It seems like the most common attitude towards transracial people is that they are racists or lunatics or something. I think most of the people who have this attitude have it on irrational grounds.
A missing piece in this argument for me is an assumption that the distance between "races" is comparable to the distance between "sexes". That the steps you could take in transition are similar in kind.
But they're not.
Every human being carries around genetic code capable of expressing opposite ends of the sexual dimorphism. Peculiarities of gonadal development, sensitivity to hormones or straightforward intervention can bend that expression at many points in life. You, the same individual over the same lifetime, can inhabit a body and mind substantially similar to either "sex" through the application of sex hormones. Heck, the word "gender" has it's roots in the medical establishment's need to re-establish a binary after we started learning how non-binary human sex actually was.
There's nothing inherent to you that knows how to be a different race.
Lay that on top of an extensive history of gender diverse humanity, and alongside magnitudes fewer trans racial people. We know a lot of people have gender incongruence, that they're happy and productive when affirmed, and we have a clear mechanism (an internal sense of gender) why there are so many of them.
I don't think that all transracial people are racists or lunatics. I just think race is pretty different than gender and sex. Different enough to make the comparison inapt
I don't see why that makes a difference to how we should treat trans people. I assume that people cannot, as of yet, change their chromosomes and stuff like that. Should that make us make fun of trans people or witch-hunt them? No of course not! Imagine a world where trans men couldn't grow beards - there was simply no way to make them have that hair growth for some reason. Due to this, some trans men chose to wear fake beards to feel more at home in their own bodies. Should we ridicule and witch-hunt these people for doing that, just because their body doesn't have the innate ability to exhibit certain characteristics on its own? No, that would be ridiculous!
Or maybe the point is that there is nothing inherent to being of a certain race? But that is surely just all the more reason not to be judgemental. There is nothing inherent to dressing as a goth as opposed to with a cottage core aesthetic or whatever, but I just see no connection whatsoever between that and us ridiculing people for choosing to switch styles.
Now, maybe the difference is, as you elude to, that transracial people don't has as "real" a sense of incongruence as transgender people. That may be so - though that is a contingent empirical fact which is open to (dis)confirmation. But I don't think it should make much of a normative difference. Suppose that your friend tells you that they want to transition from male to female. Before deciding what your attitude should be towards them, you take out your trusty "transgender detector 3.0", which scans their brain for whether they have the "correct" transgender dispositions. Sadly it comes up negative, so they are not "really" transgender. For this reason you go on to ridicule them and try to get them to lose their job for being sexist.
I hope we both agree that that is not the appropriate reaction - rather you should just be accepting or at the very least not actively opposed, even though they are not "really" transgender. I think the same holds for transracial people; whether there is some condition which we can label "transracialism" should be irrelevant to our treatment of these people.
Well, to start, we don't really examine people's chromosomes in the normal course of life, in fact most people have never been karyotyped.
It's a bit of a difference to being transracial that, with sufficiently early exposure to hormones and access to gender affirming surgery, that many trans people are actually indistinguishable from cis counterparts in almost all avenues of life.
I don't think the medical ability to eliminate differences should determine if we're accepting of minority groups of people, but that we can surely informs how we cluster them into the wider population. Take the third rail of sports. The fact that long term suppression of testosterone and exposure to estrogen eliminates significant performance differences in endurance and strength should probably inform sport specific policy involving trans women's participation in women's sports.
My argument isn't that I think being transgender is more "real" than being transracial. Or that we're more likely to find a test for being a "true transgender" than a "true transracial". But rather that sex itself just isn't a static binary over the course of a lifetime. Whatever we're calling "race" is a mosaic of features derived from genetics you inherit at the beginning of your life and can't/don't significantly change. "Sex" instead is a clustering of attributes that are mixed in all people and can be, for most practical purposes, completely altered over the course of a lifetime.
Basically, I think it matters for people who medically transition and for the wider transgender community (that includes those who don't), that all humans have a mix of male and female attributes and that individuals can choose to change that mix. I'm rejecting both gender and sex as static binary categories. In contrast, even if we reject racial categories, I doubt there are many people rejecting the static expression of what might be coded as racial characteristics over the course of a single lifetime.
Pulling back, I want to clarify that I strongly hold the view that we shouldn't shun or abuse transgender or transracial people. I just don't think our acceptance of transgender people is a clear guide for how should accept transracial people, because there's a different in kind in underlying plasticity, the quality of available interventions and the rates occurrence. We should accept both, but it should also matter that medical transition works as well as it does and that there have been and continue to be orders of magnitude more transgender people.
Okay, so if I get you right, your point is that sex and/or gender is not defined by fixed facts about a person, whereas race is. That is, sex/gender is defined by certain physiological and social factors that are in principle malleable, but race is defined by stuff like ancestry which is fixed at birth. And this is sufficient for making the two incomparable in the relevant respects.
Is this roughly correct?
I just don't think that picture holds as a means of differentiating moral reasoning. There seem to be facts like gamete-production which are in fact fixed, and which correlate strongly with sex (or may even be said to define it). But the fact that that is unchangeable should not change how we treat transgender people. (Perhaps you that stuff is changeable, but imagine that scientists discover that people have an unchangeable "sex essence" of some sort tomorrow - that should not change our view or at least treatment of transgender people, I think.) As you say, we don't test people for that stuff before deciding how to treat them. Instead we use the term "gender" to refer to the stuff that is socially (perhaps morally?) relevant, and that is certainly changeable (stuff like appearance, presentation, identification etc).
