Category: interview

Bari Weiss interviews Roland Fryer

February 21, 2024 • 12:45 pm

A lot of readers and heterodox colleagues have sent me this link to Bari Weiss’s interview with Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., often accompanied by big encomiums. Despite my unwillingness to watch long videos, I did watch all 77 minutes of it.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t mesmerized, or even much interested. There are interesting bits in it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. Readers who see it, or have seen it and feel otherwise, please weigh in below.

Fryer is famous for two things: his prize-winning economic and sociological work, which sometimes produced counterintuitive results, and also for his suspension from Harvard for two years for sexual harassment. (He’s now back again.) I have only a few comments, but here’s the intro from the Free Press on YouTube:

Roland Fryer is one of the most celebrated economists in the world. He is the author of more than 50 papers—on topics ranging from “the economic consequences of distinctively black names” to “racial differences in police shootings.” At 30, he became the youngest black tenured professor in Harvard’s history. At 34, he won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, followed by a John Bates Clark Medal, which is given to an economist in America under 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

But before coming to Harvard, Fryer worked at McDonalds—drive-through, not corporate.

Fryer’s life story of rapid ascent to academic celebrity status despite abandonment by his parents at a young age, and growing up in what he calls a “drug family” is incredibly inspiring in its own right. Because based on every statistic and stereotype about race and poverty in America, he should not have become the things he became. And yet he did.

He also continues to beat the odds in a world in which much of academia has become conformist. Time and time again, Fryer refuses to conform. He has one north star, and that is the pursuit of truth, come what may. The pursuit of truth no matter how unpopular the conclusion or inconvenience to his own political biases.

He’s also rare in that he isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong, or to admit his mistakes and learn from them.

Bari Weiss sat down with Roland at the University of Austin for this inspiring, courageous, and long-overdue conversation.

The parts I found most absorbing are these:

  1. Fryer’s rough upbringing, raised without a mother and with most of his acquaintances being killed. And, of course, working at the McDonald’s drive-though before college.
  2. His famous paper showing that although there is police bias against blacks for some legal infractions, there is no racial bias in the Big Issue: police shootings. Fryer describes how he had to get police protection for over a month after that paper came out, for its conclusion violated the Aceepted Narrative and angered many people.
  3. His suspension from Harvard and closure of his lab. Fryer appears to have taken it well, but does explain that the incident involved his failure to understand “power dynamics”, for which he’s apologized. It’s curious, and has been pointed out by many, that Claudine Gay, who was a dean at the time (and later President of Harvard), was instrumental in getting Fryer punished. This makes Weiss ask Fryer at one point, “do you believe in karma?”  I can’t say much more about this as I haven’t followed the controversy, but I know many people think Fryer’s punishment was unduly harsh.

A Q&A session begins 49 minutes in.

Pinker on “What’s wrong with our universities”

February 9, 2024 • 12:45 pm

Here’s a new one-hour interview of Steve Pinker by John Tomasi, inaugural president of the Heterodox Academy.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and today, we’ll be exploring the growing concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we’ll be discovering the challenges to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We’ll explore how questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit of truth within academic institutions. We’ll also uncover the story of the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to combat these challenges.

Join us as we delve into policies protecting free speech, and the vital role of civil discourse in the academic community. Together, we’ll navigate the complex landscape of universities, grappling with the delicate balance between common knowledge and the suppression of dissenting opinions.

The audio isn’t great, but you should be able to hear what’s said.

As background, you might first read Steve’s Boston Globe op-ed, “Steven Pinker’s five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” which is now free online (my take on it is here).  This was published before Claudine Gay was fired as President, and perhaps Harvard will now enact some of Pinker’s suggestions.  These include adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.

I won’t summarize the video, as there’s a lot of stuff discussed here, and if you have a spare hour you can listen for yourself. In general, it deals with “cancel culture” and also goes through Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” and why he suggests a panoply of specific reforms.

h/t: Daniel

Douglas Murray interviews Benjamin Netanyahu

January 30, 2024 • 9:15 am

I am feeling poorly today, so posting may be light. I do my best.

