AIBU to find the idea of trans-racial ridiculous.....

[CastlesBlown]

but support the idea of trans-gender? I just read this article

www.upworthy.com/a-black-trans-woman-explains-changing-gender-vs-changing-race?c=ufb1

And the arguments for trans-gender appear to support trans-racial, despite that being the very opposite of what it aims to do.

I feel SO confused!!!!!

XX

But sex and gender are both fixed. Sex is vaguely fixed (although it's a lot more complicated than the binary would suggest). Gender is nonsense and a construct.

I agree that it's the social overlay that matters. And I also agree that it shouldn't. But it does. And until it doesn't, we can really say that it doesn't, can we?

Sex is not vaguely fixed. It's just not always fixed, but not in numbers that makes doing away with the concept meaningful.

To be honest, I've always been confused about transgender.
I hear a lot about gender bias, and conditioning people from a young age in 'gender appropriate roles' and such like, how girls and boys shouldn't be expected to behave differently because of their gender etc
And then you get people who have operations because they seem to believe in these gender constructs more than anyone else, which to me seems to spit in the face of the aforementioned ideas, and does nothing but enforce the idea of 'this is how men and women should behave'
Does that make sense? It's a bit of a minefield to me to be honest?

Agreed NotJust but I think the current halfway accommodation is doing massive and worrying damage to women.

So sex is fixed but gender is bollocks.

So the solution is everyone do what they want, ie wear dresses or mascara or a Thomas the Tank Engine t shirt, but don't try to call yourself XX if you're XY and vice versa?

That would be my solution formidable but I would probably be called a TERF and transphobic.

Timri that makes sense to me.

But I'm the TG Virgin, as it were

Bloody Nora

I feel how I imagine Glaswegian people feel. I certainly feel out of place in Cardiff.

Ha ha. I'm cardiff born and bred, of English parents. Zero welsh blood in me but i consider myself welsh through and through. My heart literally ached about potentially giving birth in england.

Those English parents have been here for such a large proportion of their lives that they too consider themselves welsh.

I find it difficult. My fil was black, my husband is brown my kids are well browner than me and whiter than their dad. What do they identify as? Human as far as I know. As a white mother of mixed race kids I always find it feels strange when people like Obama and Halle Berry talk about their black heritage, and the black father who deserted them, but the white mother who was always there for them sort of gets ignored. I don't know if I am being paranoid but I feel I count too. Having said that race and colour are something we don't seem to register. I remember one of my kids noticing a photo of husbands parents, his father died before our children were born. My son said in amazement, "Was grandad black?" We pointed our the different shades of skin in the immediate and wider family. He said he had never noticed.

Terry can that not extend to call yourself what you like too?

So names shouldn't be gendered? Caitlyn can be called Caitlyn and he can wear a basque and go on the cover of Vanity Fair but he's still a man?

(Sorry to bring CJ into it)

That would be my solution formidable but I would probably be called a TERF and transphobic.

Cis normative is my personal favourite.

What does cis normative mean??

So names shouldn't be gendered? Caitlyn can be called Caitlyn and he can wear a basque and go on the cover of Vanity Fair but he's still a man? Caitlyn can of course be Caitlyn. Caitlyn has broadly male biology so I would say Caitlyn is still a male human being.

BTW in RL I never misgender people. Their lived experience is not mine to dictate. I also know no transactivists in RL despite knowing lots of transpeople.

In my gender-neutral utopia you can change your name to anything you want. Including names traditionally associated with one or other gender. Or not, do what you like. Sleep with consenting people you want to, do the job you want to, wear what you like. Bake cupcakes while doing one-arm press-ups. Be happy. Just don't confuse biology with philosophy.

And I also think it's worth mentioning that she wasn't pretending to black, but mixed race. Although in the states I believe that anyone with a mixed race heritage that includes black is classed as a black person?
Didn't she put her race on the application as black white and Native American?
I only mention this because people are saying that a black person couldn't pretend to be white.
In my opinion a mixed race person could.
My daughters father is mixed race, so she has one black grandparent, she has blonde wavy hair and blue eyes. She looks white, people are very surprised when they first see her dad.
She has a cousin who is the same ethnic make up, but looks much more visibly 'mixed race'. So is her cousin 'blacker' than her?
Again, to me, it's all a minefield!!

Also could someone please answer this question.
I keep hearing that race is only a social construct. If that's the case, how do they do those ancestry dna tests? The ones that tell you you're so many percent European, so many percent African, so many percent East asian etc?
There must be some sort of biological difference between the 'races' for this to be possible, no?
For example I've heard west Africans tend to be the fastest runners because of their muscle fibre, and that Europeans tend to be the best swimmers because of their bone density.
Yet the definition of a racist is to believe that different races have different characteristics? It's soo confusing??

I find this really interesting.