But I can make a parallel move with race. Sure, there are fixed facts like ancestry which determine race. But we don't "look at" peoples ancestry before choosing how to treat them, so the ancestry is analogous to gamete production or chromosomes or whatever. But Now I introduces "shmace" which is the analogue for gender. This is stuff like skin color, accent, facial structure, cultural tradition etc. This stuff certainly is changeable, and so just as there can be transgender people, there can be transschmacial people. Would you have any gripes with that? If not, then just translate "schmace" back into race, and call what we called "race" ancestry or something, and then you have my position.
I agree with you that transracial identity and transgender identity share many features in common, and that it's difficult to be extremely supportive of one and extremely hostile towards the other in a principled way - but that symmetry just makes me think we ought to be more critical of both.
In terms of transracialism specifically, I would describe my opposition like this: I don't believe race exists as an actual feature of human beings apart from a particular social context, and I think that particular social context is a *bad one.* Race as a concept has its origins as a sorting system for hierarchies that developed out of European colonialism, and many of the central racial stereotypes and assumptions have a particular function of reinforcing that hierarchy. The proper social response in the here and now ought to be race abolitionism - we should vigorously oppose racial essentialism and strip any meaning from race categories beyond either 1) entirely neutral claims about basic biological characteristics or 2) historically grounded claims about ancestry in regards to that specific colonial hierarchy.
But if you agree with this, then obviously transracial identity would be unproductive and even harmful, because it further naturalizes and essentializes the race categories we ought to be aggressively de-naturalizing and de-essentializing. If someone can "feel like a black person" in a meaningful way, then blackness must necessarily be distinct from any particular material and social context. But it obviously isn't! So in practice, transracial identity can only ever be established in relation to stereotypes and assumptions that are laundered through the lens of individual identity; if you actually ask a transracial person what makes them Asian, or black, or whatever, the only possible answer will be regurgitating harmful stereotypes or asserting a presocial racial nature, both of which are bad things we ought to oppose. For this reason, I think all people who are devoted to anti-racism should oppose any ideology that affirms racial categories as inherent and natural or seeks to merely liberalize the racial hierarchy. Wouldn't most socialists, for example, accept that a "trans-class" identity based in disconnected signifiers of poverty or wealth was destructive to efforts for overthrowing capitalism?
I'll leave it to the reader to apply the same analysis to transgender identity, but regardless of what position someone takes there, there are, imo, coherent reasons to find transracialism problematic (to use a trendy term!).
I definitely see your intuition here, although I just think that it is false that transracialism will essentialize rather de-essentialize racial categories.
This example might not be the best dialectically, since you also say you oppose transgenderism, but I just think that it is quite clear that people who support transgender identity are people who have a less essentialist view of gender. Is this correlation accidental? I don't think it is. So, in order to think that you can transition from one gender to another, you have to think that gender is not some fixed fact about a person. Often the people who are against transracialism are so on the ground that it is not possible to change gender, and that "transwomen are not real women" and so on. But that is just clearly much more essentialist. So by accepting transracial identity, you are helping denaturalize the idea of gender, and making it at much more arbitrary and "empty" concept.
I do agree that the best thing would be if everyone just stopped caring about gender, race and whatever else, but I just simply think that that is not feasible - at least not right now. So transgender and transracial identity might just be "necessary evils" to make these categories less strict, and then there is a further question as to whether it is possible to abolish them altogether.
Sorry for the late reply! I think it's complicated here - there are multiple competing (and conflicting) accounts of gender identity in the larger progressive world, and they range from totally constructivist to totally essentialist. So I don't think it's accurate to say acceptance of transgender identity necessarily implies a less essentialist view; the idea that someone who comes out as trans at 25 was "always a woman," or that they have a "female brain" that fixes their identity from birth, is even more essentialist to me than the average conservative view. But otherwise, yes, I agree that it's bad to oppose transgender identity (or transracial identity) by saying that "you can't change your race/gender" and implying it's totally biological.
Finally, I'll just say that I don't think we should assume liberalizing a hierarchy makes it easier to dismantle. If someone really wants the gender (or race) system to be abolished, it seems reasonable that they would be concerned about a movement that celebrated gender (or race) as an individual, private, and important aspect of who you are. In my opinion, we ought to be doing the opposite - framing gender as entirely external, and actively emphasizing the fact that no one's internal sense of self ought to be framed around this oppressive cultural construct! If nothing else, I think it's very hard to look at the last fifteen or so years and say the queer and trans movement has actually resulted in people caring less about gender. Obviously, it's become much, much more important to many people's lives, and I would say the average progressive is probably *less* likely now to critically examine many gendered practices on the grounds that they've become very important to many trans people's self-expression. That might be a necessary trade-off, but I at least wish people would acknowledge the tension.
There are certainly many views on the ontology of gender, and I would definitely not defend all of them (although, I still think anyone who has a view where you can change gender should also think you can change race). I guess I would take the sort of classic distinction where there are some clusters of biological facts that generally match up with our ideas of sex, but gender is a socially constructed add-on, if you will, which can change in a way that sex might not. Although I also think that the category of sex will ultimately be ill-concieved, if you try to give a sufficiently precise definition.