I know that the name “Netanyahu” is synonymous for “Satan” in most people’s minds, and he’s often completely dismissed or ignored. Douglas Murray, too, is often dismissed as being too conservative  or xenophobic. But you’d be missing out if you didn’t at least watch this new 32-minute video of Murray interviewing the Israeli Prime Minister. It’s entirely about the war, and Murray doesn’t refrain from asking hard questions, like what responsibility Netanyahu bears for the October 7 attacks, what he thinks of all the Israelis who dislike him, and so on.

But I found most of it enlightening, especially on the topics of Gaza, Qatar and Iran.  The Prime Minister pulls no punches about Gaza, insisting that there is no solution beyond “total victory” over Hamas, and that victory will have a huge effect on deterring other countries in the region, including Iran.  After watching this, I’m convinced that Netanyahu will not accept any kind of ceasefire.

As for “what about afterwards?”, Netanyahu says that Israel will supervise Gaza when hostilities end, though I don’t know how that would work or would go down with the world.

Netanyahu says that although Qatar seems to be playing a double attitude towards the war (hosting Hamas leaders while brokering peace), Netanyahu insists that Qatar must use its “considerable influence” to get the hostages free immediately, as well as providing them with medicine.  What if it doesn’t? Well, Netanyahu will have some words with Western countries.

Finally, the Prime Minister says that Iran simply must not be permitted to develop nuclear weapons, for it’s already inciting violence without them, and it’s horrible to imagine what they could do with nukes.  He insists that the civilized world cannot allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons.  (Murray misses the chance to ask “how can the West do that?”)

Again, I strongly recommend that you take half an hour and watch this. I didn’t want to at first, but now I’m glad I did.

Sam Harris on free speech, the Middle East war, religion, and proportionality

January 19, 2024 • 10:15 am

In terms of extemporaneous eloquence, I suppose Sam Harris is the closest living “Horseman” to Christopher Hitchens. (How many of you have wondered, over the last 13 years, “What would Hitch have written about this?”) But it’s a close race given that the other two living members of the quartet are Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins, no wallflowers on the platform.

What strikes me is that Sam always speaks, as he does here, in perfectly constructed sentences and paragraphs, and has it all in his head the moment he starts speaking. He’s respond to questions with answers that began “Well, there are two separate points you bring up.” I couldn’t even come close: but the time I mentioned the first point, I would have forgotten the second.

This video of Piers Moragn interviewing sam is short (13 minutes) but covers a fair amount of ground. Here’s the YouTube summary.

Piers Morgan Uncensored is joined by philosopher, author and YouTuber Sam Harris for an open debate on the ideals and limitations of free speech, as well as the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Palestine as the IDF is slowly losing its country’s support in their conquest against Hamas due to their methods of attack.

Sam also discusses with Piers Morgan how religion and God have played a part in this conflict and could be partly to blame for the escalation.

The conversation begins with Sam explaining why social-media platforms do not and should not adhere to a First-Amendment construal of free speech. If sites like Twitter (X) weren’t cleaned up, they’d become toxic cesspools. Elon Musk, says Sam, isn’t really the “free-speech absolutist” he pretends to be. Sam and Piers go off on Alex Jones and his Sandy-Hook denialism—one example of how unregulated speech on social media can cause damage.

The discussion of the Hamas/Israel war begins about 3:33, with Sam emphasizing that the war is really based largely on Muslim religious beliefs (and to a much lesser extent on Jewish religious beliefs), and we can understand it much better when we realize that the jihadis really believe what they say they believe: their actions will land them in heaven. He also notes the special standards that Muslims claim for themselves, sometimes because of “the tendency of the Muslim community to erupt with psychopathic rage in response to what it perceives to be the desecration of religious symbols.”

A much longer discussion of the pernicious effects of religion on terrorism is found in Sam’s “bright line” monlogue linked below.

