Guest post: When you take some of the arguments about race and reword them for gender
Originally a comment by Artymorty on What exactly did she mean by that?
Well I did some reading around, and — whaddayaknow — everything I could find of the left’s efforts to reconcile their conflicting ideas about gender and race is terribly flimsy. I thought at least I’d find some food for thought, but no. This was the best I could muster:
– “Gender is more deeply rooted in one’s own mind, while race is more forcibly imposed by the surrounding society.” (Hmm citation seriously needed there.)
– Transracialism is about Deception therefore it’s deceitful, whereas transgenderism is about Truth therefore it’s true. (Circular reasoning at its most absurd.)
– Transgendered folks face discrimination and social disapproval in a way that folks who identify outside of their prescribed racial identities don’t. (This doesn’t really address the question — but what’s worse, it isn’t necessarily true, as we’ve seen in the case Arundhati Roy here, and of course Rachel Dolezal last year. Monnica T. Williams, a psychologist writing at Psychology Today, said, “The real issue is that switching from White to Black defies the unspoken social order and therefore elicits social punishment. Dolezal’s parents were so distressed with her “downgrade” that they needed to publicly “out” and humiliate her.”)
– Gender dysphoria is real and recognized in the DSM-5 while “transracial” folk don’t have a named psychological condition. (Well, for one thing, sometimes they do: body dysmorphia is no less “real” than gender dysphoria is; take a look at Lil’ Kim. But more to the point: since when do liberals put so much stock in the supposed wisdom of the DSM of all places?!)
It’s striking when you take some of the arguments about race and reword them for gender. Like this Guardian piece, for example:
Perhaps it feels convenient to white people men who desire to unravel systemic effects of a hyperracialized hypergendered society (especially those effects that they feel affectwhite people men negatively) to embrace the notion of a transracial transgender identity, as if such a thing exists. But to argue that real parity between race and ethnic groups the sexes in the United States exists – and can be exchanged one-on-one – is to deny protections for those groups marginalized by institutional power.
[…]
Crossing over […] doesn’t subvert the structure; it reinforces it.
[…]
If anything, to believe that one can transfer one’s identity in this way is a privilege – maybe even the highest manifestation of white male privilege. The ability to accept marginalization, to take on the identity of blackness womanhood without living the burdens of it and always knowing you could, on a whim, escape it, is not a transition toblackness womanhood; to use it to further your career or social aspirations is not to become black a woman.
[…]
To deny the complexities of racial gender identity is to plead ignorance. To demand that your racial gender identity be seen as fluid because you are inconvenienced bywhiteness maleness and your ambitions are thwarted by other people’s blacknessfemaleness is just a new reason for a very old kind of erasure.
Sounds like a TERI — a Trans(racial) Exclusionary Radical Intersectionalist.
Is there anybody who sincerely thinks of themselves as transracial and isn’t just trying to get some kind of benefit or trolling trans people?
IDK about all this transracial stuff but I do think there is such a thing as being transgender. Do you think so? Or do you think (for example) a transgender woman who gets sex reassignment surgery is just a mutilated man who’s lying to himself?
Race and gender.
One is a social construct through which people are assigned at birth to groups based on certain phenotypic traits. Assumptions are then made, by group, about an individual’s intellect, competencies, tendencies (such as aggressiveness, sexual drive, interest in academic pursuits). The individual is expected to conform to roles based on group membership. If the individual is not a member of the dominant group, then their rights are often curtailed. Historically they might have been denied basic rights such as land ownership, suffrage, etc. Pushback against the dominant group by outsiders seeking equal rights has always been fiercely opposed, often violently.
So is the other.
I have NO IDEA how you got that interpretation out of the op, Dan. Are you misreading on purpose?
I’m sorry, you’re right. I was getting it all wrong. Ugh need coffee. My apologies.
On a brighter note, you’ll all be pleased to hear about this change in the German rape law: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36726095
I have wondered that thing about the DSM so many times. The DSM!! Cited as gospel!!!
Ray #2: Bravo.
Okay, I’m sure you’re all waiting for the biological perspective on this.
