Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
A while back there was some discussion about whether people could claim that they were members of a race/ethnicity other than the one they were born into. The paradigmatic example was Rachel Dolezal, a white woman in Spokane, Washington who claimed to be black, and altered her appearance to match her claims. She worked her … Continue reading Why can’t you be transracial?
This event was more or less inevitable given that organizations can allow people to change their genders (a social construct) but won’t allow them to change their race (another social construct). That is, many people and groups approve of “transgenderism” but strongly oppose “transracialism”. It’s a mystery to me why, if you feel you’re of … Continue reading Chicago cop, citing gender precedent and seeking affirmative-action benefits, prevented from changing race to person of color from Caucasian
When my colleague, coauthor, and conspirator in crime Luana Maroja, a professor of evolutionary biology at Williams College, was teaching a short summer course at The University of Austin, she was interviewed on video about sex and gender issues by Peter Boghossian, also teaching at the U of A. The interview, below, speaks for itself: … Continue reading Peter Boghossian interviews Luana Maroja (and a note on “transracialism”)
Not long ago I pondered the question of whether someone could be “transracial”, saying that they feel like (and assuming the accoutrements of) a member of a race that was not their natal race. After all, if you can be transgender, why not transracial? Rachel Dolezal, a white woman from Spokane who passed for black, … Continue reading Jesse Singal sees no problem with transracialism
The title of Richard Dawkins’s new article in Areo (below) is one I pretty much agree with, and in his analysis he covers a lot of ground. His main point, though, is that determining one’s “race”, which is said to be a social construct with no biological basis (that part isn’t true) is far more … Continue reading Richard Dawkins in Areo on race and sex
The question of how we compare someone like Rachel Dolezal, who assumed the identity of an African-American although she was white, with someone like Caitlyn Jenner, who transitioned from a male to a female, is a philosophically interesting ethical question that, unfortunately, has been declared almost taboo. If you even raise it, as Richard Dawkins … Continue reading A new comparison of transgender and transracial identities
I still don’t have a firm opinion about, or anything much to add to, the case of Jessica Krug, who resigned her history professorship at George Washington University yesterday after revealing that she wasn’t really the Afro-Latina woman woman she’d pretended to be her whole academic career, but a white Jewish woman from Kansas City. … Continue reading What to make of Jessica Krug?
The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, isn’t being very friendly, nor charitable, to Richard Dawkins. This is based on a tweet that Dawkins made comparing “trans-racialism”—as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who pretended she was black—with transsexualism. Hemant has thus deemed Richard “transphobic” and implicitly demanded that he be removed from the … Continue reading The Friendly Atheist is not so friendly, damns Richard Dawkins as “transphobic” for comparing transexualism with transracialism