I do agree that a view where there is some deep metaphysical, or even just biological, distinction between transgender people and other people might work to cement the categories that we would want to abolish. Although I am not sure how many who are for transgender identity really have such a view. I doubt many of the people who support transgenderism would think that we should not support a transgender person whose brain scan came back "transgender-negative", whatever that might mean. Rather it is a matter of personal choice rather than being some neuro-physical condition. And it appears to me that respecting someone who chooses to change category will help to weaken the category, even if we are still operating withing the general gender-framework.
There is also a question of whether we could ever fully abolish the categories of race and gender. I think that it is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, and thus I think it would be better to respect people's moving around in those categories as a next-best option.
I just think that it is false that transracialism will essentialize rather de-essentialize racial categories.
The point isn’t to de-essentialize them so much as it is to do away with them together, which is really not the same thing. Consider religion: thoroughly de-essentialized, but only somewhat undone. And it’s not particularly clear that the two have gone together - arguably the classical Mediterranean interpreted religion in a less mutually-exclusive manner, but also saw it as more constitutive of the individual, via its role in citizenship.
This is not a particularly realistic goal for gender, at least as of now. But given that our current racial categories were made relatively recently - i.e. in the last 500 years or so - it stands to reason that they can be unmade.
For one, I agree with RMH above that there is likely a physical difference in the brain for many trans people that drives their trans identification. Part of this is that gender is a more fundamental category in human beings than race. Even if you don't think gender is actually a physical phenomenon, it is older and much more embedded in our culture.
Second, I think your gender logit point gets at something important, which is that trans individuals basically want to change their gender presentation, and don't typically care if, say, DNA testing would still find them to be their birth gender. On the flipside, there isn't really a coherent idea of racial presentation, or at least that idea works very differently.
One example of this is a recent case of a Canadian academic who turned out to be mistaken or lying about her indigenous identity. She dressed very "indigenously" and was constantly beading, whereas another indigenous candidate she beat out for an academic job showed up in a suit and tie. Many people reacting to the case found the difference in presentation here to be especially galling. There's a lot of discussion of how much racial minorities control their presentation in majority spaces, and also a long history of people in blackface, yellow face, etc. portraying offensive stereotypes, all of which is relevant here.
But I don't mean any of the above to be construed as saying that appropriation is really what's at issue in any of these cases. To my mind, the gender appropriation argument falls flat because gender isn't reducible to a schema of oppression. At the same time, I think gender is basically about presentation, and additionally somewhat about gendered sex organs. On the other hand, race is not really about presentation. Having a surgery to get monolidded eyes wouldn't really teach me anything about any Asian culture.
I guess at some end I would say that cultures are free to have pathways to join them, along the lines of converting to Judaism, where you become initiated after learning about the culture in depth. Yet I can't imagine how gender could work as that sort of community.
So, if I understand you correctly, you think that what transgender people care about is changing their presentation (and thereby their gender, since gender is socially constructed). There is at the same time something more fundamental about gender than race, but whether there is some biological feature (sex), which cannot be changed, is irrelevant to the transgender persons desires. On the other hand, race is not as "real" as gender, in the sense that it is not grounded in any sort of biological reality, but is rather a vague cultural idea - something akin to a club (although I am not so clear on what you think race is). I just want to make sure I understand you correctly.
So, as I have said before, I do not quite see how there being a biological foundation of gender makes it such that we should respect transgender people more than transracial people. While certain gender roles correlate with certain biological features, I take it that you think that gender is still independent from these (hence why it can be changed). But surely race-roles, if you will, have a similar social ontology. You say that there is no coherent idea of racial presentation, but it seems clearly that there are markers that "present" your race, like your accent, skin color, clothing style, etc. How is that not a form of racial presentation?
You raise the issue that there is a history of negative portrayal of racial minorities. While that is certainly real, it seems to me that transracialism would work to break this sort of thing, rather than perpetuate it. To take a bit of a silly example, there is a clear difference between fairy-tales written as love letters to the Brothers Grimm, and something like Shrek, which makes fun of their fairy tales. And the existence of the latter does not seem to make the former wrong.
As you say, getting monolidded eyes won't make you an asian. But similarly, having your penis turned into a vagina won't make you a woman in itself. But I also suspect that someone who is "really" transracial would (at least want to) be steeped in the culture into which they are trasitioning.
On your first paragraph, I think that's mostly correct. I see gender, biological or not, as fundamental to being human. Race is a modern social concept, like nationality. Underneath there is a more organic concept of culture that might play some role in this conversation.
Racial presentation is complex to me because it's so poorly defined in its correspondences. A white person raised with a Nigerian accent isn't pretending to be black. Skin color opens up a lit of complexities around colorism, but also things like Arabs being mistaken for Mexicans, etc. On dress, Sihk men, who by creed wear turbans, often get mistaken for Muslims because of this headgear. There's also the fuzzy race-culture distinction here. Even people who think donning another culture's dress is cultural appropriation in all circumstances don't think it's transracialism to do so.
But to my mind it just seems obvious that having the presentation and perhaps the biological features of a gender is equivalent to assuming that gender, whereas for race, you can't understand the experience of a given race without learning about an associated culture. Learning about other cultures is good, and there are some pathways if you want to become a primary member of that cultural community-- I offered conversion to Judaism as one I'm aware of.
