Interesting analogy on X - identifying as black

I remember when I was a teenager 'making yourself seem interesting' was a big thing - changing your name to something more exotic, acquiring a foreign grandparent, saying that you had some very very unusual, invisible, medical condition, claiming that a celebrity was a distant cousin...

We kept to fantasies that were plausible and could not be disproven. We never claimed that we were boys, or were not white.
We may have been silly teenagers, but we we weren't complete eejits🙄

Judith Butler is a self-hating woman, always has been. And someone who minimized the rapes of October 7. She's basically become an old, white male.

Interesting @TempestTost about TK. He must have talked a good talk as he was highly regarded in academia and literary scenes for so long. I’ve never read his books.

It’s the hand wringing about him that gets me. Why is what TK did so beyond the pale yet men doing this to women (when it’s materially much worse because of the safety in sport, safeguarding and sexual harassment/assault issues), lauded as heroic? It’s pure, unadulterated misogyny and when put in this context it takes extreme wilful ignorance not to see that. The liberal media who do this are despicable with this.

A bit OT, but people knew for years that TK was a bullshitter. His story made no sense and many people asked him about it. He worked in a field where following up would have been simple and he carefully chose not to. And like a lot of fake Cherokee, he made his career in Canada. His job in academia was largely dependent on his first nations identification. As was his literary career.

If you ever heard him interviewed, he was also fake in person, going on about himself as an :Indian" and what they were like as a people. This from a guy who by his own admission was raised by a white mum in a white family in a white town. the idea that he was fn came from a single family photo and a claim that one family member was in fact illegitimate. He had no personal connection to any indigenous culture.

Some people are 100% black (due to ancestry) and some are 100% white. If you take a black woman and a white woman they are basically the same, other than skin colour. A white woman who has painted her skin black is an infinitely closer approximation of a black woman than a man who wear women's clothes (or take hormones and has surgery) is an approximation of a woman.

Sex is binary. Race is a genuine spectrum (if indeed it truly exists at all).

Then you have the following scenario. A "white" girl has frizzy hair and tans easily, and has certain facial features more associated with black people than white. Everyone sees her as white for the first few years of her life.

Her parents die and she goes to live with her mix-raced grandmother who was brought up immersed in black culturre. She lives in a black area, surrounded by black culture. She starts being perceived as mixed-race or even "black" (due to the racist way that the moment someone is not "pure white" many people put them in the box marked "black").

If she were to claim to "identify" as black I would respect her black identity infinitely more than I would respect the transwoman identity of someone who is 0% woman.

I read this article in the Spectator

https://archive.ph/YbU5V

https://spectator.com/article/why-did-scientists-think-the-beachy-head-lady-was-african/

Struck me as pertinent, go back far enough and we're all black, although not the point the author was making. The poor woman (that's not up for doubt) became a political football, millenia after her death, even though she wouldn't have been unique had she been black.

What??

But keeps it to herself

Yes, but my gender identity and a dollar gets me a subway fare.

Neither is gender identity!

Funny that wealth is not a protected characteristic.

I'm eagerly awaiting the time when I can self-identify as a billionaire.

Skippy67, oh, so Thomas Markle isn't Megan's Father, he lied about the fact.

IIRC, the "identified as" language started to be used before genderism really became big.

It was in use in the early 80s when I started Uni. My first ever DEI form that a very earnest student union rep asked me to complete after I returned it uncompleted (starting a lifelong practice). I asked who checked them, and rather uncomfortably he said no-one. I then said what was there to stop me ticking "black" (I am somewhat under tanned at the best of times). He said it wasn't so much about objective truths, but more how I "identified".

"What a load of bollocks" I said - to no pushback.

better part of 50 years on and it's amusing nothing has changed.

Yes, I think I see what you mean. I'd never considered it in that way, but it does make a lot of sense.

Sometimes the reason is because an individual is vulnerable.

However unfortunately the way it manifests - because it is based on enforcing a lie and emotional blackmail - it's toxic.

It doesn't stop it being about power and control though.

If you look at power dynamics and particularly toxic power dynamics it replicates them. It's why it sets off women familiar with power and control dynamics.

@RedToothBrush

Anyone who says trans identity is about identity is fundamentally wrong.

