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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Looks like 'transracial' might be a 'thing' after all

32 replies

PencilsInSpace · 25/09/2017 09:57

Rhode Island School of Design are offering a course called Transracial Bodies, Transracial Selves:

Thanks to the work and lives of transgender people, we now have room to understand our bodies in radically unbounded ways. Technological advances in surgery, hormonal therapy, psychiatry, cultural warfare, are catching up to the transgender presence: the gendered body is not necessarily that with which we were born, but one that can be crafted to match the real body of our psyche, our dreams. However, one's racial self remains tethered to biology. Blackness, Whiteness, Asianness, Latinness, the whole rainbow of racial identification, is still construed as biologically inescapable and inevitable. To speak of "transracialism" is to evoke self-delusion and community betrayal. But this cultural reaction is contrary to the everyday experience that actually finds racial identification as a process that is always transracial: declaring ourselves racially, we all cross restricted zones in becoming ourselves. In this course, we will use the discourse of transgenderism to build an alternate vocabulary of race.

This could get messy.

OP posts:
GemmaCollinsBabes · 25/09/2017 10:28

I find the idea of transgender people appropriating our experiences as women very, very interesting.

MsPassepartout · 25/09/2017 10:25

Well, it's utterly illogical to believe in transgenderism but not in transracialism.

The biological differences between a biological man and a biological woman are far greater than the biological differences between a pair of men or women from two different races.

So if ones actual physical biology is deemed irrelevant when it comes to gender, how can it not be irrelevant when it comes to race?

PencilsInSpace · 25/09/2017 10:20

How do people mentally compute the disparity in approaches here?

I've been wondering that since Dolezal came to our attention. I was hoping it would make people think more critically about the whole trans agenda but it seems it might be going the other way. People's brains might be about to fall out about race as well as sex.

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Roomba · 25/09/2017 10:08

There was a woman who was absolutely pilloried in the press last week as she claimed she was Transracial - she'd had loads of tanning jabs and plastic surgery. There was outrage.

I've often thought it was a shame that women as a whole don't work together to defend their 'identity' as we see with movements such as 'Black Lives Matter' etc. It's very interesting to me that you get white girls with cornrows being shamed online for 'appropriating our cultural identity', yet no one does this to trans people for example. How do people mentally compute the disparity in approaches here?

SerfTerf · 25/09/2017 10:03

In this course, we will use the discourse of transgenderism to build an alternate vocabulary of race.

And why not?

ALittleBitOfButter · 25/09/2017 10:02

Wonder what Frantz Fanon would think Hmm

MaisieDotes · 25/09/2017 10:02

Is that a satirical comment on transgender-ism? If so, amazing.

If it's real Shock Grin HAHAHAHA good luck with that.