How is one ok and one bad?

[Firestones]

So I read about Raquel Saraswati recently. She is a white woman and her family claim she is lying about ethnicity, and changing her appearance to appear darker etc.

I also saw an article about Ariana grande “Asian fishing”… using makeup to appear like she is a different ethnicity.

Along with black fishing, these have been covered in press and most people are outraged.

sorry for being dumb, but why is it not ok for this but ok to change gender/sex?

im not understanding the logic.

i consider women different to men. Not only in biology and appearance but how we are treated. We couldn’t vote til quite recently, there is still work to be done on gender pay gap, most violent sexual assaults are done by men on women etc etc.

help me understand the logic here…

One’s bad because it’s women doing it (and it’s a chance to attack women for trivial reasons), the other’s fine because it’s men doing it (and it’s a chance to attack women for resisting.)

there’s no logic, don’t drive yourself mad looking for it. Any pretence of logic behind it is just rationalisation of misogyny.

Logic?

You're asking the wrong people. Ask a TRA. And please do report back, I'm very very interested to know too.

Itis logical because men say it is. If you look really really hard and refuse to bow down to shouts of transphobia, that is all it is.

And ethnicity is far less binary. My son is mixed ethnicity and is very light skinned. His dad is dark skinned but also mixed heritage. Could my son identify as black? It's a much more complex area than male / female sex.

It's because men are black and Asian. If it was only women being appropriated no one would be bothered.

@doadeer If it is less binary, shouldn't it be less of an issue? None of us are "100%" whatever it is we think we are, whereas almost all of us are 100% female or male.

I think the difference is that trans falls under the LGB umbrella, so it is seen as a sexuality of sorts and that is where the acceptance comes from. I have also heard a biologist say that in utero brain development is a very complex process and that some males develop a female brain and vice versa. I don't know if that is true and what that the consequences are (and if there are any), but I assume they see a medical foundation to being trans. To me, this still does not explain why you cannot just be male with a female brain, but claim to actually be female, but that's their view. There is no such umbrella or medical foundation for identifying as another ethnicity.

@onlytherain
Yes I agree! There is outrage at black fishing etc and I agree ethnicity is far less binary.

After considering all sorts of alternative explanations for this difference the one that seems to me to have the strongest empirical support is that the transracial idea was firmly stomped down from the beginning as unacceptable, while the transgender idea was not.

It's probably as simple as that. Not enough women said anything about the dangers of this for women's rights, and too many women were being inclusive and without boundaries.

From a theoretical pov 'transracial' makes some sense (I don't agree with it at all myself), given that race really is a spectrum but sex is not.

Now why one idea was strongly refused while the other was allowed is probably because men are not negatively affected by transgenderism as almost all the negatives from that fall on the female sex, while 'transracialism' would hurt minority race men just as much as women.

But this then makes us ask the question if all the difference is just based on misogyny and sexism and viewing women's rights as unimportant (as they are viewed in many countries), or if this is really a sex-difference in women not defending their own rights but submitting to what they deemed as a greater good (be kind). Or perhaps both of these are working.

Finally, I have heard enough young women say that women in the West are already fully equal so there is no need to defend women's rights at all, but Black people are not fully equal.

Ex-TRA here. It's because we've been fed a lie that one is like black/brown face and the other will improve the world and make women and men more equal. I never agreed with this. But that is what they told me. They literally think that transwomen are HELPING women and improve feminism. They believe that in an ideal world we can ignore or pretend away our differences and that would make us more equal to men.

I think the silliest argument I read recently on Twitter to defend this difference was that race is all about how minorities have been treated and it is about communities while gender is only about internal feelings!

Not hard to predict the sex of the man who wrote that defense. Sex is very much about how women and girls have been and still are treated, and gender has been forced on us for centuries (how to dress, how to submit, how to obey, how to work and to which overlord etc.).

But it's not possible to give a logical argument for the difference, other than sexist beliefs in women's unimportance or a sex difference in assertiveness or both.

Wasn’t Lily Madigan asked this? I recall the answer was something about skin colour is more related to biology and oppression

I too am reading to see if you get some answers not seen before.