Genuinely curious, don’t intend to sound like an asshole. Someone who identifies as a different race they were born as would be terribly criticized and judged by society, besides called racist. Transgender people have millions of supporters and defenders. The argument is that “gender is a social construct” and it is undeniable that to an extent, gender roles, behaviors, and expectations are due to socialization. But race is also a social construct. “But we wouldn’t be able to track racial inequality if anyone could identify as another race” same with gender. What would make this different?
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This was asked on the r/philosophy reddit, gonna post it here
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/s/D3eCHe30Xz
With that being said, sometimes they are, like in adoption, communities being born in as a different race, though they maybe viewed slightly different.
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This is a great question that I hope someone with some expertise can respond to. I can only respond with more questions:
If race and gender are both ‘learned,” does that mean that they are learned by the same process? Just because two concepts of identity are socially constructed doesn’t mean that they are constructed in the same way.
I just read (and pasted) an article that mentions intergenerationality, which is interesting. Who do we learn ethnicity from vs who we learn gender from?
Another concept was essentialism. Is there an “eternal truth” that relates to how we define race and gender?
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-dembroff-dee-payton-breaking-analogy-between-race-and-gender/
https://thesociologistdc.com/all-issues/revisiting-transracial-vs-transgender-identity/
Looking forward to revisiting this post
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M & M: How Eminem Established Authenticity in Rap Despite His Race
>As a white rapper, Eminem needed to solidify his legitimacy which stems from his upbringing of living in the streets. In order to be considered an authentic rapper one have to prove oneself.
A Lifespan Model of Ethnic-Racial Identity
>The main premise of our model is that ERI starts in infancy with ethnic-racial priming that prompts nascent awareness of ethnicity/race. We propose that, across development, ERI manifests in both implicit and explicit forms within five dimensions: ethnic-racial awareness, ethnic-racial affiliation, ethnic-racial attitudes, ethnic-racial behaviors, and ethnic-racial knowledge.
Rites of Passage GREGORY FORTH
>[…] state wherein participants are “betwixt and between” recognized social statuses. Highlighting the common bonds that develop among people undergoing transition rites together, he then proposed a concept of “communitas” as a property characteristic of a great variety of phenomena other than life-cycle rituals, including not only practices such as pilgrimage but also entire ways of life, such as those of hippies, Gypsies, members of religious orders, and participants in millenarian and other religious and sociopolitical movements.
The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course
>Performativity clearly defined sequentially of events, multimodal dramatism of the ritual
Regulation and creation: accommodating both elements of arising anxiety and ways of overcoming it
Navigating Black Identity: Black Young Adults’ Perception of Being ‘Black Enough’ in America
We do see acceptance with individuals like Eminem, who figure out the unique tribal markers and execute on them. This has been the case for some time now. Some people are wildly successful, while others are comically not. Trans-racial is likely not the correct term for this group, but norms failing individuals, “outcast”. The identity of what is and is not part of a tribe can and often does evolve. And then gets communicated in the groups via its own channels trans-race individuals may not be familiar with and then fail to execute on. BET comes to mind.
Going down the rabbit hole of “Urban Outcast” will provide more information.
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Lewis R Gordon has a response to Truvel
https://www.pdcnet.org/C1257B82005A7B6C/file/77A1AFC195938EA98525826B006A3D89/$FILE/philtoday_2018_0062_0001_0015_0023.pdf
And in a one of Overthinks Podcasts with him, he discusses it briefly. In the podcast he says it’s not that crazy of an idea for someone to feel transcultural. His article above goes more in depth, but is a response.
Has the government said you don’t exist? Trans people experience far greater bigotry than biracial. This is rather appalling and ignorant.
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In 2017 Rebecca Tuvel wrote an article in defence of transracialism, comparing it to the transgender experience. She received a large amount fo harassment over it. This was in a feminist philosophy journal.
In Social Science, Rogers Brubaker published Trans: Gender and Race in the Age of Unsettled Identities in 2016, to less fanfare.
Generally, race is more “closed” than gender, specifically among the political left who have embraced transgender rigths and identity.
Tuvel: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=1LOb39EAAAAJ&citation_for_view=1LOb39EAAAAJ:Tyk-4Ss8FVUC
Brubaker https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wf4ckd
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So, I cannot speak a huge amount about transracial individuals because I have not read up on them, but to my knowledge there is no such thing as racial dysphoria.