But if you're actually enmeshed in a culture, then trying to imitate their racial features seems wrong, like you're reifing the shell after having obtained the kernel. It's hard for me to imagine someone who converts to Judaism then getting, e.g., a nose enlargement surgery. The presentational features of race are only a tangential part of the core culture, and even cultures open to outsiders joining do not want those outsiders to do things like this.
So it sounds as if your sticking point is that one cannot transition into another race, since race, among other things, depends upon having some sort of lived experience of being part of that race.
But surely there is also some part of being a woman which is having the experience of fearing going home alone at night, or something to that effect, which a trans woman will not have experienced prior to transitioning.
I don't see why the complexity of racial presentation makes it such that one cannot transition. Rachel Dolezal, for example, went a long time passing as a black woman, and so she must at least have partly succeeded in presenting as a black woman (whatever that entails). Even if you think that she did not do so faithfully, it is not hard to imagine someone being "better" at it than her, and having the right sort of cultural knowledge.
With regards to being accepted into the culture, this is partly what is at question - whether transracial people ought to be accepted into the culture. But with regards to whether it is possible, it is quite clear to me that it is: Consider someone with white parents, but who feels at home with "black culture", and watches all the tv shows, knows all the slang, has black friends etc. To "seal the deal", they get cosmetic surgery to look black as well, before moving into a black neighborhood. They would surely be accepted. And so it just seems quite clear to me that it is at least possible in principle to have the right sort of acknowledgement and acceptance occur.
This sort of acceptance might also become more widespread once more people become convinced of my position. And so the position would reinforce itself.
The disconnect in the above is that while there are plenty of white people raised in majority black areas who feel more or less integrated into that culture, the idea of someone getting their skin darkened to fit in more with black culture is totally crazy and would immediately upset anyone who knew about this.
I don't think the lived experience point is right. Being black, for example, is more than just facing antiblack discrimination. A lot of it is about culture, and I stand by the shell-kernel distinction I made before. The idea of making a physical transition to look more like a certain race in order to get more in touch with that culture makes no sense. Unlike with gender, racial presentation is a tangential part of the culture one is trying to integrate with. For gender, it's different, as gender presentation and the biological aspects of gender are core to gender identity.
I do think that you are certainly getting at something with the point that gender is more about presentation and race is more about a culture. But there is surely at least some part of racial identity which comes down to presentation, and at least some part of that comes down to skin color and facial features.
I think that ultimately it will just go back to the question of whether people can in fact have "transracial desires" if you will. But it is very hard for me to see why this should not be the case (for example in the case of someone growing up amongst people who are of a different race to themselves). There might of course not be the same neuro-physical basis as there is with transgender people, but there can surely still be the desire to belong to another race. And if someone reports such a desire, we should surely assume that they are not lying, unless we have independent reason to think that they are.
There will probably still be people outraged at someone having their skin color changed to sadistfy such a desire. But there are also TERFs who are outraged at transgender people for ruining the fight for women's rights.
I've been trying to stay away from the empirical since that's the way you framed the conversation, but I would be really surprised if someone who grew up in a different racial-cultural community actually thought that changing their skin color or facial features would matter, and I don't think you really observe this. Maybe someone could genuinely report such feelings authentically, but even then, there is no way we can compel members of that racial-cultural community to accept someone who changes their body in such a way as one of their own.
Part of the difference with gender is that the two genders each make up half of every society, and have always been engaged in a dialectic with each other. Cultural communities, on the other hand, are independent. Someone who is black has ancestors that are black and have a link to the history of black people in a certain region or country. For gender, however, everyone has ancestors of both genders, and the experience of one gender or another covers an extremely broad spectrum of the human experience. I guess part of the issue is that I don't accept TERFs or anyone else putting a box around what one gender or another should be, whereas I think a culture should be able to internally set the rules of what being part of that culture is about.
Gender dysphoria is probably internal map of one's body not corresponding to reality, similar to "extraneous limb" thingy (I want to call it "phantom limb", but phantom limb is thinking you have a limb you don't, while I mean the also-existent opposite syndrome where a person has a limb but feels like it isn't their part). The idea that internal map of one's body includes a term for one's race (unlike a term for one's sex) is somehow dubious.
I think we should spend more time with the question of why we should honor social constructs, such as gender or race, and how and why they can be legitimately challenged.
I mean, I think the world would be a better place if we just stopped caring about things like gender and race. But it's hard to see how that could happen in reality. But by, for example, accepting people crossing the "boundaries" of race and gender and the like, we at least help make it clearer that they are not as rigid as we might have thought in the past.
Yes, I think you answer it somewhat yourself. If we say that in order for us to accept transgender identity, there must be some neurophysiological basis, then it makes it so that we could in principle find out in the future that we ought not tolerate transgender identity, on the basis of empirical findings. But that should surely not be our position. Even if there is no neurophysiological difference between transgender people and other people, we should still respect them.
With respect to someone like Rachel Dolezal, I don't know what she was feeling, and how "real it was". But it is not hard to imagine someone who could feel transracial. Imagine someone with light skin, who is born and raised in a predominantly black community. They attend black churches, have black friends and are a part of the culture. It is at least not very far-fetched that they might feel more at ease in their own bodies, if they were to undergo cosmetic surgery in order to also appear black.
I don't know about your point with MRI scans, but I suspect that it could be explained by socio-economic differences between racial groups, which are accidental rather than intrinsic.
