What's the best way to respond to someone who says "transracial is just as valid as transgender"? (Transracial referring to people who identify as another race like Rachel Dolezal)
What's the best way to respond to someone who says "transracial is just as valid as transgender"? (Transracial referring to people who identify as another race like Rachel Dolezal)
Edit for context:
My view is transracial isn’t valid and this person is trying to dogwhistle. I’ve already blocked this person, and now they’re going after my friend saying my friend is transphobic because they disagreed with them about transracial being a thing (they're purposefully leaving the context out so my friend looks transphobic when what my friend really said was transgender is valid but transracial isn't)
The correct response is to consider what the correct way to synthesize the positions is, and go with that. There's nothing wrong with adapting your position to handle possible inconsistencies. The goal is not to win but to be the most correct.
Typically, the assumption is that this is an argument that transgender is invalid. Perhaps there's another way of looking at it. Perhaps a way people aren't ready for, which is why your opponent went in that direction.
Alternatively, it can be pointed out that this is changing the topic, because it technically is.
"Shut up."
I genuinely don't know enough about what people who claim to be trans racial are even saying and why they're saying it to form an opinion on it. My gut feeling is that it isn't valid and they're bad actors, but my gut has been wrong before.
So if someone told me "trans racial is just as valid as trans gender" I'd either not respond or just say "I don't know about that." and leave it at that.
Gentle reminder that if you believe someone is a bad actor and using dog whistles there isn't a point in responding to things like this because you aren't going to change their mind.
The best way is asking: what's your point? Is it that transgender shouldn't be accepted or that transrace should?. And proceed from there to either defend transgenderism or criticize transracism accordingly.
First let me start by saying I strongly dislike the race therminology, but I'll use it here for consistency, although normally I would call it ethnicity.
The difference between those lies in that gender is a social construct, and race is not. Race has some biological meaning, just like sex, people can't change their sex (yet), they can't change their race (yet).
Gender is a social construct, it's things that have nothing to do with biology but that we as a society attribute in general to a specific sex. A similar concept for race would be culture, a person can be of the sex male but prefer to wear clothes usually associated with female sex, just like someone can be of the white ethnicity but prefer to hear music usually associated with black ethnicity. I wouldn't call Eminem or Michael Jackson transrace, what would that even mean?
No race, no gender. No problems.
Gender anarchism and race anarchism. People be just people. Social constructs shall not be a dividing reason, let everyone behave however the hell they want as long as they don't hurt others and be happy.
Also US race concepts are kind of weird in general. I suppose the history of slavery and segregation did a number on people's perception of race.
Does it really matter if someone is either
Transracial doesn't exist because "Race" in the context that they want to use it doesn't exist.
Genetically there's only one "race"; that's the human race. If they want to identify as a different culture, it's purely a cosmetic cultural thing, not biological or genetic. Whereas as being Transgender is biological. Therefore, you can safely tell people like Rachel Dolezal to fuck off and go back to fifth period science class.
Depends if I have time and I want entertainment at that moment, I know they are trolling and don't care and usually people just want to get me angry at them so I calmly responded to everything they say as it's a real legitimate question, treat every question as if there truly caring about it. Most people will just back off after a bit because they can't get me all angry and pissed off. It's quite entertaining watching them get angry and wound up because I was trying to answer them honestly and nice way. Doesn't always work but it's just something I do I learned really pisses off those kinda people
The differences between the sexes is much less than people like to pretend. Every cell in your body has different modes it can operate in. Many, perhaps most, cells have estrogen-dominated and testosterone-dominated modes. If you change the dominant hormones in the body, every cell in the body switches between these modes. Trans people who medically transition are simply taking advantage of the body's existing mechanism of secondary sex characteristics.
Ultimately, any person could have a male- or female- typical phenotype. If you put the right hormone injections into a fetus at the right time of pregnancy, an XY fetus would be born with a vagina and a uterus. And the opposite is true as well. These conditions sometimes happen naturally with intersex conditions. Every human body has the potential to develop along a male- or female-typical path. It's just a matter of what hormones are passing through the body at what stage of development.
But race? There's no comparison. Cells don't have different expression modes that correspond to different racial phenotypes. There are no "black hormones" that a white person could take to gain many of the characteristics of black bodies. There is simply no equivalent to the medical transition process many trans people undergo. There is simply no equivalent to the fundamental rewiring of the body that occurs on a cellular level with trans medical treatments.