Finally, at 9:34 Morgan asks Sam his thoughts about whether the massive damage inflicted on Gaza by the IDF would actually increase the radicalization of Hamas.  Sam then addresses the “disproportional” ratio of of Gazan civilian deaths to Israeli deaths as a purported reason to end the war. You can see his answers by listen to the video.

If this leaves you wanting more, do go hear Sam’s hourlong monologue, inspired by the war, called “The bright line between good and evil” from his Making Sense podcast. It’s absolutely brilliant, and much more an analysis of morality and religion than of the politics of the war.

A moving interview

January 17, 2024 • 9:15 am

Two readers sent me this 44-minute video posted by Tom Gross, showing Emily Hand, a 9-year-old girl kidnapped by Hamas, comforting her father Thomas, an Irishman, as he’s interviewed by Piers Morgan. (Hand’s wife died of cancer, and Thoma’s ex-wife, who served as Emily’s stepmother, was killed by Hamas.) It’s ineffably moving to see young Emily stroke her father’s face, wiping the tears from his eyes as he recounts the family’s ordeal.

You may remember Thomas Hand saying, when he thought his daughter was dead in Gaza, that her death was probably for the best, for her fate would have been worse had she been taken alive:  he imagined what Hamas would do to Emily.(A clip from that interview is at 11:42.) I’m sure he feels differently now! But he did have to explain to Emily, after she returned, that her stepmother was dead.

My friend said this:

You have to watch this—it’s insanely powerful. I’m crying.  He just lays it all out. Makes me want to move to Israel and help. . .

Towards the end, Thomas Hand gets very angry and calls Western university students “idiots”. . . and he mentions Harvard.

Here are Tom Gross’s notes:

Thomas Hand, the Irish-born father of Emily Hand who was released after 50 days in Hamas hell, gave an in-depth interview yesterday evening to Piers Morgan on Britain’s TalkTV. Emily was 8 when she was kidnapped and turned 9 in captivity.

One viewer said: “How she wiped her father’s tears, caressed and cared for him when he started to cry in the interview. Melted my heart.”

Also of note is when Thomas Hand says ignorant critics of Israel in the West “don’t know a thing” and have “no idea what they are talking about”.

Hand is no conservative: he brought up Emily on a kibbutz because he liked its socialist atmosphere. As for Emily’s kidnapping during a sleepover and the attack on the kibbutz, you’ll have to listen to the interview.

Three bits are worth noting: about 30 minutes in, Thomas explains how he told Emily that her stepmother/caretaker was dead. (See especially from 31:15 on.)

At 32:25, the discussion turns to politics, Israel’s response, and how the West has reacted. Thomas gets quite exercised, especially when he gets to the accusation that Israel is an “apartheid state.”

At 43:00, Piers asks Thomas to ask Emily (in Hebrew) how she felt when she saw her father again after her release.

A final word from me: of the roughly 200 people taken hostage by Hamas, from several countries, about 136 remain in Gaza. That there is no world outcry about this; that the UN hasn’t condemned Hamas for this; and that the Court of Justice in the Hague is not putting Hamas on trial for real genocide, including taking civilian hostages, firing rockets into Israel, swearing to keep attacking Israel until all the Jews are dead (as specified in its charter) and many other terroristic war crimes—all of this should bring deep shame to the West

As with many YouTube videos, this one is periodically interrupted with annoying advertisements.  Nothing is immune from being monetized these days.

Dan Dennett: a new book and an interview in the NYT

August 27, 2023 • 12:00 pm

I recently finished Dan Dennett‘s new autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking (cover below; click to get an Amazon link), and I was deeply impressed by what a full life the man has had (he’s 81).  I thought he spent most of his time philosophizing, writing, and teaching philosophy at Tufts; but it turns out that he had a whole other life that I knew little about: owning a farm in Maine, sailing all over the place in his boat, making tons of apple cider, hanging out with his pals (many of them famous), and traveling the world to lecture or study. Truly, I’d also be happy if I had a life that full. And, as Dan says in his interview with the NYT today, he’s left out hundreds of pages of anecdotes and other stuff.