A missing piece in this argument for me is an assumption that the distance between "races" is comparable to the distance between "sexes". That the steps you could take in transition are similar in kind.
But they're not.
Every human being carries around genetic code capable of expressing opposite ends of the sexual dimorphism. Peculiarities of gonadal development, sensitivity to hormones or straightforward intervention can bend that expression at many points in life. You, the same individual over the same lifetime, can inhabit a body and mind substantially similar to either "sex" through the application of sex hormones. Heck, the word "gender" has it's roots in the medical establishment's need to re-establish a binary after we started learning how non-binary human sex actually was.
There's nothing inherent to you that knows how to be a different race.
Lay that on top of an extensive history of gender diverse humanity, and alongside magnitudes fewer trans racial people. We know a lot of people have gender incongruence, that they're happy and productive when affirmed, and we have a clear mechanism (an internal sense of gender) why there are so many of them.
I don't think that all transracial people are racists or lunatics. I just think race is pretty different than gender and sex. Different enough to make the comparison inapt
I don't see why that makes a difference to how we should treat trans people. I assume that people cannot, as of yet, change their chromosomes and stuff like that. Should that make us make fun of trans people or witch-hunt them? No of course not! Imagine a world where trans men couldn't grow beards - there was simply no way to make them have that hair growth for some reason. Due to this, some trans men chose to wear fake beards to feel more at home in their own bodies. Should we ridicule and witch-hunt these people for doing that, just because their body doesn't have the innate ability to exhibit certain characteristics on its own? No, that would be ridiculous!
Or maybe the point is that there is nothing inherent to being of a certain race? But that is surely just all the more reason not to be judgemental. There is nothing inherent to dressing as a goth as opposed to with a cottage core aesthetic or whatever, but I just see no connection whatsoever between that and us ridiculing people for choosing to switch styles.
Now, maybe the difference is, as you elude to, that transracial people don't has as "real" a sense of incongruence as transgender people. That may be so - though that is a contingent empirical fact which is open to (dis)confirmation. But I don't think it should make much of a normative difference. Suppose that your friend tells you that they want to transition from male to female. Before deciding what your attitude should be towards them, you take out your trusty "transgender detector 3.0", which scans their brain for whether they have the "correct" transgender dispositions. Sadly it comes up negative, so they are not "really" transgender. For this reason you go on to ridicule them and try to get them to lose their job for being sexist.
I hope we both agree that that is not the appropriate reaction - rather you should just be accepting or at the very least not actively opposed, even though they are not "really" transgender. I think the same holds for transracial people; whether there is some condition which we can label "transracialism" should be irrelevant to our treatment of these people.
Well, to start, we don't really examine people's chromosomes in the normal course of life, in fact most people have never been karyotyped.
It's a bit of a difference to being transracial that, with sufficiently early exposure to hormones and access to gender affirming surgery, that many trans people are actually indistinguishable from cis counterparts in almost all avenues of life.
I don't think the medical ability to eliminate differences should determine if we're accepting of minority groups of people, but that we can surely informs how we cluster them into the wider population. Take the third rail of sports. The fact that long term suppression of testosterone and exposure to estrogen eliminates significant performance differences in endurance and strength should probably inform sport specific policy involving trans women's participation in women's sports.
My argument isn't that I think being transgender is more "real" than being transracial. Or that we're more likely to find a test for being a "true transgender" than a "true transracial". But rather that sex itself just isn't a static binary over the course of a lifetime. Whatever we're calling "race" is a mosaic of features derived from genetics you inherit at the beginning of your life and can't/don't significantly change. "Sex" instead is a clustering of attributes that are mixed in all people and can be, for most practical purposes, completely altered over the course of a lifetime.
Basically, I think it matters for people who medically transition and for the wider transgender community (that includes those who don't), that all humans have a mix of male and female attributes and that individuals can choose to change that mix. I'm rejecting both gender and sex as static binary categories. In contrast, even if we reject racial categories, I doubt there are many people rejecting the static expression of what might be coded as racial characteristics over the course of a single lifetime.
Pulling back, I want to clarify that I strongly hold the view that we shouldn't shun or abuse transgender or transracial people. I just don't think our acceptance of transgender people is a clear guide for how should accept transracial people, because there's a different in kind in underlying plasticity, the quality of available interventions and the rates occurrence. We should accept both, but it should also matter that medical transition works as well as it does and that there have been and continue to be orders of magnitude more transgender people.
Sorry for the late reply!
Okay, so if I get you right, your point is that sex and/or gender is not defined by fixed facts about a person, whereas race is. That is, sex/gender is defined by certain physiological and social factors that are in principle malleable, but race is defined by stuff like ancestry which is fixed at birth. And this is sufficient for making the two incomparable in the relevant respects.
Is this roughly correct?
I just don't think that picture holds as a means of differentiating moral reasoning. There seem to be facts like gamete-production which are in fact fixed, and which correlate strongly with sex (or may even be said to define it). But the fact that that is unchangeable should not change how we treat transgender people. (Perhaps you that stuff is changeable, but imagine that scientists discover that people have an unchangeable "sex essence" of some sort tomorrow - that should not change our view or at least treatment of transgender people, I think.) As you say, we don't test people for that stuff before deciding how to treat them. Instead we use the term "gender" to refer to the stuff that is socially (perhaps morally?) relevant, and that is certainly changeable (stuff like appearance, presentation, identification etc).