I have read some of the threads about transgender and the numbers of men/transwomen who are asserting eg that a penis can be a female body part are quite astonishing (not here, out there on the internet). So I have a slight problem with transwomen claiming to be female. They're not. They are male but have decided to present and live as women. They are transwomen, which is different from women as a class in terms of experience, biology, physicality, socialisation and so on. I'm perfectly happy to refer to them as she etc and for instance use Caitlyn Jenner's chosen name but she isn't a woman and she never will be.

Rachel Dolezal's case doesn't seem massively different to me. She's not black and never will be but I suppose she can identify however she wants and decide to present as black and be treated as if she were black. It's the deceit that's the problem (and the fact that transracial means something already so it's a bit off to co-opt that term). If she were able to say 'I'm not black but I identify as black' with a clear term like transwoman, I can't see a problem with that.

I'm not white, btw, but I would say I mainly identify as white because my father's culture has had pretty much zero impact on my life and my entire life has been lived much as a white and v privileged person would have lived theirs (private school, Oxbridge etc). I have never encountered any overt racism as I happen to be relatively pale and have reddish brown rather than black hair and people don't really know how to pigeonhole me. I can make a mean curry and roti thanks to my grandma, but I'm not really of that culture. But I do know I'm not white and it is part of my identity that I am not white. But I am kind of white, because I'm not really part of the cultural thing that people from my Dad's country are (he's not been back for about fifty years).

My daughter only noticed at about 7 that my (pretty much never seen the sun) bottom was browner than her dad's - and she thinks I am the default, she exclaimed 'Daddy's bottom is PINK!' and I had to say, well so is yours, have you not noticed. And interestingly, she still thinks she is brown, even though she has light brown hair and blue eyes and is actually quite pale. So perhaps my brownness is informing her idea of who she is even though I only feel very mildly not white.

I am white, but a black friend explained it me like this in light of the Dolezal story:

If you are from a black bloodline of a recent generation, you can identify with it all you want. But given that race is a lived experience, and used to categorise who is more oppressed by society, white-passing people have less of a claim to their racial identity, and should be careful about co-opting their darker black peers. Race is a social construct because of oppression, rather than any biological differences (like certain races being more likely to suffer from certain diseases or having different physical characteristics).

(Again, not my words - I would never try to explain race as a white woman - but that of one particular black friend)

No I have to admit, pumpkin, I don't do any of those things.

Me either, and I am actually from Glasgow. Thanks for the repetition of tired clichés about Glasgow though pumpkin, we really prefer to keep outsiders from visiting in case they come and like it and start putting up the property prices.

cigars that's what confuses me though, because as much as people say she has benefited from it, she has still put herself in a more 'disadvantaged' position, by losing her 'white privilege' hasn't she? So for all intents and purposes, she will be experiencing the same struggles that a black person would, because people saw and treated her as black?

Hmm. It's all a bit confusing. I think it is more understandable for people to want to change their racial identity than gender. Mainly because it is quite hard to accurately categorise people by race anyway. I find switching gender at the age of 65 a bit more difficult to understand, but I think understand we must. I think some tolerance and acceptance is the way to go in both these cases.
I also think though, that this need to change ones identity probably means that the meaning of that identity in the first place has become unhelpful. That is, identities such as African-American or heterosexual man, carry with them too much baggage and are too rigid in their connotations.

Me either, and I am actually from Glasgow. Thanks for the repetition of tired clichés about Glasgow though pumpkin

If you can't see the relevance of recycling tired cliches in a thread dealing with identity, and the tired old cliches surrounding those identities, I can't help.

Besides, I'm sure the poster I was addressing realised I was not wholly in earnest.

we really prefer to keep outsiders from visiting in case they come and like it and start putting up the property prices.

Speak for yourself. I'd like to sell, and anything that will lead to a hike in my property value is fine by me.

I think both are ridiculous.

Being gay is completely different to feeling like you're actually a mad trapped in a woman's body or a white woman trapped inside a black woman's body. Its how you look physically ,generally if you have a XY chromosomes and a penis you are male, if you have XX chromosomes and a vagina/vulva you are female.

There are of course genetic conditions that can change this but in todays society when you can chose how you present yourself, iI just don't get how you can decide you're another gender when there is no need to be. I also don't get why the gay community align themselves with people who want to be a different gender, physical attraction to someone of the same sex is very different to wanting to be another sex. (which is more a psychological condition).

Race is very different from a genetic point of view, where as XX generally means female and XY chromosomes male, racial characterises such as skin colour are much more complex.

But then you are what you are....I think we're really lucky in our society that we live a very tolerant place where you can be what you want to be. If you want to be a feminine male you can be, if you want to be part of black culture you can be too.,,

What does cis normative mean??

To quote someone more erudite than myself:

"the view that all people are cissexual, i.e. have a gender identity that is the same as their biological sex."