The feminist philosophy journal Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis. The journal had published a peer-reviewed article by Tuvel in which she compared the situation of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. When the article was criticized on social media, scholars associated with Hypatia joined in the criticism and urged the journal to retract it. The controversy exposed a rift within the journal’s editorial team and more broadly within feminism and academic philosophy.
In the article—”In Defense of Transracialism”, published in Hypatia‘s spring 2017 issue on 25 April—Tuvel argued that “since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races”. After a small group on Facebook and Twitter criticized the article and attacked Tuvel, an open letter began circulating, naming one of Hypatia‘s editorial board as its point of contact and urging the journal to retract the article. The article’s publication had sent a message, the letter said, that “white cis scholars may engage in speculative discussion of these themes” without engaging “theorists whose lives are most directly affected by transphobia and racism”.
On 1 May the journal posted an apology on its Facebook page on behalf of “a majority” of Hypatia‘s associate editors. By the following day the open letter had 830 signatories, including scholars associated with Hypatia and two members of Tuvel’s dissertation committee. Hypatia‘s editor-in-chief, Sally Scholz, and its board of directors stood by the article. When Scholz resigned in July 2017, the board suspended the associate editors’ authority to appoint the next editor, in response to which eight associate editors resigned. The directors set up a task force to restructure the journal’s governance. In February 2018 the directors themselves were replaced.
And of course Rachel Dolezal was also demonized when she was outed as having been born white although claiming she was black. She was fired as president of the local NAACP, and, as Wikipedia notes, “dismissed from her position as an instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and was removed from her post as chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission in Spokane over ‘a pattern of misconduct'”. All for saying she was black when she was born white. I do believe Dolezal assumed her black identity honestly. It didn’t seem to be a ruse, and, indeed, why would she fake being a member of an oppressed minority unless she really believed it. It surely wasn’t a trick or a ruse.
Richard has been writing about this disparity/hypocrisy for years, most notably in his website post, “Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary.” The title is of course correct, but pointing it out on Twitter cost Richard the 1996 Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. And that was for simply raising the question of any relevant difference between being “transracial” or “transsexual”. The AHA acted shamefully in that case, and I’ve washed my hands of it.
Indeed, since race is more spectrum-ish than is sex, it would seem to be MORE JUSTIFIABLE to say you’re a member of a non-natal race than of a non-natal sex. After all, people like Barack Obama are of mixed ancestry, and can claim whatever they want with biological justification (in his case, white or black). But if he felt more Asian, why couldn’t he claim he was Asian? After all, race, like sex, is supposed to be a social construct.
This came back to me when I considered the case of Kat Grant and her essay for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which I documented here. That fracas resulted in my published response being taken down, with the consequence that I resigned from the FFRF along with Richard and Steve Pinker. And the FFRF declared that it dissolved the honorary board of which we were all members (though, curiously, it’s still on the web). Grant’s essay, “What is a woman?” implicitly accepted sex as a social construct and ended this way (bolding is mine):
All of this is to say that there is an answer to the question “what is a woman,” that luckily does not involve plucking a chicken from its feathers. A woman is whoever she says she is.
This fracas, which I call “The KerFFRFle,” has reminded me of the seeming hypocrisy of regarding both sex and race as social constructs, but allowing you to declare whatever sex you feel you are, but not allowing you to declare whatever race you feel you are. Transracialism would seem especially laudatory because one would think it would be a bold move to declare you’re of an oppressed minority group. (Again, I prefer “ancestry” or “population” to “race” for reasons I’ve explained many times.)
I am not taking a stand on these issues here, but merely trying, as did Richard, to understand the difference. And so I ask readers?
Why is it okay (indeed, applauded) to be transsexual but not transracial?
Why OK for one but not the other? Because the Grand Poobahs have decreed it so, and what they say is Law, not to be questioned, only obeyed and genuflected to.
Social fashion.
To me it is much the same as transexualism. I couldn’t care less what people want to be called or what role they want in social or intimate settings. If it “doesn’t break my bones or pick my purse”, I don’t care.
If someone wants to declare they are Napoleon Bonaparte, adapt an outrageous early 19th century French accent and even have eyes on the Crimea, it’s fine by me. If our new Boney is a black woman, they are simply “transracial and transexual” and I can go along with that too. But assent to their delusion for civility’s sake doesn’t mean we have a new, historically inaccurately colored, French Emperor…and the Crimea is safe. And I reserve the right to say so.
Off-the-cuff: it is about political destabilization and consciousness, not empirical science/medicine. The praxis is ruthlessly inconsistent, and the inconsistency drives praxis :
The dialectical potential and power in Queer identities – which is positioned to absorb a destabilized consciousness – advances Revolutionary praxis.
Escape of White Guilt by transformation into a black identity – even in thought-reform – shuts down Revolution, as the destabilized consciousness can possibly find stability. No power left to drive praxis – and the cult Inner School is the final arbiter of power. If whites want to transform by political activism alongside “People Of Color”, they can demonstrate penance for White Guilt as fragile Whites.