But I can make a parallel move with race. Sure, there are fixed facts like ancestry which determine race. But we don't "look at" peoples ancestry before choosing how to treat them, so the ancestry is analogous to gamete production or chromosomes or whatever. But Now I introduces "shmace" which is the analogue for gender. This is stuff like skin color, accent, facial structure, cultural tradition etc. This stuff certainly is changeable, and so just as there can be transgender people, there can be transschmacial people. Would you have any gripes with that? If not, then just translate "schmace" back into race, and call what we called "race" ancestry or something, and then you have my position.
I agree with you that transracial identity and transgender identity share many features in common, and that it's difficult to be extremely supportive of one and extremely hostile towards the other in a principled way - but that symmetry just makes me think we ought to be more critical of both.
In terms of transracialism specifically, I would describe my opposition like this: I don't believe race exists as an actual feature of human beings apart from a particular social context, and I think that particular social context is a *bad one.* Race as a concept has its origins as a sorting system for hierarchies that developed out of European colonialism, and many of the central racial stereotypes and assumptions have a particular function of reinforcing that hierarchy. The proper social response in the here and now ought to be race abolitionism - we should vigorously oppose racial essentialism and strip any meaning from race categories beyond either 1) entirely neutral claims about basic biological characteristics or 2) historically grounded claims about ancestry in regards to that specific colonial hierarchy.
But if you agree with this, then obviously transracial identity would be unproductive and even harmful, because it further naturalizes and essentializes the race categories we ought to be aggressively de-naturalizing and de-essentializing. If someone can "feel like a black person" in a meaningful way, then blackness must necessarily be distinct from any particular material and social context. But it obviously isn't! So in practice, transracial identity can only ever be established in relation to stereotypes and assumptions that are laundered through the lens of individual identity; if you actually ask a transracial person what makes them Asian, or black, or whatever, the only possible answer will be regurgitating harmful stereotypes or asserting a presocial racial nature, both of which are bad things we ought to oppose. For this reason, I think all people who are devoted to anti-racism should oppose any ideology that affirms racial categories as inherent and natural or seeks to merely liberalize the racial hierarchy. Wouldn't most socialists, for example, accept that a "trans-class" identity based in disconnected signifiers of poverty or wealth was destructive to efforts for overthrowing capitalism?
I'll leave it to the reader to apply the same analysis to transgender identity, but regardless of what position someone takes there, there are, imo, coherent reasons to find transracialism problematic (to use a trendy term!).
I definitely see your intuition here, although I just think that it is false that transracialism will essentialize rather de-essentialize racial categories.
This example might not be the best dialectically, since you also say you oppose transgenderism, but I just think that it is quite clear that people who support transgender identity are people who have a less essentialist view of gender. Is this correlation accidental? I don't think it is. So, in order to think that you can transition from one gender to another, you have to think that gender is not some fixed fact about a person. Often the people who are against transracialism are so on the ground that it is not possible to change gender, and that "transwomen are not real women" and so on. But that is just clearly much more essentialist. So by accepting transracial identity, you are helping denaturalize the idea of gender, and making it at much more arbitrary and "empty" concept.
I do agree that the best thing would be if everyone just stopped caring about gender, race and whatever else, but I just simply think that that is not feasible - at least not right now. So transgender and transracial identity might just be "necessary evils" to make these categories less strict, and then there is a further question as to whether it is possible to abolish them altogether.
Sorry for the late reply! I think it's complicated here - there are multiple competing (and conflicting) accounts of gender identity in the larger progressive world, and they range from totally constructivist to totally essentialist. So I don't think it's accurate to say acceptance of transgender identity necessarily implies a less essentialist view; the idea that someone who comes out as trans at 25 was "always a woman," or that they have a "female brain" that fixes their identity from birth, is even more essentialist to me than the average conservative view. But otherwise, yes, I agree that it's bad to oppose transgender identity (or transracial identity) by saying that "you can't change your race/gender" and implying it's totally biological.
Finally, I'll just say that I don't think we should assume liberalizing a hierarchy makes it easier to dismantle. If someone really wants the gender (or race) system to be abolished, it seems reasonable that they would be concerned about a movement that celebrated gender (or race) as an individual, private, and important aspect of who you are. In my opinion, we ought to be doing the opposite - framing gender as entirely external, and actively emphasizing the fact that no one's internal sense of self ought to be framed around this oppressive cultural construct! If nothing else, I think it's very hard to look at the last fifteen or so years and say the queer and trans movement has actually resulted in people caring less about gender. Obviously, it's become much, much more important to many people's lives, and I would say the average progressive is probably *less* likely now to critically examine many gendered practices on the grounds that they've become very important to many trans people's self-expression. That might be a necessary trade-off, but I at least wish people would acknowledge the tension.
No problem!
There are certainly many views on the ontology of gender, and I would definitely not defend all of them (although, I still think anyone who has a view where you can change gender should also think you can change race). I guess I would take the sort of classic distinction where there are some clusters of biological facts that generally match up with our ideas of sex, but gender is a socially constructed add-on, if you will, which can change in a way that sex might not. Although I also think that the category of sex will ultimately be ill-concieved, if you try to give a sufficiently precise definition.