Race is entirely a social construct, where sex isn’t. There are no clear cut lines where a person goes from one race to another, it’s all just categorisation.
Sex, although not the binary construct we view it as, does have a much stronger foundation in biological reality.
There is a phenomenon called gender dysphoria, where people (and I am simplifying here), can be born feeling as if they should have the physical characteristics of a different sex. We do not know why this is, but there’s evidence of genetic and genuine sex differences in the brain.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7415463/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-0666-3
So any discussion we have about transgender people does need to be understood in that concept. There is a genuine recognisable medical condition present in most trans people, for which there is no equivalent for race.
My own experience of gender dysphoria, as a trans person, is very much that my physical body comes first. I was born with a male body, and that was very wrong. I won’t go into depth as to what that actually feels like, because its very complicated, traumatic, and I’m not sure I even could communicate it accurately if I tried. It feels, for lack of a more accurate term, like I should have been born with a female body.
All the rest of my dysphoria stems from that. If I am misgendered, it gives me pain because I am being gendered as male because aspects of my body appear male to other people. I need to fit the social category of “female”, not because I really want to wear dresses or perform femininity, but because I need to be acknowledged as female by wider society to alleviate dysphoria.
On the other hand, to my knowledge there is no evidence that one can be “born into the wrong race”, so to speak, because race just isn’t a real biological category.
There are people who feel culturally connected to a different race than their physical appearance suggests because of adoption or integration into another community, but imo this is a completely separate phenomenon from transgender people that just happens to share a similar name.
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Race is called a social construct because it doesn’t have a matching scientific concept, and it’s especially not the scientific notion of race. The meaning of the general term seems to be a mix of skin color and ethnic ancestry connected to emblematic continents and some phenotypic traits connected to that. Why this is weird because black Africans might have the same skin color as some dark skin color people from south Asia and Oceania, but when looking at their general genetics and biology, both of these groups are closer to lighter skinned people of eg central Asia than they are to themselves. But they’re both often said to be black, because lots of people just use that term to talk about skin color. But somehow if a person is of very dark skin color but their facial features are more similar to typical European ones than to the sub-Saharan African ones, then they are not black, like some people from south India look like, now all of a sudden they are not called black. And what races even are there? Do we just go by the colors and say well there’s white, black, and brown people? But people have now made up the “yellow” race as a new color, even tho those people have basically the same color as most Europeans. Oh, and by the way, the fact that southern / Mediterranean Europeans have skin color more similar to the Semitic peoples of the Middle East than they do to more northern Europeans doesn’t matter, all Europeans are white, and those Semitic peoples are some other race. So first all those cans of worms need to sorted out so can talk about transracial people.
About gender, things are much more worked out. Sex and gender are two different things. Sex is a category of biology, determined by looking at various primary sex characteristics (chromosomes, inner genitalia, outer genitalia, and balance of sex hormones) and secondary sex characteristics (facial and body hair patterns, body shape, chest /breast, and structure of the face). Gender is another thing, there’s external gender, which is defined via various social traits (clothing, hairstyles, make-up, jewelry, gesticulation, manner of speaking, body language, level of muscularity, and maybe other things, like personality traits and social roles), and internal gender, which is a part of person’s self-concept (ie how a person sees oneself as in terms of gender and/or sex). So if a person is transgender, it’s very clear what we mean. We mean a person who was raised in a certain gender (masculine or feminine) but they don’t see themselves as that gender they were raised as, their inner gender is different than what they were raised as, and they usually start performing the external gender they see themselves as. Eg a person (usually because they were born female) is raised in the feminine gender, but they realize they dont see themselves as a girl /woman, but lets say as a man. So they start performing the external gender of a man, because that’s how they see themselves. They are transgender, ie the transitioned from one gender to another. Pretty clear. They can also chance some secondary sex characteristics, especially with modern technology like hormones. With surgery you can change also some primary sex characteristics. Now they dont only transition their (external) gender, but also their sex to a large degree. Tho ‘transsexual’ is a contentious term, there are disagreements among some (trans) people about who should transsexual and transgender terms be used, some want one some want the other, but some are ok with both.
In any case in terms of being transgender it can be pretty clearly be explained what is gender and from what they are transitioning into what, which is not really the case for race. What are they transitioning, and how does that relate to the concept of race, that’s nowhere near to what we can say about people being transgender.
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