Both are gnostic, which is hard to perceive in the race case, so as illustration I present this quote which readers here know very well :
[begin quote]
Ida Bae Wells [Nikole Hannah-Jones ]
@nhannahjones
There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black. I am not defending anyone, but we all know this and should stop pretending that we don’t.
11:12 AM • 22 May 20 • Twitter Web App
[end quote]
… to see the gnosticism, consider whether some special consciousness is in play, revealing a hidden gnostic prison.
Nothing to do with a stable reality.
Addendum :
Consider Larry Elder – I don’t know a lot exactly about this politician, but AFAIK he garnered the epithet “The Black face of white supremacy”.
IOW the gnostic cult carved him out as an inauthentic Black political problem using the cult’s Black consciousness, i.e. Black gnosis.
Races have a clear oppressed/oppressor dynamic, as in “white” is typically an oppressor while “black” is typically oppressed. If one has lived their life as an oppressor, they are “privileged” and that has informed their identity. Therefore they cannot simply switch to an “oppressed” identity, especially if they still have all of the physical markings (i.e. white skin) of an oppressor.
For example, it would be considered obscene for a white man to suddenly “identify” as black, and then be admitted to Harvard as a black man perhaps under a special program to benefit “people of color”.
But we never see that with transgender. First, there is no “oppressed/oppressor” dynamic with men and women. Men and women have always been viewed as equal in all societies, everywhere.
Second, when is the last time you’ve seen a transgender person obviously try to game the system? Suppose a mediocre male athlete is fed up with being unable to compete with other men, and just decides to identify as a woman in order to now dominate a particular sport? It never happens.
So clearly there are massive differences between changing one’s gender and changing one’s race.
Or not. But move along now, no need to question. If you keep pointing out this “contradiction”, we may have to slap an “ist” label on you to silence you. That is how we do intellectual discourse today.
As an aside, I rarely agree with Ida Wells about anything, but I chuckle every time I see “Ida Bae Wells.” That’s just such a great nom de guerre.
…is this sarcasm?
I suspect so.
Of course it is. I thought it was obvious, but a bad attempt apparently.
You have my sympathies. Sometimes it’s a tough crowd here.
I still usually resist adding ‘/s’, on the general principle that humour which needs footnotes ain’t that funny. Taking an occasional pie to the face is all part of the process.
Happens all the time. Lia Thomas
(Hi. Having been a target of teasing about my name, I am somewhat reluctant to post this, but the Muse can be very insistent. Please do not take this at all personally. Or if you do, feel free to tease me about my name.)
Customer Service
There is no way you’ll shoo me home
You face much more than just a poem
Just call me Karen of the moaning, Karen
Just get right now the supervisor, (dickhead)
Just call me Karen of the moaning, Karen
Then slowly back away from me
And if it costs your job, all right
I won’t be victim of this shite
Just call me Karen of the moaning, Karen
Just get right now the supervisor, (moron)
Just call me Karen of the moaning, Karen
Then slowly back away (you’d really best not stay) from me
© 2025, no charge for nonpolitical noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.
(Inspired by an actual customer-service multi-fail)
That’s so weird. I was just thinking about Rachel Dolezal yesterday, which led me to thinking about this. It really doesn’t make sense. If a person declares they are trans, it adds another person to the struggle. If a white person declares that they are black, it would seem that the same applies, but it doesn’t. All I can think is that the creation of racial identity in this country has led to an exclusive identify that is racial fundamentally. “You can’t know what we’ve been through because you aren’t X.” Allowing people to declare that they are members of another racial group seems to undercut that, and, if other people can understand, it destroys the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. I think, though, that fundamentally, the issue is on the trans side. The trans category is more or less made up, and, although they search for it, there is no real history of trans or trans oppression. Therefore, anyone can join. Indeed, if it were exclusive, it wouldn’t exist, because how would they get more trans people.
All of this is such an alien way of “thinking” to me. It appears that the following is a valid syllogism in the minds of the “woke”:
1) Gender is a social construct imposed on individuals at birth, not a biological reality.
2) Because gender is a social construct imposed on a person, in a free society they can choose which gender they wish to identify as.
But this is also a valid syllogism:
1) Race is a social construct imposed on individuals at birth, not a biological reality.
2) Even though race is a social construct imposed on a person, in a free society they nonetheless can NOT choose which race they wish to identify as. This is because of [reason X].
Reason X is never stated. I doubt it exists. 30 seconds of analytic thought unveils a massive contradiction in the transgender movement, but it seems like approaching this contradiction is like walking up to a grizzly bear and trying to pet it. All non-rational ideologies function similarly….they maintain their nonsense through threats of intimidation.
I have made the point ad nauseam that being a “social construct” is not incompatible with reality, biological or otherwise. It’s simply a way of acknowledging that knowledge/facts are discovered (a social process), tested (a social process), transmitted in education (a social process), etc, etc. Ideally knowledge and facts come closer to reality as a discipline advances, and part of the progress of science has been to develop ways of testing or measuring how close our knowledge and facts are to reality, without claiming to have perfect knowledge of reality to start with.
Consequently, your syllogisms start with premises that are problematic. I’d recast them as follows:
• Gender is a social construct as well as a psychological reality.