Block them.
someone said that in a thread on lemmy early, i cringed. it seems the only people that think transracial is a thing is primarly done by white people. i wonder if thats the same person were talking about.
and yes i was thinking about rachel dolzal. or white people claiming they are native american, because they have less than 1-5% of thier dna, your still a white asf guy. and a white guy pretending that he is filipino, because he drives a tuk tuk.
Why not ask more questions about it? And if they insist it does no damage, it wouldn't matter either way
"You are wrong. Gender and race are two different things. Transgender people have been around since time began, transracial was invented few years ago to appropriate and diminish transgender people's experiences. it's not transphobic to be against something that was recently invented to invalidate transgender people. ciao"
but tbf it seems like that person's tryna start shit so I'd just block and report em
They don't appear to understand the difference between cultural and gender identity. I'd try this:
"If a white person of european descent were raised from birth by a Sentinel Island tribe, would they be culturally european?"
The answer is obviously no, illustrating that the cultural identity of a person depends on the culture the person was raised in. I don't know how gender identity works, but clearly how someone is raised has little to do with it.
Edit: Disclaimer that I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.Just don't have conversation about this stuff at all. You can rarely change a person's mind.
I used to try talking about politics and things in my rural town but it's pointless. In America it's more like a drug people use, they like the rush they get from the drama. And most the time no one is saying anything original, it's like they just spout off market sound bites. The conversation will always go nowhere.
It might sound counter productive to not fight for something like that. But just live your life, and understand life and humanity is chaos, to try to change people is like trying turn the sun into an icecube. You can't fuck with the universe.
Dont waste time on that stuff, and instead be the best person you can be and be a good role model to your immediate circle. Thats worth more to the community and will spread naturally without trying.
"No it's not, and you know it"
Feel free to throw in some "dickhead"s as well, if they're gonna come in bad faith you don't have to be polite. Talk garbage, expect pain
This person is not arguing in good faith and is just looking to make trouble. Engaging with people like that is as frustrating as it is futile.
This thread clearly shows that people are naturally bigoted. There is trace community on reddit. There are a lot of trace people who are also trans. They have dysphoria. They are suicidal. The hate their body. They are not accepted by society. They get death threats. Arguments used against trace people are the same as arguments against trans people. So, we are actually the same.
Race is an extremely unscientific way to catagorize human beings, and it's no wonder these people claim to be trans racial instead of trans ethnic. The more scientific, cultural, and hereditary definition of ethnicity means they'd have no real arguement to claim an ethnicity they weren't raised in and have no heritage from but the loose political definition of race gives them lots of wiggle room.
Tldr: tell them race isnt real and ethnicity is based on the culture you were raised in and the heritage of your ancestors. You can't force your ancestors to be a different ethnicity and you can transition a childhood upbringing, just an identity.
I'm no expert on either topic. But I believe humans basically start off as female in the womb, and either become male or don't. And there are many intersex conditions. The body responds to hormones typically associated with either sex. So gender is fluid in a biological sense. If someone transitions to male, female or nonbinary, they already kind of contained that potential.
However, race is a social construct, usually based on heritage as well as biological appearance. So it's hard to say how much biology is really involved. Does the human body contain the ability to be any race? Or to cultivate an appearance that prompts other humans to socially categorize you as one race or the other?
Maybe for people who are mixed race, there is a sort of spectrum available to them. They likely know how to present themselves in a way that gets them categorized as one race or the other.
But otherwise, not really. If you're White, and you say, "I identify as Black," the question might be: do you have Black heritage? If you don't, you can't really create it out of thin air. There wasn't a situation while you were in the womb where various hormones could have influenced you to appear more Black than you do. If your parents are both White, they were going to have a White baby, no matter what. Race is a social construct, but it's based on appearance and heritage. It's about belonging to a group, not about being an individual, the way gender is.
If you're assigned female at birth, and you say, "I identify as male," then cool! Your body already has the capability to become hormonally male. You can socially identify as male. Any human, of any race, has this potential. Any two parents could have a baby that is any sex or gender, depending on various factors.
Don’t waste your time, if someone is claiming transracialism then they are way too far gone and it’s not your job to understand or fix people that can’t be fixed or understood. Every interaction with that person will equate to a net loss on your life and time, they will hit the wall of reality eventually or die a joke.
You don't. That's not even a dogwhistle, it's outright racism and transphobia, and isn't worth responding to any more than the normal flavors of racist. Report, block, and (for mods) ban.