Although I’ve taken issue with Dan’s ideas at times (I disagree with him on free will and on the importance of memes, for example), you can’t help but like the guy. He’s sometimes passionate in his arguments, but he’s never mean, and of course he looks like Santa Claus. Once at a meeting in Mexico, I was accosted by Robert Wright, who was incensed that I’d given his book on the history of religion a bad review in The New Republic.  Wright plopped himself down beside me at lunch, so I was a captive audience, and proceeded to berate and harangue me throughout the meal. It was one of the worst lunch experiences I’ve ever had.

Because of Wright’s tirade, I was so upset that, after the meal was done, I went over to Dan, jumped in his lap, and hugged him (telling him why). I was greatly relieved, for it was like sitting on Santa’s lap. Now Santa, who’s getting on, has decided to sum up his career. The book is well worth reading, especially if you want to see how a philosopher has enacted a life well lived.

In today’s paper there’s a short interview with Dan by David Marchese, who has been touted as an expert interviewer. I didn’t think that Marchese’s questions were that great, but read for yourself (click below):

I’ll give a few quotes, mostly about atheism and “other ways of knowing,” First, the OWOK. Marchese’s questions are in bold; Dennett’s responses in plain text. And there are those annoying sidenotes that the NYT has started using, which I’ve omitted.

Right now it seems as if truth is in shambles, politics has become religion and the planet is screwed. What’s the most valuable contribution philosophers could be making given the state of the world? 

Well, let’s look at epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Eric Horvitz, the chief scientist at Microsoft, has talked about a “post-epistemic” world.

How? 

By highlighting the conditions under which knowledge is possible. This will look off track for a moment, but we’ll come around: Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s last theorem. 1990s, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles proved a theorem that had stumped mathematicians since it was proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637.

It was one of the great triumphs of mathematics in my lifetime. Why do we know that he did it? Don’t ask me to explain complex mathematics. It’s beyond me. What convinces me that he proved it is that the community of mathematicians of which he’s a part put it under scrutiny and said, “Yep, he’s got it.” That model of constructive and competitive interaction is the key to knowledge. I think we know that the most reliable path to truth is through communication of like-minded and disparate thinkers who devote serious time to trying to get the truth — and there’s no algorithm for that.

Note this bit: “the most reliable path to truth is through communication of like-minded and disparate thinkers who devote serious time to trying to get the truth.” This means that all knowledge, including the “other ways of knowing” of indigenous people, has to be vetted by like-minded and disparate thinkers. If it hasn’t been, it’s not another way of knowing, but only a way of claiming to know.

But wait! There’s more!

There’s a section in your book “Breaking the Spell” where you lament the postmodern idea that truth is relative. How do we decide which truths we should treat as objective and which we treat as subjective? I’m thinking of an area like personal identity, for example, where we hear phrases like, “This is my truth.” 

The idea of “my truth” is second-rate. The people who think that because this is their opinion, somehow it’s aggressive for others to criticize or reject them — that’s a self-defeating and pernicious attitude. The recommended response is: “We’d like to bring you into the conversation, but if you’re unable to consider arguments for and against your position, then we’ll consider you on the sidelines. You’re a spectator, not a participant.” You don’t get to play the faith card. That’s not how rational inquiry goes.

Marchese asks too many questions about AI and ChatGPT, topics which, while they may be important, bore me to tears. He also gets a bit too personal. He should have stopped inquiring after the first answer below.

There was something in your memoir that was conspicuous to me: You wrote about the late 1960s, when your pregnant wife had a bowel obstruction. 

Yeah, we lost the baby.

You describe it as “the saddest, loneliest, most terrifying” time of your life. 

Yes.

That occupies one paragraph of your memoir. 

Yes.

What is it indicative of about you — or your book — that a situation you described that way takes up such a small space in the recounting of your life? 