• Individuals are not free to choose their gender, since it is present at birth; individuals are not free to choose their sex, since that is also present at birth.
• However, gender as a psychological reality is in rare cases not isomorphic with sex as a biological reality.
• Consequently, individuals may choose to identify themselves via their gender or via their sex.
Not a syllogism, but I think each statement is closer to being valid. Race, however, is a different kind of beast.
• Race is a social construct that selects and valorizes certain features of biological reality (and attributes to “race” additional features or qualities that may not be present in each individual.)
• Since race is based on the possession of certain features of biological reality, individuals cannot choose to be a member of a race that lacks those features. (Here, “race” in ordinary language is not the same as “population” in science. Many people of Black African descent are/were able to “pass” as White, but presumably they could credibly claim “Black” racial identity by establishing descent, just as Native Americans use descent as a basis for claiming membership in a Native tribe.)
• Certain biological features carry more cultural weight than others in determining race – Barack Obama could never credibly pass himself as White, though biologically he may have a large percentage of the biological features of “white” through his mother. But the biological features that mark him as Black outweigh the features that might be more often associated with being “White” – social construction again!
So I don’t see any serious contradiction in the trans assumption that identity can be based on gender or on sex, but race is based on possessing certain biological features. Perhaps the better analogy is people who “pass” — they have the choice of presenting themselves as one race or another, and they choose which depending upon a variety of circumstances. But they must still possess the features that allow identification with the race they choose.
Just a thought.
Re racial features carrying cultural weight, ISTM this is shown by there having been several Black Nationalist movements. But there have been no Transgender Nationalist or separatist ones (yet?); and the idea of such a thing seems prima facie “problematic”.
Those aren’t my syllogisms. They are the syllogisms of the trans movement, or at least my attempt to describe what they appear to think.
Barbara, you are missing the point. The question Jerry posed (and which was also the topic of Rebecca Tuvel’s essay) is why one is supposed to be able to chose/change one’s SEX (not one’s gender) but not one’s race – check again Jerry’s headline of for this post.
You talk about gender. This is not the issue. The issue is sex which, to use your words, “is based on the possession of certain features of biological reality.”
What trans activists want to do is to replace sex by gender anywhere – on ID documents, in sports, in prisons, in rape crisis centers, in hospitals, body searches (by police officers, customs officials, prison guards), in intimate medical care, etc. – which would imply the abolition of the category women in law.
And trans activists want to force everybody to go along with the contrafactual belief that a woman can have a penis. So we are not talking about self-identification here: You can identify as anything you want. The critical question is whether other people have to affirm your self-identification. In non-trivial cases the answer is no: identifying as a 65 year, while your are 30, will not get you an old-age pension; employers want to know whether you have the qualifications for a given job, not whether you imagine to have them; my landlord wants the rent at the start of the month, but cares not one bit about whether I identify as somebody who does not have to pay rent or who already paid the rent, etc.
I think Bryan is right (comment #4 above): Some people’s political agenda depends on using white guilt, and that is why you cannot change your race from white to black. So the answer to the ontological question Jerry posed is: POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY. That’s also why people like the Princeton anthropologist Agustin Fuentes argues for a new definition of sex so that sex becomes changeable. There is no scientific reason to change the definition of sex. The reason is political, though Fuentes denies this. But what reveals his motivation is that a) he refuses to tells us how many sexes there are, and b) he cannot show us what we gain scientifically from using his new definition of sex – what can we explain (explanation being the main business of science) with his new definition that we could not explain with the conventional definition (and how, for example, does the theory of sexual selection work with his new definition of sex?).
“The question Jerry posed (and which was also the topic of Rebecca Tuvel’s essay) is why one is supposed to be able to chose/change one’s SEX (not one’s gender) but not one’s race ”
But my point was that one CAN change one’s race, and people who “pass” as White do so, and did so, frequently. My take on that is that one must possess sufficient markers of the race one wants to claim to be able to make a credible case for being that race. (And, though it is a slightly different issue, the American category of “White”, racially, has expanded over time to include a number of populations that were excluded from it in the past, an expansion made possible because they possess sufficient physical markers of White-ness to allow the shift in racial category membership.)
And yes, my comment acknowledges that trans people — I don’t know about activists, which are a poor basis for understanding what the majority of trans people might think — valorize gender, a psychological trait, over sex, a biological trait, and I speculate that they do so because we are pretty good at modifying overt secondary sex characteristics through such means as “top” and “bottom” surgeries, but we are not very good at modifying psychological traits. As far as I am aware, the standard psychological interventions for trans people are designed simply to make them feel less troubled about their lack of isomorphism between body and mind, if I can put it that way, and a profound sense that one’s mental life is somehow authentic, while one’s body is not (see the literature on vegetative states versus paraplegia; so long as a person is conscious, their body is not relevant to “life”, but brain death — the absence of any psychological/mental activity — is enough to pull the plug….)
So I speculated that the issue might be that trans people do believe that they possess some important features of the opposite sex, focusing on gender, and so feel that transitioning is possible. And racial transitioning is also possible when a person possesses sufficient features of the ‘target’ race to be able to “pass”. I note the difference, for example, between Obama and Belle da Costa Green, who passed as “white” for her professional career, but could switch back to being Black when visiting her family, all of whom self-identified as Black.
