GC White women comparing being transgender to someone white claiming to be black

[NewNameNigel]

Does anyone else find this incredibly offensive?
Race and sex are so incredibly different!

Race is on more of a spectrum than sex is, to be fair. Claiming to be the opposite sex is offensive on its own. No need to compare it to anything else

Race would not exist if racism did not exist. It was created so people could oppress each other. There are no biological racial catagories. Humans have just decided that some physical characteristics are important and lumped people with them together. Race could just as easily be based on height and eye colour with skin colour and hair texture as irrelevant.

Sex would still exist with or without sexism. There is something intrinsic about sex that isn't there with race.

It's not at all comparable.

Read that back and please realise how ridiculous your claim is.

OP what are your thoughts about someone identifying as a black person such as Rachel Dolezal?

I'm a white GC feminist and would also appreciate reading black women's views on this.
I think this comparison is made to demonstrate how ludicrous the claim is that you can change sex and is not meant to minimise racism, in fact the reverse.
Rachel Dolzeal has done exactly what many TW do, falsely claimed an identity and then used it to access resources she wasn't entitled to (I think jobs/roles reserved for PoC)
The men who so often berate us for being unkind/hateful/bigoted etc are nearly always white left wing men who claim to be anti racist so one would hope this analogy would give them pause for thought. It doesn't.
In fact, they quite often reveal their own racism by saying things like 'but transwomen are women just like black women are women' as if this was some kind of gotcha. No. We don't have to expand the category of 'women' to include black women because they are already in the category. A subset if you like just as white women are a subset and working class women are a subset and women with disabilities are a subset and married women are a subset and women with disabilities are a subset and....you get the point. Different groups of women may have different needs and priorities but we are all women and have some interests in common.
Men will never be in this category because they are men not women.

Racism is definitely a toxic social construct, but the biological reality of what colour your skin is is a biological reality. Just as sex is a biological reality but gender is another toxic social construct.

Tbh it's not only this issue this happens with. The number of threads I read on MN where a poster will go "this wouldn't happen to a black person", or "this wouldn't happen to a disabled person" and I just want to know where they have been all their life and why its so hard for them to listen to anything sitting outside their bubble.

Because if there discimination is happening you can bet your life that black women and disabled women, and black disabled women are right there at the bottom of the heap

totally agree
but I'm not sure when people say 'this wouldn't happen to a black person'? what does that mean?

Of course race exists.
Look at the conflict in what you are saying.
If you think race is man made then of course people could identify as being a difference race.
It's not, so people can't, the same as sex not being man made.
Both are fixed biological characteristics.

But race isn't just skin colour. Several people in my family are pale, sometimes even whiter than a white person but obviously black because of their facial features/hair texture and (most importantly) heritage.

The biological reality of sex is that one group is made vulnerable through pregnancy/rape by the other. Where is the comparable biological reality of race?

@fuckityfuckityfuckfuck apologies I hadn’t thought of that.

What if Rachel Dolezal was a male too?

I’d really like to know what biological realities grant one race dominance over another. Can anyone explain?

there aren't any
I think its been argued that 'race' was invented as a concept to justify the exploitation of one group by another, and that the domination was made possible by historical and political factors
otherwise it would just be a case of 'oh look, those people who come from over there tend to look like this, and these people from over there tend to look like that' with no particular value to that difference.
Whereas, as PP have said sex is a genuine difference that carries a genuine vulnerability which one group has used to oppress the other, and this has happened in (I think) nearly all cultures we know about regardless of religion, economic organization, political arrangements etc.
Also sex is binary, there are no 'in betweens' whereas people can be mixed race.

So the two are very different.

I guess the GC position is
'look, you can see that 'identifying into'blackness is offensive and unjust- even though race is a far more elastic construct and we can see that race is a social construct invented for the purpose of oppression.
If you can see how offensive that is surely you can see that 'identifying into' a sex, where sex is a genuine and binary category is just as offensive and unjust'

Thanks that makes sense. Race and gender have a lot in common, with some people simply not believing in the concept while others find it of vital importance in describing who they are.

exactly
whereas sex actually exists
this is why its so important to use the right words and not say gender when we mean sex!

Race actually exists for those on the receiving end of discrimination, prejudice and racially motivated violence.

I think the issue arises because its another example of white women making a special case for something that they perceive as affecting them by trying to appropriate the suffering and historic injustice of another community with which they are not in alliance. GC feminists so called sre not oppressed by the existence of trans people. Nothing is done to them and no privileges are taken from them. Its a kind of “stolen valor” argument. GC feminists are not in a world historical struggle against oppression. And the struggle against white people passing as non white is not the same as a narrow minded set of white women refusing to be in solidarity with other people who want to live their own lives.

@newtlover my opinion is that apropriating racism to make a point about gender is offensive. Especially if you are are the sort of feminist who tells black women to separate their race from their sex (yes I've been told to undertake this impossible feat multiple times on the sex and gender forum but perhaps not by you.)

If you have a good argument for your position then why do you need to bring racism into it? Do you see racism as some kind of gotcha or trump card for gender?

No, I don’t think it’s offensive, and despite reading your posts closely, I really don’t see why you do.

Men are far more physically powerful than women, and men can kill and forcibly impregnate women pretty easily. In the UK, a woman is murdered by a man every three days. When men pretend to be women, dress as cliched sexualised stereotypes of women, and demand the right to control women’s speech, it is extremely offensive.

As all white people are descended from black ancestors, it’s far less offensive for a white person to pretend to be black than it is for a man to pretend to be a woman. Particularly where he’s doing it to get access to women’s changing spaces, sports, and scholarships.

Also I posted this thread here, the the black mumsnetters section, because I didn't want to go the the exhausting process of explaining how racism and sexism are different to white women.

@Ardith you are misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that it's ok for men to do these. I am saying that it's a separate and very different issue to racism.

Yes. It exists for me. But only because of the way others treat me and have historically treated my ancestors. There is no biological reason why it matters though. I don't, for example have a different reproductive system to the oppressor race, which would make mu experience different whether or not this was the case.