I do agree that a view where there is some deep metaphysical, or even just biological, distinction between transgender people and other people might work to cement the categories that we would want to abolish. Although I am not sure how many who are for transgender identity really have such a view. I doubt many of the people who support transgenderism would think that we should not support a transgender person whose brain scan came back "transgender-negative", whatever that might mean. Rather it is a matter of personal choice rather than being some neuro-physical condition. And it appears to me that respecting someone who chooses to change category will help to weaken the category, even if we are still operating withing the general gender-framework.
There is also a question of whether we could ever fully abolish the categories of race and gender. I think that it is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, and thus I think it would be better to respect people's moving around in those categories as a next-best option.
I just think that it is false that transracialism will essentialize rather de-essentialize racial categories.
The point isn’t to de-essentialize them so much as it is to do away with them together, which is really not the same thing. Consider religion: thoroughly de-essentialized, but only somewhat undone. And it’s not particularly clear that the two have gone together - arguably the classical Mediterranean interpreted religion in a less mutually-exclusive manner, but also saw it as more constitutive of the individual, via its role in citizenship.
This is not a particularly realistic goal for gender, at least as of now. But given that our current racial categories were made relatively recently - i.e. in the last 500 years or so - it stands to reason that they can be unmade.
A few points.
For one, I agree with RMH above that there is likely a physical difference in the brain for many trans people that drives their trans identification. Part of this is that gender is a more fundamental category in human beings than race. Even if you don't think gender is actually a physical phenomenon, it is older and much more embedded in our culture.
Second, I think your gender logit point gets at something important, which is that trans individuals basically want to change their gender presentation, and don't typically care if, say, DNA testing would still find them to be their birth gender. On the flipside, there isn't really a coherent idea of racial presentation, or at least that idea works very differently.
One example of this is a recent case of a Canadian academic who turned out to be mistaken or lying about her indigenous identity. She dressed very "indigenously" and was constantly beading, whereas another indigenous candidate she beat out for an academic job showed up in a suit and tie. Many people reacting to the case found the difference in presentation here to be especially galling. There's a lot of discussion of how much racial minorities control their presentation in majority spaces, and also a long history of people in blackface, yellow face, etc. portraying offensive stereotypes, all of which is relevant here.
But I don't mean any of the above to be construed as saying that appropriation is really what's at issue in any of these cases. To my mind, the gender appropriation argument falls flat because gender isn't reducible to a schema of oppression. At the same time, I think gender is basically about presentation, and additionally somewhat about gendered sex organs. On the other hand, race is not really about presentation. Having a surgery to get monolidded eyes wouldn't really teach me anything about any Asian culture.
I guess at some end I would say that cultures are free to have pathways to join them, along the lines of converting to Judaism, where you become initiated after learning about the culture in depth. Yet I can't imagine how gender could work as that sort of community.
So, if I understand you correctly, you think that what transgender people care about is changing their presentation (and thereby their gender, since gender is socially constructed). There is at the same time something more fundamental about gender than race, but whether there is some biological feature (sex), which cannot be changed, is irrelevant to the transgender persons desires. On the other hand, race is not as "real" as gender, in the sense that it is not grounded in any sort of biological reality, but is rather a vague cultural idea - something akin to a club (although I am not so clear on what you think race is). I just want to make sure I understand you correctly.
So, as I have said before, I do not quite see how there being a biological foundation of gender makes it such that we should respect transgender people more than transracial people. While certain gender roles correlate with certain biological features, I take it that you think that gender is still independent from these (hence why it can be changed). But surely race-roles, if you will, have a similar social ontology. You say that there is no coherent idea of racial presentation, but it seems clearly that there are markers that "present" your race, like your accent, skin color, clothing style, etc. How is that not a form of racial presentation?
You raise the issue that there is a history of negative portrayal of racial minorities. While that is certainly real, it seems to me that transracialism would work to break this sort of thing, rather than perpetuate it. To take a bit of a silly example, there is a clear difference between fairy-tales written as love letters to the Brothers Grimm, and something like Shrek, which makes fun of their fairy tales. And the existence of the latter does not seem to make the former wrong.
As you say, getting monolidded eyes won't make you an asian. But similarly, having your penis turned into a vagina won't make you a woman in itself. But I also suspect that someone who is "really" transracial would (at least want to) be steeped in the culture into which they are trasitioning.
On your first paragraph, I think that's mostly correct. I see gender, biological or not, as fundamental to being human. Race is a modern social concept, like nationality. Underneath there is a more organic concept of culture that might play some role in this conversation.
Racial presentation is complex to me because it's so poorly defined in its correspondences. A white person raised with a Nigerian accent isn't pretending to be black. Skin color opens up a lit of complexities around colorism, but also things like Arabs being mistaken for Mexicans, etc. On dress, Sihk men, who by creed wear turbans, often get mistaken for Muslims because of this headgear. There's also the fuzzy race-culture distinction here. Even people who think donning another culture's dress is cultural appropriation in all circumstances don't think it's transracialism to do so.
But to my mind it just seems obvious that having the presentation and perhaps the biological features of a gender is equivalent to assuming that gender, whereas for race, you can't understand the experience of a given race without learning about an associated culture. Learning about other cultures is good, and there are some pathways if you want to become a primary member of that cultural community-- I offered conversion to Judaism as one I'm aware of.