Well, Barbara, I missed that you are arguing that one can change one’s race.
I disagree. I think one can neither change one’s sex nor one’s race. (Though one can make some other people believe that one is of different race than one actually is.)
RE:
According to the trans view of the world, the only marker for changing sex is the declaration that you feel to be a women. Why then should it be different for race?
Note that many trans-identifying people have not changed any of their secondary sex characteristics. That is because they are transvestites. They don’t believe they are women. They engage in cross-dressing and the invasion of female-only spaces because that excites them sexually. Why women should let themselves be abused by being forced to participate in this fetishistic peformance (and why this is, according to Joe Biden, the civil rights issue of our time) is beyond me.
When I first read of the Rachel Dolezal matter at the time—since she is from the Pacific Northwest, the case was widely reported out here—I thought that she must have perpetrated a fraud. But this was because of how the media portrayed it.
Upon a few minutes of reflection, I became more sympathetic. Why couldn’t she legitimately believe she is Black? Why shouldn’t she be able to identify publicly as Black? The analogy with gender* is clear—at least without further analysis. I’m glad that I’m not the only one who has come to accept her legitimacy, and I recall defending Dolezal at a social gathering. It got people thinking, but these are thoughtful people by their nature.
People cannot change their sex or race**, but they are in charge of what they believe about themselves and how they represent themselves in public (with few exceptions.)
I, too, would like to understand the difference.
*as distinct from “sex.”
**which is “spectrum-ish.”
But what is “gender” beyond whether or how much you align with (culturally specific) sex-based behaviour?
Excellent points.
Related: I got into trouble on a leftist site over an article about what Dems needed to do to win in the future.
I suggested one thing: no more men in women’s sports.
Huge pile on followed: all the usual arguments trotted out: sex is a spectrum, trans women don’t have a physical advantage, and it’s not common (that last one being the only true one).
Usual nastiness. The site “Reality’s Last Stand” by Colin Wright was said to be “right wing propaganda”!
I did get some likes on my comments but no one else was prepared to argue my side.
Right — I’ve gotten sideways with people who I thought might know better on this same issue — no more men in women’s sports. A certain losing issue for Democrats. Bums me out.
I see those “sciencey” posts featuring a few rare genetic variants or some steroid signaling pathways (not bad for a bright high school kid or a college sophomore or an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies) and try to explain, no, really, sex is binary and hey, placental mammals, immutable, and I know quite a lot about developmental genetics, and there are only half-educated sneers in return. At best.
(I’ll be late to bed, dear — someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet.)
There is no difference, and the intellectual incoherence of the whole project is shown by the vociferous insistence that there is one. There is no principle involved, just special pleading, all the way down.
(I think somewhere down in the stack are turtles who identify as tortoises, and TTAT.)
Well, I can’t answer your question because there’s no good answer. I just want to steer your readers to the (from my, possibly twisted, point of view) delightful story of Korla Pandit. A black kid from St. Louis went out to L.A. and fell in love with a white woman. They couldn’t get married in the United States, so they went to Mexico for that. They then came up with a brilliant idea to avoid all the crap they would get for being an interracial couple. He was light-skinned enough to pass himself off as the son of an Indian Brahmin and a French woman and he adopted that persona. He played the part to the hilt and played music of the “exotic East” on the organ. Produced many albums, had his own TV show (or at least part of one), had a long career and died without anyone knowing the secret. My general ethical stance would be against lying, but if you are doing it to get out from under someone’s bullshit, have at it. He did a great job of beating the incredibly shitty system and I congratulate him. If you haven’t heard the whole story, Google it. There are a couple good videos produced on it. Korla Pandit. A great story.
Reminds me a bit of the founder of the Nation of Islam, Wallace Fard Muhammad, of uncertain heritage, who self identified as belonging to various races at different points in his life. Fascinating case.
Needless to say, those of us in the trans-species community have been raising (or
barking about) the obviously related issue for years.
When the transgender ideology (and woke cliches generally) became commonplace, even orthodox, this revealed an unexpected historical lesson: the 20-year dominance of Lysenkoism in the galaxy far away was NOT just due to its enforcement by Communist state power; a tendency of this kind can spread from academia (where Lysenkoism began in the 1930s) to the whole society by other paths, as we have seen in the Anglosphere. Those other paths are worth detailed study by social psychologists, if any such study again becomes possible in what now remains of academia.
Re: Rachel Dolezal
While I would not consider her Black, she has 3 Black siblings. That is more than most Black folks.
And several black husbands/ex-husbands and some mixed race kids, I believe. It’s not all that hard to see why she may have identified as black (especially given her parents don’t seem to have been particularly sympathetic towards her).
“[According to Kat Grant,]…a woman is whoever she says she is Clearly, sex is a social construct here, and you can be whatever sex you want, regardless of your natal gamete-producing system.” – J. Coyne
If an individual’s sex is determined by nothing but an arbitrary speech-act of self-identification, then it is not a social construct but an asocial one imposed on others, being an expression of an anarcho-individualistic, egoistic attitude. For nothing is a social construct unless a group of people is interactively and constitutively involved in the “construction”. Otherwise it is just an “individual construct”.