Look at the title of the book: “I’ve Been Thinking.” There are hundreds of pages of stories that I cut at various points from drafts because they were about my emotional life, my trials and so forth. This isn’t a tell-all book. I don’t talk about unrequited love, failed teenage crushes. There are mistakes I made or almost made that I don’t tell about. That’s just not what the book’s about.

Finally, the good stuff about atheism and religion. Although regarded as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” along with Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, Dan has been the least demonized of them, probably because he’s not a vociferous anti-theist and regards religion as a phenomenon deserving more philosophical study than opprobrium. Nevertheless, he makes no bones about his unbelief:

We have a soul, but it’s made of tiny robots. There is no God. These are ideas of yours that I think a lot of people can rationally understand, but the gap between that rational understanding and their feelings involves too much ambivalence or ambiguity for them to accept. What is it about you that you can arrive at those conclusions and not feel adrift, while other people find those ideas too destabilizing to seriously entertain? 

Some people don’t want magic tricks explained to them. I’m not that person. When I see a magic trick, I want to see how it’s done. People want free will or consciousness, life itself, to be real magic. What I want to show people is, look, the magic of life as evolved, the magic of brains as evolving in between our own ears, that’s thrilling! It’s affirming. You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful. We’re so lucky to be alive! The anxiety that people feel about giving up the traditional magical options, I take that very seriously. I can feel that anxiety. But the more I understood about the things I didn’t understand, the more the anxiety ebbed. The more the joy, the wondrousness came back. At the end of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” I have my little hymn to life and the universe.  That’s my God — more wonderful than anything I could imagine in detail, but not magical.

So how do you understand religious belief? 

No problem at all. More people believe in belief in God than believe in God. [Marchese takes issue with this in a sidenote.] We should recognize it and recognize that people who believe in belief in God are sometimes very reluctant to consider that they might be wrong. What if I’m wrong? That’s a question I ask myself a lot. These people do not want to ask that question, and I understand why. They’re afraid of what they might discover. I want to give them an example of somebody who asks the question and is not struck down by lightning. I’m often quoted as saying, “There’s no polite way of telling people they’ve devoted their life to an illusion.” Actually, what I said was, “There’s no polite way of asking people to consider whether they’ve devoted their life to an illusion, but sometimes you have to ask it.”

There are better questions that could have been asked. For example, I would have asked Dan, “What do you think has been your greatest contribution to philosophy?” and “What has been your biggest error in your work on philosophy?”  Readers might suggest other questions below, though I’m not going to convey them to Dan!

A photo of Dan en famille, with caption, from the interview. I knew him only after his beard turned white, so I wouldn’t have recognized him:

Two of my photos of Dan. The first is in Cambridge, MA, on the way to the “Moving Naturalism Forward” meeting in 2016. We drove the three hours from Boston to Stockbridge, and Richard had to fly back early because of a hurricane warning. Ergo Dan argued with me about free will for three hours’ return drive on the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston (it was not covered with snow). That was something to remember, but I gave no ground:

And Dan at a symposium on religion at the University of Chicago in 2019.  It was tedious at times, and I think Dan is showing some impatience here with the annoying lucubrations of Reza Aslan.

Peter Boghossian interviews Luana Maroja (and a note on “transracialism”)

August 22, 2023 • 9:30 am

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: Luana did a superb job clarifying the biological controversies about sex and gender (and Peter asked some great questions to draw her out).  As you can see, she’s spirited, eloquent, and amiable, with the latter trait helping her convey antiwoke truths without being seen as “strident”. She’s a great collaborator. The interview is well worth listening to, and I don’t say that because Luana and Peter are friends of mine.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Luana S. Maroja is a renowned evolutionary biologist, Professor of Biology, and Chair of the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College. She was taken aback when the Society for the Study of Evolution released a statement promoting sex as a spectrum and declaring the validity of “lived experience” in sexual identity. What would inspire such a misguided, conspicuously anti-scientific declaration? In this conversation with Peter, she answers that question.

In plain language, Luana explains chromosomal differences in mammals and how the sex binary is expressed in animals. She addresses popular arguments about exceptions to the binary, such as variations in sex chromosomes, hormone receptor failure, and developmental sex disorders.