Sex: two sexes, almost no phenotypic biological overlap. Social overlays a mile deep. The social overlays are always considered a natural consequence of the biological facts. For instance, pink is the masculine color because it denotes heat, action, excitement; and blue is the feminine color because it’s cool, quiet, and passive. High heels are for men because tallness is masculine; women wear slippers. Both of these were gospel a mere 300-400 years ago.
Race: envision a 3D cloud of data points with varying degrees of overlap between the concentrations of points. You can put names on the denser parts of the cloud, and they have biological reality. Enough so that medical research has caused real problems for non-Caucasians by not taking the sometimes different physiology of different races sufficiently into account. Social overlays may be a mile deep or very thin, depending on the culture and the people involved. The lines drawn through the overlap areas have to be arbitrary. There’s no biological dividing line. People in interracial overlap areas could (in biological terms) quite validly decide on which side of the arbitrary line they arbitrarily put themselves. Socially, it’s usually way more fraught than that.
In other words, what Roy said, with the addition that there are varying degrees of underlying biological reality that confuse the issue.
It might help if people could grasp that “Black” might have different meanings in different cultures and situations. Roy, as a dark-skinned woman in India, experiences a different sort of oppression than an African immigrant in Europe, or, for that matter, a light-skinned African-American in the United States.
Homonyms, how do they work?
Quixote,
I think “almost no phenotypic biological overlap” is a bit of an exaggeration; it’s true that there are certain phenotypical traits that are very strongly correlated to (and almost always mutually exclusive between) the different sexes, but it’s also true that even in the average case, male and female people share a great deal of phenotypical similarities, both in their sexual and non-sexual physical characteristics.
—
For my part, I think one of the major distinctions between how race and gender are conceived comes down to the difference in how these categories are performed. There are of course many performative aspects to our conceptions (and expectations) of race; indeed, the entire problem of racism is extrapolating our expectations of an individual’s performance from arbitrary physical characteristics. The same may be said of sexism, as well. But cues for racial identity are largely immutable (Lil Kim and Michael Jackson being notable recent exceptions), and it is often incredibly obvious when someone attempts to perform as a member of a different race by imitating these cues.
The cues for gender, on the other hand, are far more mutable; that is because the immutable cues all have to do with primary and secondary sexual characteristics, which are viewed as inappropriate to overtly display and overtly inspect in public, so people have to rely on more mutable analogues in order to infer the right category to place their fellow human beings in. Length of hair, type of clothes, colour of nails, cross body shape, presence or absence of makeup, pitch and tone of voice, even a name; these are some of the things that we assess to identify gender, and they are all things which can be performed more-or-less convincingly for different periods of time by anyone with enough time and inclination. Racial cues are much more difficult to convincingly portray, and so people who attempt to move from their socially-assigned category are much easier to spot.
Also, I don’t find the re-worded case presented in the OP’s quoted article terribly convincing; for one thing, the implication that a trans woman could be a man pretending to be a woman for career gain does not jive with the reality that a great many trans women who publicly perform as women do so at the *cost* of careers, and a great number of them have wound up falling victim to prostitution or pornography as their only reliable means of survival. (That isn’t counting the ones who perform too convincingly and are murdered by men who feel betrayed when that performance does not meet their biological expectations.)
Nevertheless, the orthodoxies around transgenderism do need a lot of work to iron out the contradictions in the rhetoric when it is applied respect to racial identity, some of which the OP pointed out to great effect. It is not an easy or trivial question to sort out how the concepts of race and gender differ, and identifying why some or all of the seeming contradictions are not really contradictions will not be accomplished by simply asserting those contradictions don’t exist.
Alona #8: Roy is not that dark-skinned at all — her complexion is on the lighter side of the spectrum in India, so she is unlikely to suffer much discrimination in India on the basis of that alone.
Seth #9,
Just to clarify, I’m not endorsing the reworded paragraph as reflecting my personal views; I’m just pointing out the double standard: feminists like Germaine Greer have argued along those lines and been blacklisted for it, but when the same points are brought up with respect to race it’s considered well within the bounds of acceptable debate — in fact it’s close to left-wing dogma. Obviously race and gender aren’t entirely the same thing, but they aren’t entirely dissimilar either, and it seems no one on the left can articulate what aspect of their difference justifies treating them in such radically different and contradictory ways.