“Why is it okay (indeed, applauded) to be transsexual but not transracial?” – J. Coyne
I’d add: “…or transethnic or transnational?”
Oliver, this is an excellent comment. I had not thought about this in this way. But I think you are right.
Fashion.
Despite her antisemitism and promotion of David Icke, Alice Walker still has her “Humanist of the Year” award…
Is David Icke pronounced “icky”? I wouldn’t want to mis-insult him.
Haha! It should be, but no it’s pronounced “Ike”, like Eisenhower’s nickname. And he used to be just a lowly sports presenter on TV (well, if you can call darts a “sport”).
Because they’re not oppressed!
Black Americans were indeed oppressed in the past, but have not been since about the 1980s, which is 40 years ago now. Indeed, since then and certainly in the 2000s there has been a strong preferential treatment of blacks in many areas of life, such as in admisson to universities and medical schools.
Famously, Ibram Kendi put out a Tweet complaining about the number of white students claiming some degree of Native American ancestry in admissions to universities — before he realised what this meant and deleted the Tweet.
I was asking myself the same question: How oppressed are black people in the US today?
How oppressed are Morgan Freeman, Jamie Foxx, Claudine Gay, Shonda Rhimes, Dionne Warwick, Stephen A. Smith, Barrack and Michelle Obama, Sasha and Malia Obama, Don Lemon, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, Charles Barkley, Tiger Woods, Barry Jenkins, Regina Smith, Denzel Washington, Chris Rock, Will Smith, Eddy Murphy, Kanye West, Beyoncé, Lauryn Hill, Tracy Chapman, Snoop Dog, Sean Combs, Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King, Wendy Williams, Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Roland Fryer, Questlove, Tyler Perry, Tracy Morgan, Spike Lee, Chrystal Dunn, Jaedyn Shaw, Naomi Girma, Casey Krueger, Jay-Z, Ego Nwodim, Michael Che, Kenan Thompson, Halle Berry, Viola Davis, Spike Lee, Trevor Noah, John Baptiste, Marcus Miller, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Joshua Redman, Coleman Hughes, Jordan Peele, Terry Crews, Quinta Brunson, etc., etc., etc. ???
The simple answer is that there are quite a few rich men who really really want to be women and they have the wealth and influence to promote the idea. No comparable lobby exists for transracialism
“Recognizing the need for better coordination and collaboration between donors and activists, Global Action for Trans* Equality, the Open Society Foundations, and Wellspring Advisors partnered to host a meeting for funders and activists working on gender diversity in December of 2013 in Berlin. Twenty-two trans* and intersex activists came together with 24 foundation and bilateral donors to learn, network, and together identify ways to better collaborate and coordinate to advance the rights of trans* and intersex people.”
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/advancing-trans-movements-worldwide
Depending on which way the “zeitgeist” evolves, in ten or twenty years “transracialist” might be as common as “transgender” is now. This doesn’t explain it at all.
I think that if anyone can declare their race you cannot have affirmative action. You cannot give everyone a leg up. But there are no special preferences awarded by gender (except admission to women’s prisons) so there is less need to restrict self declarations.
Wiping out race-based affirmative action by dissolving the categories on which it is based would be a good thing. Almost all race identity is self-identity, let’s face it. It depends on how poker-faced you can be when the hiring manager peers over her glasses at you, thinking what she dare not say, “You don’t look black to me. Isn’t there some blood test we can do?” Because at least in America, race is such an original-sin taboo, few people would actually try to pull this off for fear of being thought racist somehow,, which is what made the Dolezal affair so newsworthy and meltdown-inducing.
But there are many affirmative-action programs aimed at giving women a leg up, not just prisons: everything from “Believe all women!” through rape shelters and women’s sport to our new Prime Minister’s renewal of his predecessor’s pledge to appoint a gender-balanced Cabinet. (I think he means sex-balanced. AFAIK, there were no transgender MPs elected to his caucus.). Many firms have programs intended to mentor women, but not men, who have executive ambitions to address a “shortage” of women in the C-suite. Medical schools want to get women into family-unfriendly disciplines like neurosurgery. All of these AA programs are ripe for being queered and gamed by men self-identifying as women just to grab the benefit, and many already are, every day. Taboo forces seem not to be inhibiting such obvious pretendwomaning the way they strongly inhibit pretendblackening, and weakly inhibit pretendIndianing. Maybe that says something about the relative status of the groups that grifters pretend to be, not just the success the pretenders themselves have had at stealing the human rights limelight.
