Transgender, Transable, Transracial

Does transgenderism conflict with feminism?

What Makes a Woman? (New York Times)

Do women and men have different brains?

Back when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld donations.

But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.

After Being TKO’d by Fallon Fox, Tamikka Brents Says Transgender Fighters in MMA ‘Just Isn’t Fair’ (Cage Potato)

Transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox earned her second straight win on Saturday, when she TKO’d Tamikka Brents in the first round at a Capital City Cage Wars event in Springfield, Illinois. Brents reportedly suffered a concussion and a broken orbital bone during the two-minute beatdown, and required seven staples in her head.

Brens said:

I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right.

Does transableism conflict with disability rights?

Becoming disabled by choice, not chance: ‘Transabled’ people feel like impostors in their fully working bodies (National Post)

When he cut off his right arm with a “very sharp power tool,” a man who now calls himself One Hand Jason let everyone believe it was an accident.

But he had for months tried different means of cutting and crushing the limb that never quite felt like his own, training himself on first aid so he wouldn’t bleed to death, even practicing on animal parts sourced from a butcher.

“My goal was to get the job done with no hope of reconstruction or re-attachment, and I wanted some method that I could actually bring myself to do,” he told the body modification website ModBlog.

His goal was to become disabled.

Is transracialism bad for racial progress?

Why Comparing Rachel Dolezal To Caitlyn Jenner Is Detrimental To Both Trans And Racial Progress (Huffington Post)

Transracial identity is a concept that allows white people to indulge in blackness as a commodity, without having to actually engage with every facet of what being black entails — discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and so on. It plays into racial stereotypes…

 

7 thoughts on “Transgender, Transable, Transracial”

  1. Another article caught my attention: A black trans woman explains changing gender vs. changing race. As with the HuffPo article, what stands out to me the most is that behind some very, very adamant claims that transracialism and transgenderism are nothing at all alike is a total absence of any real justification.

    The Upworthy piece makes basically two claims:

    Ultimately, Rachel Dolezal’s story is one of deception. For trans folks, coming out as trans is about truth.

    To say that Dolezal’s act was “one of deception” and to say that she is lying is to say that transracialism isn’t legitimate. To say that trans folk are expressing the truth is to say that it is legitimate. So these arguments–based on calling Dolezal a liar–amount to transracialism isn’t legitimate because it isn’t legitimate.

    One major difference here is that trans folks face immense challenges when they come out. Simple tasks like getting identification and even using the restroom can be major obstacles because of a lack of understanding and education, along with a whole heap of bigotry.

    This difference is even odder: the argument is that Dolezal had it easy, but when a transindividual is undetected, they have it just as easy. The hard part is being accepted as a trans individual. And who, so far, has accepted Dolezal after she was outed? Who has accepted Dolezal as a trans(racial) individual?

    Very few. It doesn’t look to me like, having been outed, she has it so easy after all. And, ironically, it is transpeople who are helping to ensure it stays that way. To ensure that any other transracial folks out there stay hidden.

    I’ve yet to see an argument showing not just that transracial and transgender are totally different things, but how and why.

  2. Wayne-

    The writer raises some really interesting points about her parents, and their part in this.

    I don’t really think there’s much useful in that article, actually. It seems like agenda-driven ax-grinding,. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not leaping to defend Dolezal’s parents, either. I have no opinion. I just don’t think that it is reliable, and it also doesn’t have anything to say specifically about how the various accusations would bear specifically on Rachel’s feelings of transracialism.

  3. If it’s true that gender is a product of physiological issues (different lengths of genes with different levels of hormone exposure or protein binding or things like that) and if it’s true that race is a purely social construct, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a big difference between transgender and transracial.

    I believe there are people who genuinely identify better with a gender different from the sex they were born as, and I believe there are people who genuinely identify better with a race different from the one they were born as, but the reasons for how they identify and the relative intractability of how they identify are probably pretty different for gender vs. race. I suspect people are more empathetic to someone struggling with a physiological disconnect than a social one. I’m not sure if I think that’s fair or not–to have so much more empathy for one than the other–but it does seem pretty different to me. What do you think?

  4. Monica-

    If it’s true that gender is a product of physiological issues (different lengths of genes with different levels of hormone exposure or protein binding or things like that) and if it’s true that race is a purely social construct, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a big difference between transgender and transracial.

    There are a couple of problems with this view.

    The first is the idea that we can separate physiology and psychology into distinct categories. That’s very unlikely. If you look at the brain of a world-class violinist and compare with the brain of someone who doesn’t play the violin, you will find physical differences. This is because practicing the violin for tens of thousands of hours will have an effect on your brain. Thus, it is impossible to figure out any causality from the mere fact that transpeople have different brain structures. This is a point that even Rolling Stone acknowledged:

    Rather, a growing body of research is pointing to biological origins. The 2008 discovery by Australian researchers of a genetic variation in transgender women—their receptor gene for the sex hormone testosterone was longer, making it less efficient at communicating signals—set off speculation that insufficient uptake of male hormones in utero contributed to a “more feminised brain.” And the brains of trans people do look different. Recent Spanish imaging studies have shown that the white matter of untreated trans men look much like those of biological males, and that the patterns of trans women’s white matter fell about halfway between those of biological male and female control groups. But it’s premature to draw conclusions from those studies, warns Olson, since “those parts of the brain are shaped by performance and experience,” and so may be a product of nurture, not nature. [emphasis added]

    In short: there isn’t actually any evidence that gender (as opposed to sex) is a physiological construct.

    But there’s an even worse philosophical problem. The whole point of the gender/sex dichotomy was to say that gender is socially constructed. This is why I asked the question of whether or not transgenderism conflicts with feminism. You see, transgenderism relies on gender essentialism. This is why–after all the work to argue that gender is a social construct–suddenly with the rise of transgenderism we’re talking about it being biological again after all.

    I suspect people are more empathetic to someone struggling with a physiological disconnect than a social one. I’m not sure if I think that’s fair or not–to have so much more empathy for one than the other–but it does seem pretty different to me. What do you think?

    I would agree that transgenderism is both more prevalent and more serious than transracialism, but that we’re really talking about a difference of degree and that they are fundamentally the same kind of thing. I don’t think it’s possible to draw the kinds of bright, clean dividing lines between the two that so many folks are trying to rush to do right now.

  5. Personally the difference is that with transgenders there is a biological basis for such a thing: http://www.cakeworld.info/transsexualism/biological-basis
    http://blog.cakeworld.info/2015/03/new-evidence-for-bologiccal-basis-of.html
    Transracial and transabled do not share this as far as I know
    Also see here with the logical fallacy of feminism when it comes to trangenders breaking down gender barriers: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/transphobic-tropes-3-reifying-gender/

  6. Thanks for the excellent sources, Jacob. You links (especially the first one) really underscore the point I made in my previous comment: “transgenderism relies on gender essentialism.”

    The only way to draw a distinction between transgender and transracial is to double-down on gender essentialism, which is the source of a deep, deep rift within the broader socially liberal coalition.

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