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veronicastraszh:

Choice is the key, I think, and a big part of privilege is being able to choose your battles.

And that’s the thing, a typical black person cannot just choose to be white. Nor could I choose to be cis — not that I would have, and not that (I suspect) most blacks would choose whiteness either. But still, there is a thing about choosing that separates what this woman did from what I did or from the choices blacks have available.

And look, Rachel Dolezal is not claiming to be “transracial.” In fact, the claim of “transraciality” is pretty flimsy and seems isolated to certain edges of the otherkin community (alongside some Poe’s Law style nonsense among the anti-trans crowd). Is there “race dysphoria” that matches the social and bodily dysphoria of trans people? Or is this in fact an attempt of a boring person to make their life seem interesting? (More on this below.)

Well, we cannot read anyone’s minds, but race as a social construct seems rather different from gender, insofar as gender exists atop human sexuality, and while many aspects of the human sex system are socially constructed, there is a core material reality.

Uteruses exist. Testicles exist. Testosterone does something different from estrogen. And note that the “genetic programming” that makes male bodies versus female bodies exists equally in all of us, except for one gene on the Y chromosome that when expressed causes another gene, not on Y, to cause the gonads to drop and develop into testicles, where otherwise they would develop into ovum.

That is it. That is human sex selection. Everything else is triggered by hormones, including the hormones present as the brain develops.

In other words, males have all the genes needed to make a uterus. Females have all the genes needed to make a penis. It is only the presence or absence of hormones that triggers the development. Is it the same in the brain? (Yes, probably.)

Does race work this way? Is there a chemical similar to hormones that causes “black brains” to develop differently from “white brains”? Are the genes that construct “blackness” found uniformly in everyone, just waiting from some anomalous condition to be expressed?

There does seem to be a deep connection between gender and social identity. We don’t understand it, but we cannot ignore it. David Reimer provides the most clear-cut case. (But note that psychologists work on gender did not reach their conclusions only from Reimer. There are reasons that all the major medical organizations support transgender rights.) Something in me needed to express femaleness and femininity and adopt a female social role, alongside my need for a female body. Those things happened together. For trans people, they frequently do.

Which is weird, and it means gender cannot ever be viewed in a simple way, no matter how much that would make feminist theory easier. But too bad. Truth is truth. Over the last fifty years trans people have made a convincing scientific and political case.

And while certainly melanin exists, there is no sign that this leads to any kind of fundamental, neurologically-based sense of identity the way gender does. Certainly history produces nothing that looks like this, whereas trans people show up throughout the historic record, long before we had a name for them.

(Which, it is risky to lay modern concepts onto the lives of historic people. Likewise, we cannot always know their motives, or whether their motives should make sense to us. For example, I have no way of knowing if the Priestesses of Cybele suffered gender dysphoria the way I do, nor if that is what led them to enter the cult. But I know they existed, and I suspect.)

“Transracialism” is right now being used as an explicitly anti-trans argument, including by people who create bogus Tumblr sites claiming silly and extreme version of such identities. (This is nothing new. These are like amateur versions of those trollish fake news sites.) The right-wing media-sphere is also glomming onto this.

Look, if “transracialism” is a real thing, rare but present, and associated with dysphoria, then I want to believe in it. If transracial people exist, I want to support them. However, if they are bored kids pretending, or white people trying to hook into a “cool factor” they feel they are missing, or worse for the status and publicity, then we should reject their claim.

In either case, this is a separate claim from what trans people make. It is a similar claim, but that is no accident. It should be expected that critics and hangers-on would adopt trans language for their pet theories. But details matter. You cannot just create an analogy, you must answer the challenge: does your analogy really fit?