In the August or September 2015 issue of the Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal, Rogers Brubaker published an essay titled “The Dolezal affair: race, gender, and the micropolitics of identity.” This essay was assigned as reading material for a seminar on identity in America. Despite my repeated attempts to read it, I’ve realized that I lack the necessary background to comprehend its content. Perhaps others may be able to provide insights into this essay.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2015.1084430
From the abstract: This article treats the pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” in the intertwined discussion of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal as an intellectual opportunity rather than a political provocation. I situate the Dolezal affair in the context of the massive destabilization of long taken-for-granted categorical frameworks, which has significantly enlarged the scope for choice and self-fashioning in the domains of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexuality. Anxieties about opportunistic, exploitative, or fraudulent identity claims have generated efforts to “police” unorthodox claims – as well as efforts to defend such claims against policing – in the name of authentic, objective, and unchosen identities. Instead of a shift from given to chosen identities, as posited by theories of reflexive modernity, we see a sharpened tension between idioms of choice, autonomy, subjectivity, and self-fashioning on the one hand and idioms of givenness, essence, objectivity, and nature on the other.
From the conclusion: For most people, gender identity is more deeply bound up with the anatomical, physiological, and hormonal differences that are closely and consistently (though of course not perfectly) associated with socially de ned sex categories than racial identity is with the super cial phenotypic differences that are only loosely and variably associated with socially de ned racial categories. Yet paradoxically, gender identity is at the same time more autonomous from the socially classied sexed body than racial identity is from the socially classied racial body.
I asked my local AI to make sense of the abstract:
Rewrite the following into plain English. Skip the clearly obscurantist bits.
Its answer:
The comparison of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, both figures who challenged traditional identity categories, is viewed here as a chance for intellectual exploration, not just political debate. Dolezal’s situation highlights how our understanding of race, gender, and identity is changing rapidly, giving individuals more freedom to define themselves. However, this freedom has led to concerns about people falsely claiming identities for personal gain. This has resulted in attempts to control and regulate these identity claims, creating tension between the idea of choosing one’s identity and the belief that identity is something fixed and inherent. Instead of a simple shift from fixed to chosen identities, we see a continuing conflict between the ideas of personal choice and self-creation versus the concepts of essential, unchanging identities.
HTH
And re you lacking the necessary background to digest the original, thank your good fortune for that. This stuff is laced with toxic nonsense. True story — I saw a leaflet at an academic department announcing a seminar on some trendy postmodern topic. I tried, but just couldn’t decide whether it was genuine or a satire. See “Poe’s Law”.
Shouldn’t it be up to the members of the group of which one is claiming to be a member whether or not this claim is accepted?
In Canada, there have been a number of high-profile cases of people with no First Nations ancestry claiming that they are in fact members of particular indigenous groups. The reactions of these purported “relatives” have generally not been positive, partly because this ploy has frequently involved the acceptance of various kinds of support (anything from preferential hiring to acceptance of literary awards reserved for indigenous artists) to which nobody who is not indigenous is entitled.
But a lot of the blowback has been, I think, because First Nations groups feel pretty strongly that it’s up to them to say who’s a member, not someone who makes a claim and expects everyone to accept it on their say-so. It’s a matter of controlling their own identities.
I don’t think pretendians are contesting the right of a First Nation to decide who its members are. Pretendians aren’t sincere. They’re fakes. They know that they aren’t indigenous and are simply seeking benefits that flow from being thought indigenous in a generic sense, not as members of a specific First Nation. As soon as they are unmasked they try to disappear. They don’t press their cringe-worthy cases.
There is a category of disputes between a First Nation and the Canadian Indian Affairs Department (the name changes periodically; I’m going for brevity) as to who decides whether a person who really is indigenous can be considered a member of a First Nation (with the entitlement to live tax- and rent- free on that Nation’s Reserve and receive a treaty stipend from Ottawa.) These are usually clashes between customary aboriginal law and Canadian Human Rights law — aboriginals are Canadian citizens entitled to the same human rights protections as all other Canadians, regardless of what their Nations say. An example would be whether, say, an indigenous woman who marries an white man can be expelled under customary law from the Band and banished from the Reserve. But we don’t call those women pretendians. We call them victims of human rights violations.
First-Nations groups tend to play along with pretendians (unless they want to come and live on a Reserve where they would be another mouth to feed.) The reason is that if someone who identifies as indigenous is doing well enough in public life to be the subject of media interviews, that reflects very favourably (even if undeservedly) on indigenous society, a nice corrective to the steady stream of bad news that comes out of the dysfunctional Reserve culture. In the example of Buffy Ste. Marie, the Saskatchewan Cree Nation, despite knowing full well that she was not indigenous, helped her concoct a story that had her being born on the Reserve to an mother who didn’t exist, then being fostered out to New England, to her real live birth parents. Buffy was fabulously useful to the Cree of Saskatchewan, bigger than anything they could have produced off their own bat. Their collusion helped defuse the initial public impression that she had played them for fools. Not at all. They got their money’s worth.
Pretendians know enough not to defraud First Nations out of cash. The idea is to advance one’s career in the prediction that being indigenous will get you a leg up over non-indigenous competitors, not to advantage you against indigenous people, who are generally not competitive with pretendians. Anything that holds preferential hiring up to ridicule is fine by me, though.