It is about power and control and always has been regardless of which trans cohort you belong to.

Hmm, food for thought... Thanks !

Women & men share psychological & behavioural characteristics that make them interchangeable.

But sex has nothing to do with psychological or behavioural characteristics. It's purely about biology. It's never been about how we think or feel; it's always been about what body we have. That's always been the one and only characteristic men looked at to determine who they would subjugate as less than them: does it have a vagina or a penis? They never cared about what was in the mind.

It is about the erasure of the concept of sex. Different bodies and how they function are always erased - it's a feature not a bug. The idea of making womenhood a personality trait which ignores physical being.

It's no coincidence that this disembodiment occurred at the time when we had the rise of online communities and online communities have particularly high over representation of those who identify as trans. Not only this, but they have a higher than normal population of individuals who are not in physical relationships and a higher than normal level of people who will never give birth. Sex IS therefore irrelevant to many of them. There's also a higher than normal love of anime which is highly stereotyped and very defined in ideas of feminist and masculinity which isn't reflective of the real world.

The trouble is, they seem to think this applies to the whole real world.

Anyone who says trans identity is about identity is fundamentally wrong.

It is about power and control and always has been regardless of which trans cohort you belong to.

Power and control over their own bodies and against males - often similar in nature to anorexia or often a result of trauma.
Power and control against their homosexuality. Power and control over women and girls, sometimes sexual motivated.
Power and control over adults / authority by placing certain behavioural controls on them.
Power and control over peers, particularly when belonging to a low social group within the social hierarchy.
Parents exercising power and control over their child to prevent their autonomy and as a means of gaining social status within a liberal community.

There are no exceptions to this rule. None.

I had this realisation a few years ago when I was trying to work out why drag queens made me uncomfortable. I think that’s the moment I peaked actually.

Black & white people don't share skin colour.

Some of them do. That's how some Black people have white-passing privilege.

I myself am biracial (though not Black), and I have white-passing privilege too. I wasn't raised at all in my non-white parent's culture, so I don't call myself bi-cultural. Yet, even though I wasn't raised as a boy and I don't have a male body, I should call myself a man, just because I "feel like a man"? That's obvious nonsense.

Women & men share psychological & behavioural characteristics that make them interchangeable.

But sex has nothing to do with psychological or behavioural characteristics. It's purely about biology. It's never been about how we think or feel; it's always been about what body we have. That's always been the one and only characteristic men looked at to determine who they would subjugate as less than them: does it have a vagina or a penis? They never cared about what was in the mind.

I recently read about the author Thomas King, who genuinely believed himself to be American Indian. It became a major feature of his writing. Genetic testing showed he was mistaken. He has duly returned awards meant for indigenous Indian people. In stark contrast, Caster Semenya retains his medals and records despite conclusive testing showing him to be genetically male.

I don’t understand how it is possible that these cases of ‘trans’ racialism, and historic examples of blackface don’t wake people up to the utter farce that is TRA and the misogyny inherent in drag.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/25/canadian-author-thomas-king-not-indigenous-cherokee-inconvenient-indian

Yes, so if race was similarly based on feelings, some white guy from Helsinki who was really into funk music, fancy sneakers, and BBQ, could be transracial.

You know though, it strikes me that there is a huge amount of internet stuff these days that is basically about stereotypes of differernt groups. Often ones that reflect reality and are interesting cultural things and even funny, but they are not what you would call nuanced. And I don't ever remember there being this level of focus on dividing up what differernt "kinds" of people are supposed to be like.

So who knows, maybe we will start to see people thinking differently about this too.

This false equivalence is the epitome how oversimplification leads to flawed reasoning. Women & men share psychological & behavioural characteristics that make them interchangeable. Black & white people don't share skin colour. But pretending its all about 'feelings' & not shared characteristics is how this con succeeds with simpletons.

That's not surprising they'd use that language, since you can't really identify who counts as black in an objective way.

IIRC, the "identified as" language started to be used before genderism really became big. Certainly I saw lots of it in the disability community. The idea being that someone might need accommodations and such, but not see themselves as disabled. This came from within the disability community itself, but I always thought it was kind of a foolish approach.