They also discuss: Moralistic and naturalist fallacies, bimodality, being “born in the wrong body,” social constructs, clown fish, non-biologists teaching bad biology, and trans racialism.

Luana S. Maroja earned her undergraduate and master’s degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and her PhD from Cornell University. Her research interests include population ecology, speciation, population genetics, phylogeny, and phylogeography. Luana studies a variety of organisms, including small mammals, insects, and plants, and has published more than 35 scientific papers.

Luana co-authored The Ideological Subversion of Biology, the cover article in the July/August 2023 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

6:30 Biological view of gender vs sex

12:40 Can you change sex?

15:23 Gender binary

23:55 Reality denialism

28:00 Reaction to SSE videos

38:13 Biological differences in behavior & expression

43:10 Transitioning/Wrap up

I want to make one point about “transitioning” at the very end, where hey discuss why for the woke it’s not only fine but admirable to transition genders, but not okay to transition races (“transracialism”). The philosophical basis of these two transitions was discussed by philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in a 2017 issue of Hypatia, and caused a big controversy after Tuvel concluded this in the abstract (my bolding):

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner1 graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one’s race in the way it might be to change one’s sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes.

and in the conclusions:

I hope to have shown that, insofar as similar arguments that render transgenderism acceptable extend to transracialism, we have reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized. I conclude that society should accept such an individual’s decision to change race the same way it should accept an individual’s decision to change sex.

Wikipedia describes the blowback from what I think was Tuvel’s a reasonable conclusion. The fracas included a groveling apology by the journal and the resignation of eight editors. Yet I still don’t see any fundamental philosophical difference between a white person claiming that they have a black identity because they “feel black” and a male claiming that they have a female identity because they “feel like a woman.”

On the other hand, the video above inspired some discussion on the Heterodox STEM site about the transracialism vs. transgenderism issue, and some people perceived a meaningful difference from a woke point of view.ˆ That difference is this: transgenderism is supposedly seen by the woke as turning one into a victim or a member of a protected class: it is a disadvantage. (Although transgender women participating in women’s athletics do accrue an advantage, this is largely denied by the woke.)

In contrast, some (but by no means all) forms of transracialism can confer advantages to people—advantages that are seen by the woke as unfair. The discussion centered on white people like Rachel Dolezal who say they are black because they feel black (she also modified her appearance so she could pass as a black person).  By passing as black if you’re not, several people argued that you would accrue an unfair “affirmative-action-based” advantage in things like college admissions and getting jobs.  Other forms of transracialism could also give one advantages: we’re familiar with Elizabeth Warren claiming she had Native American ancestry, a claim that she thought would give her credibility as a member of an oppressed minority. And there’s the book below by an Indian-American who couldn’t get into medical school because of poor grades until he decided to say he was black, and was immediately accepted by many schools. (He later dropped out.) Click to see the Amazon link:

Two points here. First, not all whites who pass as black will get advantages. I’m not sure how much Dolezal benefited personally from pretending she was black, though she did become president of the Spokane branch of NAACP.  On average, a black person is worse off than a white person in terms of prospects, education, income, and so on. Thus you gain the advantage of white—>black transracialism only if you’re assuming the identity of an “elite” black person, like someone in a position to apply to graduate school. And other forms of transracialism, including blacks assuming the identity of Asians or vice versa, wouldn’t get you these advantages because the assumed identity is not credible on a physical basis (though physical appearance shouldn’t matter).

Thus you could justify a difference between transracialism and transgenderism only if you’re woke, and it’s a practical rather than a philosophical difference.  Transracialism isn’t okay because some forms of it give one an unfair advantage via forms of affirmative action, while transgenderism is always okay because it puts one into a protected class that is said to be oppressed.

That’s one way the two forms of “trans” identity can be differentiated, but only by woke people, and only using practicality and ideology rather than philosophy.  Philosophically, I still agree with Tuvel that there’s no substantive difference between assuming a different gender or assuming a different race.