Hmmm. This is a delicate topic, but one worth investigating. For context, the people being referred to in the video are Bruce Jenner and Rachel Dolezal.
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2 comments
June 29, 2015 at 9:16 am
M.M.J. Gregory
The way I’ve been trying to explain it (as a cisgender, white person) is that gender happens mostly internally while race happens mostly externally. Other than a few differences in disease risk and melanin levels, race is entirely a social construct. If we lived in a world where all races had always been treated equally, maybe changing appearance wouldn’t be a big deal. But we don’t, we never have.
A lot of our ideas about gender are social constructs too, but there is a significant difference: gender isn’t genitals, it’s mental. We literally feel male or female, or genderfluid, or genderqueer. Gender representation is something that the world forces on us, but gender itself isn’t.
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June 29, 2015 at 10:44 am
Reneta Scian
As a person with a very intimate understanding of gender for reasons beyond my control, would like to add something to this. Every piece of evidence about gender, gendered behaviors (both among humans and other animals), and gender identity points to there being an evolutionary cause and an involved biological mechanism. Gender (in this sense) is something that humans and other mammals share. To say it’s in the mind, as if it was purely psychological is inaccurate. To say that gender is inconsequential is also incorrect. Yes, gender and sex are things that are part of language and social construction, but they are also a very valid part of our human experience. There is precedence, study, research and sound science beyond public opinion on the side of transition over conversion, for innateness and against pathologization. Just like Conversion Therapy, psychotherapy and medication failing to make gay people straight, it likewise fails to convert transgender people.
There is no similar paradigm or evidence for transracialism, and as such they are incomparable. Further, to support any case without evidence otherwise is harmful to the groups of people to which it pertains. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), and other transphobic ideologues have tried to further ideas like this comparison before as a way to marginalize trans voices and experiences, and invalidate transgender identities, and all should be aware of the dubiousness of its claims. Transitioning genders is in no way comparable to black face, or fabricating an identity as a person of another race, as they are not at all similar. However, if such evidence could be found and presented to demonstrate transracialism being as essential as one’s sense of gender, I’d be fully willing to review it and change my position. But until such a point, I will maintain the scientific position that “transracial” is in no way comparable to transgender, and any such comparison would be a logical fallacy of false equivocation.
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