I’m not aware of any pretendian winning any of the obscure awards reserved for indigenous artists. It is likely that some Canadian arts contests ostensibly open to all are tilted toward producing indigenous winners. That’s how we roll here. But unless the contest says only indigenous contestants will win, there is no cause to investigate whether the the indigenous winner was really indigenous in terms of eligibility. Naturally a big deal is made of it if an indigenous artist wins — we are expected to pretend we don’t know it was fixed — and if he turns out to be a pretendian that makes everyone look silly.
For a gray-area pretendian case, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Boyden
In the Wikipedia article you cite, it states that Joseph Boyden won one literary award “based on heritage”, according to him – he also said that it wasn’t worth a lot of money. He also admits to “taking up too much of the ‘air space'”, presumably crowding out genuine First Nations.
Sounds to me like someone who tried to capitalize on an imagined heritage.
By the by, I went to high school with his brother. Never a whisper about indigenous heritage from him back then, although he’s now backing up his brother’s claims.
Wokal Distance explained this a few years ago on X: https://x.com/wokal_distance/status/1297057378953621511
My takeaway from his thread is that it’s basically the difference between Queer Theory and CRT.
CRT sees race as a political category. Oppressed racial groups should organize around their identity to push for change. Queer Theory, on the other hand, wants to break down categories entirely. It treats all norms as fluid and all boundaries as up for debate.
In that sense, organized TERFs are actually more similar to BLM than to trans activists. Both believe you can’t just identify into an oppressed group.
+1
That’s good, yes.
“TERFs” don’t think you can just identify into being a man, either.
The biological side (mixed-race children) aside, it is worth noting that there is also a wealth of historical examples of social ethnic (racial) transition.
Gonzalo Guerrero adopted a Maya identity after getting shipwrecked on Yucatan, and did so to the point of repeatedly fighting the Spanish conquistadors later on. Examples of captured Europeans being adopted by North American tribes, with the captives adopting a native identity, are numerous – Quanah Parker is a particularly famous case (okay, his mother was the one being captured). A slightly less famous example is the peace treaty after Pontiac’s war outright demanding the return of European children captured and adopted by native tribes simply because it was so common. Not all of them appreciated it.
A case that SHOULD be famous because it’s honestly fascinating is that of Francisco Félix de Souza, a Portuguese/Brazilian slavetrader who settled in Dahomey (modern Benin & surroundings), learned the local language (normal), started to practice the local religion (Vodun; decidedly less normal), and assimilated thoroughly into local society. Lived to 94, too.
Going from individual cases to entire societies, we do, of course, have examples such as the Greeks deciding they were actually Roman (Rhomaioi) or Norse settlers in France eventually deciding they were French (and after some confusing conquests, also English). Some might argue that these people were still the same ‘Race’, but the social construct ‘Race’ is of course fluid, and it should not surprise anyone that neither the Greeks of 100 BC nor the Norse of 900 AD thought of themselves as being the same kind as the Romans or Franks, respectively.
While the trans rights movement is quick to point at people like Joanne of Arc or the woman buried in the Brika grave Bj 581 as ‘Historical Trans People’ (because donning weapons and armour is exclusive to men and any woman doing so must have thought herself a man, I assume. That’s progress for you. Girls only play with dolls, don’tcha know?), in terms of transracialism, world history actually is full of people who choose to immerse and identify with another ‘race’. But this is, of course, ignored.
Re mixed-race children, I now have a policy of answering census-like questions with “Other: mixed”. Genetically, almost everyone can honestly give that answer, and it’s not provocative (unlike “Other: none of your business”, or “Other: We don’t need your steenking categories”).
My guess is that there’s no single reason, but part of the answer may somehow involve the fact that it’s still socially acceptable to treat men and women differently and to be masculine if you’re a man and feminine if you’re a woman, but making a social or psychological distinctions between the races is considered racist.
“He’s all boy, a real bruiser” and “she’s such a lady, elegant and refined” — vs — “He acts black” or “Asians are so exotic and mysterious.”
Thus a man who insists he knows he’s a woman may acceptably point to a desire to wear frilly dresses and lipstick as evidence or authentication, but a white man who insists he knows he’s black can’t point to his innate love of hip hop and fried chicken to demonstrate he has the wrong skin tone and genetics. The first man will claim that because he wasn’t “assigned female at birth” he’s ENDING sexist stereotypes instead of promoting them, whereas the white man can’t make the same convoluted argument as convincingly.
Maybe.
“…part of the answer may somehow involve the fact that it’s still socially acceptable to treat men and women differently and to be masculine if you’re a man and feminine if you’re a woman, but making a social or psychological distinctions between the races is considered racist.”
The problem is that “trans women” don’t just claim to men who want the prerogative to behave in ways that society deems feminine; they claim to be women, full stop.
Indeed, not so different from an anorexic claiming to be fat and thus needing to go on a strict diet, or a schizophrenic claiming to be Augustus Caesar and thus entitled to all the respect and deference thereby due.
I had deleted this post for revision but it is still up – what gives?
Indeed, not so different from an anorexic identifying as fat and thus needing strict dietary restriction to lose weight, or a schizophrenic identifying as Augustus Caesar and thus due the requisite deference and respect from others.
I knew a black man who was albino. He had all the Negroid physical characteristics but with very white skin. His life was, needless to say, complicated.