But if you're actually enmeshed in a culture, then trying to imitate their racial features seems wrong, like you're reifing the shell after having obtained the kernel. It's hard for me to imagine someone who converts to Judaism then getting, e.g., a nose enlargement surgery. The presentational features of race are only a tangential part of the core culture, and even cultures open to outsiders joining do not want those outsiders to do things like this.
So it sounds as if your sticking point is that one cannot transition into another race, since race, among other things, depends upon having some sort of lived experience of being part of that race.
But surely there is also some part of being a woman which is having the experience of fearing going home alone at night, or something to that effect, which a trans woman will not have experienced prior to transitioning.
I don't see why the complexity of racial presentation makes it such that one cannot transition. Rachel Dolezal, for example, went a long time passing as a black woman, and so she must at least have partly succeeded in presenting as a black woman (whatever that entails). Even if you think that she did not do so faithfully, it is not hard to imagine someone being "better" at it than her, and having the right sort of cultural knowledge.
With regards to being accepted into the culture, this is partly what is at question - whether transracial people ought to be accepted into the culture. But with regards to whether it is possible, it is quite clear to me that it is: Consider someone with white parents, but who feels at home with "black culture", and watches all the tv shows, knows all the slang, has black friends etc. To "seal the deal", they get cosmetic surgery to look black as well, before moving into a black neighborhood. They would surely be accepted. And so it just seems quite clear to me that it is at least possible in principle to have the right sort of acknowledgement and acceptance occur.
This sort of acceptance might also become more widespread once more people become convinced of my position. And so the position would reinforce itself.
The disconnect in the above is that while there are plenty of white people raised in majority black areas who feel more or less integrated into that culture, the idea of someone getting their skin darkened to fit in more with black culture is totally crazy and would immediately upset anyone who knew about this.
I don't think the lived experience point is right. Being black, for example, is more than just facing antiblack discrimination. A lot of it is about culture, and I stand by the shell-kernel distinction I made before. The idea of making a physical transition to look more like a certain race in order to get more in touch with that culture makes no sense. Unlike with gender, racial presentation is a tangential part of the culture one is trying to integrate with. For gender, it's different, as gender presentation and the biological aspects of gender are core to gender identity.
I do think that you are certainly getting at something with the point that gender is more about presentation and race is more about a culture. But there is surely at least some part of racial identity which comes down to presentation, and at least some part of that comes down to skin color and facial features.
I think that ultimately it will just go back to the question of whether people can in fact have "transracial desires" if you will. But it is very hard for me to see why this should not be the case (for example in the case of someone growing up amongst people who are of a different race to themselves). There might of course not be the same neuro-physical basis as there is with transgender people, but there can surely still be the desire to belong to another race. And if someone reports such a desire, we should surely assume that they are not lying, unless we have independent reason to think that they are.
There will probably still be people outraged at someone having their skin color changed to sadistfy such a desire. But there are also TERFs who are outraged at transgender people for ruining the fight for women's rights.
I've been trying to stay away from the empirical since that's the way you framed the conversation, but I would be really surprised if someone who grew up in a different racial-cultural community actually thought that changing their skin color or facial features would matter, and I don't think you really observe this. Maybe someone could genuinely report such feelings authentically, but even then, there is no way we can compel members of that racial-cultural community to accept someone who changes their body in such a way as one of their own.
Part of the difference with gender is that the two genders each make up half of every society, and have always been engaged in a dialectic with each other. Cultural communities, on the other hand, are independent. Someone who is black has ancestors that are black and have a link to the history of black people in a certain region or country. For gender, however, everyone has ancestors of both genders, and the experience of one gender or another covers an extremely broad spectrum of the human experience. I guess part of the issue is that I don't accept TERFs or anyone else putting a box around what one gender or another should be, whereas I think a culture should be able to internally set the rules of what being part of that culture is about.
Gender dysphoria is probably internal map of one's body not corresponding to reality, similar to "extraneous limb" thingy (I want to call it "phantom limb", but phantom limb is thinking you have a limb you don't, while I mean the also-existent opposite syndrome where a person has a limb but feels like it isn't their part). The idea that internal map of one's body includes a term for one's race (unlike a term for one's sex) is somehow dubious.
I think we should spend more time with the question of why we should honor social constructs, such as gender or race, and how and why they can be legitimately challenged.
I mean, I think the world would be a better place if we just stopped caring about things like gender and race. But it's hard to see how that could happen in reality. But by, for example, accepting people crossing the "boundaries" of race and gender and the like, we at least help make it clearer that they are not as rigid as we might have thought in the past.
Yes, I think you answer it somewhat yourself. If we say that in order for us to accept transgender identity, there must be some neurophysiological basis, then it makes it so that we could in principle find out in the future that we ought not tolerate transgender identity, on the basis of empirical findings. But that should surely not be our position. Even if there is no neurophysiological difference between transgender people and other people, we should still respect them.
With respect to someone like Rachel Dolezal, I don't know what she was feeling, and how "real it was". But it is not hard to imagine someone who could feel transracial. Imagine someone with light skin, who is born and raised in a predominantly black community. They attend black churches, have black friends and are a part of the culture. It is at least not very far-fetched that they might feel more at ease in their own bodies, if they were to undergo cosmetic surgery in order to also appear black.
I don't know about your point with MRI scans, but I suspect that it could be explained by socio-economic differences between racial groups, which are accidental rather than intrinsic.