understand or care, are in the latter camp, the people who are targets of the system, i would argue, dont care about race, at least not in the way racists do, they care about being oppressed, and racism is the tool that is leveraged to do the oppressing.
at the end of the day, it doesnt matter what avenue of discrimination they use to oppress people, but it is highly valuable to understand their avenues of attack and tactics they use to trick people into believing bigoted rhetoric. thats why im here engaging in this conversation, not trying to deny the reality we live in.
your either targeted by the system, or you benefit from it,
And either way, you think about the system in question, but your original post still says that the only people who think about race are racists, ignoring the reality that people targeted by racism have no choice but to think about race. Thinking about race because racist systems target you does not make you racist, and disempowers the targets of racism trying to address the issue. Downplaying that experience is a racist dogwhistle. I need you to edit/clarify that post to include some of the context you’ve provided in your later posts, to make it clear that it’s not a dog whistle, otherwise, I will have to remove the post
my point was you have to choose to engage in racism for it to be a thing
I don’t see how this makes sense at all
I think they’re saying that women and men will live inherently different lives, regardless of sexism, but people of different races only do because we as a larger society continue to reinforce that. I don’t know if I agree with the first part though. It’s kind of hard to imagine, honestly.
I hope this isn’t considered transphobia on this sub, but I think gender might also cease to exist in a completely nonsexist society. I see sexism mostly as the imposition of gender norms on people and if people were no longer forced into boxes by the culture, they might cease to identify with gender roles at all. To put it another way, I think there would be no dissonance between people wearing frilly dresses and practicing Jiu-Jitsu, so people could choose the individual things that appeal to them without “picking a camp,” if that makes sense.
I do think it’s utopian enough to be a moot point though, because we still see a dissonance between liking football and warhammer, even though both are masc coded. We put people into so many boxes, even aside from race and gender, I don’t think we’ll get rid of the most fundamental distinction we recognize among people (maybe second after age?)
Removing gender from society would resolve much of my dysphoria, but not all of it.
I’d still have struggled with the body I was born with, and I’d still have needed to deal with that reality, even in a genderless society.
To put it another way, I think there would be no dissonance between people wearing frilly dresses and practicing Jiu-Jitsu
This is a huge misunderstanding of trans identity.
Trans people aren’t trans because “dresses” or the like. If we’re able to come out trans and deal with the reality and harassment that brings, then we could also simply have dressed in a way that society doesn’t like, or broke other gender norms, without coming out as trans if that’s all it took, because those things are nearly always easier than coming out as trans.
I think that would fall under the same category as any other medically prescribed plastic surgery, like reconstructive surgery, but it wouldn’t necessarily be linked to a gender. A person would just still be a person and other people would still be able to see whether they have breasts or a beard, but that doesn’t mean they’d draw any additional conclusions from that fact. It’s, again, really hard to imagine.
All I’m saying is that trans people would still exist in one form or another in a genderless society. The words might be different, and we might conceptualise ourselves and the context we exist in differently, but we would still be here.
To use your wording, I’d still have to have “picked a camp”, because the one I was placed in to by biology was a source of distress, and for many of us, that distress would still exist in some form even in a genderless society
race was invented to justify slavery, our society is built on this notion, but it doesn’t have to be, we can create a society without race as we know it, but we aren’t, were continuing to engage with racism.
Acknowledging racism in our society is not “continuing to engage”. We can’t just cover our eyes and ears and suddenly live in a better world.
I don’t want to engage in racism will people stop being racist to me now
hm I dunno, if someone wants to change the color of their skin, or the shape of their eyes, or their culture etc, I dont see a problem with that at all
I’m not saying you can’t do that if you want to, body modding should be the norm not the exception like it is currently. people should be able to look how they want.
Can you clarify what you mean by trans-racial and transgender?
I think it would help if you wanted to compare the two by first describing what you think they are.
huh why is one wrong and the other not? :p
Does someone being either really matter?
Can certain aspects of what constitutes ‘race’ be performative? I.e. are their certain clothes, behaviours, voice characteristics, words, body movements that make someone a particular race?
Or is race physically defined?
If it’s the former I can see a case for transracialism.
If it’s the latter it’s more difficult for me to see it being possible.
Well for one, it’s all up to chance whether I was born with a dick or a pussy. I never coulda been born white