One view of transgender identity regards it as a form of neurodiversity, possibly caused by atypical pre-natal hormone expression.
The bitter conflicts over trans-politics has made research difficult, as one side or the other will give you hell if they don’t like what you say.
I hope I can get away with leaving this here:
Clearly, this is a glaring contradiction in Pseudo-Woke Fake Left ideology. An even more glaring contradiction is the avowal of feminism and gay rights as universal Good Things at the same time as having an ideological alliance with Islamism which is the most misogynistic, and homophobic ideology on the planet. Same goes with Fake Left knee-jerk Jew-hatred based condemnation of Israel and equally knee-jerk acceptance as truth on a par with Abrahamic religions’ divine revelations of every lie and slander put forward by the global Qatar financed Islamist lie machine in the project of demonizing and isolating Israel.
I don’t think you can compare sex (universal, old) with race (local, recent) just because transsexualism and transracialism look like very similar mental conditions. Transracialism is purely psychological: it’s information encoded in your brain. Transsexualism could, in some cases, have a genetic basis (some transsexuals seem to be at the most feminine end of the gay spectrum). The key difference is that we are talking about two different kinds of information: genes and neurons.
“Why is it okay (indeed, applauded) to be transsexual but not transracial?”
Because in the case of race, around half of any racial category are going to be male, i.e., actual people, whose interests and boundaries obviously deserve respect.
Zing!
Cultural appropriation: BAD!
If I’m forbidden to wear cornrows, then going the Full Monty is also forbidden.
Please don’t shoot the messenger, I didn’t make the rules. If the rules don’t make any sense (or are just plain wrong), it’s pointless philosophising over it. We can talk about the Luminiferous Ether all day and how Santa rides its waves to be able to deliver all the presents in time – but if the theory is garbage, everything else that follows from it necessarily is too.
This comment may add another factor into the equation to think about:
What happens in the category of disability?
Disability is a defined category. The definition and scope of the word’s meaning does vary a little. But, I had a thought yesterday: ‘What if disability had such a broad scope of meaning that gradually it became to encompass everyone? If everyone is disabled, then, sort of, no-one is disabled. This would be an effective way of erasing the real disabled people. Here in the UK we have laws protecting disabled people, but many on the right and far left seem to want to throw away more old fashioned understandings of disability entirely. For, if indiscernably mild autism is now a disability on a par with being in a wheelchair, then ever larger groups of otherwise dominant people can claim that they are not in fact dominant, and therefore escape the accountability for their unfair position and status in society. Bending the rules for their own economic gain is what they are good at, and it’s why we see unfair proportions of healthy, white, middle class go-getter types adjusting the rules, in their positions as ‘education leaders’ and generally in the civil service, for example, to suit themselves and their children (Britain has a bad nepotism issue, not to mention the obsession with ‘lineage.’)
How many people from, for example, East Africa or South America, in the UK, do we see fretting about what words to use, or how to ‘define’ ourselves? These folks are much less likely to be in leadership in education, or working diligently in a civil service job for the department of education, let’s say. Why? Because their parents had to walk to get water everyday, which is a job for the girls. Why? Because they speak Somalian or Tigrayan as a mother tongue. Why? Because they care more about whether their families will have to live through another armed conflict or whether the rains will come. These are important differences between the British white liberal middle class (self serving and, yes, judgemental- and I shall refer to them as the BWLM from now on) and the true minority groups, such as those from the global south. We have been bullied into silence by the BWLM and their embarassing ideas for the last 10 years. They really do not have a claim to any level of hardship, they just feel ashamed and that is why they are trying to appropriate hardship for themselves; in order to escape BWLM accountability, in order to avoid letting go of their BWLM status and let some newbies have a go.
While I agree that sex and race(or geographic population) are of the same ilk, I actually think we should be using science to protect truth and academic excellence. So, these categories need to stay in place for data and research, granted. Geographic population, sex, and class are factors, but they are also sets within sets. The bigger set may be ‘humans’ (very interesting) or ‘geographic continents’ or even ‘language’ or ‘water’. We could build such a great chart of sets and subsets that makes sense of the living world, but to do it scientifically we would need to make the parameters of each set or subset clear. The idea of ‘binary’ or ‘spectrum’ is a trick used by the BWLM political class. We should be using sets and subsets.
The problem is that the small subsets are being weaponized by extreme politians, in order to stifle truth seeking and open discussion, and therefore democracy, which is a disaster. The squeezed BLWM are not helping at all with their ridiculous and embarrasing capitulation to this problem.
So, there is my answer to the question of ‘why is it ok to say you are of non natal sex, but not to say you are of non natal race.’ The subsets have been politicized by the BWLM (and the American equivalent I imagine) in order to preserve the status quo and avoid economic accountability. There is also a more sinister factor at play, that the BWLM are implicitly attempting to strengthen their own wealth and status, by rendering categories such as ‘disabled’ as so diluted and arbitrary as to be ridiculous. Which again, means they can galvanise their economic security, and use their low-key political status to trample on anyone outside of their specific group. A further question might be, will the BWLM ever truly align themselves with the poor? And how might they do this?