Why is it seen as acceptable for a person be born the wrong sex but not the wrong ethnicity?

[goldtinged]

I saw a somewhat recent article about Rachel Dolezal, the caucasian American woman who identifies as a black woman, and it made me wonder. Why is this clearly wrong but it is (largely) socially acceptable for a man to identify as a woman? She says she has always felt she was a black person from a young age, and she was denounced for this. But if you denounce a man for saying he identifies as a woman, you are a bigot?

Sorry if this is a thick question, I really don’t understand why one is wrong and the other isn’t (I know it is wrong to GC feminists but I mean widely speaking it isn’t seen as wrong). I understand why it is wrong to pretend to be a black person, just in case that isn’t clear.

Thank you. I've read through that whole thread now.

I struggled to understand some of the points being made, but the over all (over-simplified by me) take away seems to be that black women on the whole don't like white GC women using race as a comparator for transgenderism. The objections seem to include white women using black women's struggles for our own ends and only when it suits us, and a general sense amongst black women that white GC feminism is intentionally oblivious to and not inclusive of black women's lived experiences, and so we are particularly unwelcome from using race in our arguments around causes that don't promote improving the lives of those races.
It seems simple enough a courtesy for me to refrain from using it, even before I understand more about why it's a problem.

(I would welcome feedback from black women who wish to give it, though please don't take this as me demanding labour from you - I intend to educate myself more around this subject outside of MN.)

Yes, let's not let them dominate it and claim it for themselves.
There are lots of other old school leftists who see it the way we do, probably more than we think, because many are scared to speak up lest they be cancelled and bullied by these overgrown toddlers.

Black Mumsnet doesn't speak for all women of colour though does it? And if you look further than Black Mumsnet it is clear that women of colour hold a multitude of views on this topic. So you can listen to various women of colour with different perspectives and opinions but eventually you will have to think for yourself and decide where you stand on the issue.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

If it was something other than "women don't count" transmen would be getting as much support as the activists shower on transwomen.

Putting an oar in since I am Chinese by descent but often call myself a Banana (mildly jokey way of explaining I was born, raised and lived in Britain and speak zero Cantonese now although it was my first language).

I guess my own personal experience of being British born Chinese raises the spectre of intersectionality. I still think for me the analogy of transrace has validity.The tendency of some of the more strident MTFs (not all of course) to hyper-sexualise or stereotype their presentation of what it means to be female as Womanface (clumsy expression I know) is essentially based in misogyny and can be validly compared to Yellowface; that weird fetish to collect and indulge in all things Chinoiserie to borrow a term from Armistead Maupin.

I suspect my grumpiness on the matter comes from having had too many guys come up to me at parties when I was younger and addressing me in Mandarin (which of course I know less of than Cantonese) as a means of being friendly. Inevitably, all these encounters ended with their mentioning an ex girlfriend who happened, by extraordinary co-incidence, to be East Asian. I tended to respond that I too was looking for a girlfriend but was rather less particular as to what race they hailed from.

I never did figure what made be more irate. Whether it was the audacity to lump 700m Chinese women into a homogenous dating pool, or it was the presumption that I would give them the time of day, when they segued into some nonsense about us being more “amenable” “deferential” or some other nonsense. They clearly did not know that many Cantonese women because we tend as a whole to be rather forthright.

I certainly see and feel plenty of read-across from being stereotyped as a woman and as a Chinese person. Both are equally offensive and are fundamentally wrong-headed ideas in my mind as a person of colour. The ick feels the same.

I'd be far more likely to accept someone who identified as e.g. an Inuit, for some reason, than with someone who identified as the opposite sex. Race is fluid, and a total social construct. Sex is biological, binary and immutable. It's the sex bit that is looney and unacceptable, not the race bit. NB I identify as an empress born 40k in the future - is everyone ok with that?

Repost this in AIBU will you? The more women in the wider world who see this madness the better…

Born The Fell Handed says “the god Empress Protects”

Of course it doesn't speak for all women of colour. Just as no forum speaks did all white women. I didn't say it did. That thread an easily accessible space where posters here could read a discussion on the topic lead by women of colour so it was definitely relevant.

It's an easily accessible space to read, but not to post, unless you are black.

Without making this a TAAT, can you summarise here what you took from that thread? Why is this kind of comparison inaccurate and harmful to black women?

I've come to the conclusion that it is all about men having access to women's spaces.

We don't have separate spaces for black people and white people, and even when we did (in places like apartheid era South Africa or segregationist era US), the purpose of the space for the oppressed group was to oppress them further and keep them in their place (away from the oppressor group), not to give them a safe haven.

In a man's world, women only spaces were until recently the only spaces men could not access, the only spaces which were not designed around the needs of men. Gaining access to those spaces is a hugely transgressive thing and a big slap in the face to the feminists who fought for those spaces and the women who need them.

We're so used to giving men what they want, that when they say they want to be women and we have to let them be women because if we don't they'll be so sad, we tend to just accept that without questioning it.

Agree that both transrace and transgender are equally offensive. I am of mixed English & East Asian ethnicity, but very much not white-passing in any regard. The covid lockdown era years in particular were quite bad for the blatant hostility I faced for the audacity of existing as an Asian person (from white middle-aged and older men exclusively). I can understand where the Black MNers thread is coming from, in that if the comparisons start to slide into one being worse than the other, it diminishes the impact that racism has had and continues to have on the lives of PoC.

It's an interesting discussion on BMN but there is no consensus on that thread about if, or why, this comparison might be harmful to black women. It also doesn't answer the question posed by OP in this thread which is why the inconsistency exists (between how race and gender are treated); it is rather about whether or not the comparison should be made at all.

The OP (on the BMN thread) appears to be arguing that race is a social construct and "would not exist if racists didn't exist". She also argues that "sex would exist with or without sexism" (presumably because she believes sex is a biological reality but in her words she refers to sex as being "intrinsic"). This is why she says race and gender are not comparable categories because one is a social construct and one is "intrinsic".

She then goes on to state that "appropriating racism to make a point about gender is offensive".

What she doesn't say is WHY is it automatically considered to be racist for a white person to "identify" as black but not automatically considered sexist for a man to "identify" as a woman. Which is what this thread is about. I think it's a perfectly valid question.

hinokiforest I can understand where the Black MNers thread is coming from, in that if the comparisons start to slide into one being worse than the other, it diminishes the impact that racism has had and continues to have on the lives of PoC.

The important word there is IF - 'if the comparisons start to slide into one being worse than the other'.

I don't see that happening here, which is a questioning of differing attitudes to, not a comparison between, two separate social phenomena.
I agree completely that Black MNers would find it unacceptable if this discussion slid into diminishing the impact of racism on their lives.

Is there any evidence that we're on that slippery slope here?

I don't see the problem as long as we acknowledge that it's not exactly the same thing, but there are certain parallels.

Diane Abbott put it in a clumsy way, but I can see what she was saying. The prejudices and stereotypes that attach to the Roma community, or Irish people in England, or Jews, are not the same as those that attach to black people.

For instance, one of the key elements of antisemitism is the conspiracy theory aspect. Racist white people may dislike Jamaicans, but nobody thinks Jamaicans secretly rule the world.

So as long as you're sensitive to the fact that there are differences, I don't see an issue with pointing out similarities. I mentioned Buffy Sainte-Marie winning music awards specifically earmarked for Native American artists - I can't see how that differs at all from men winning medals in women's sports.

if the comparisons start to slide into one being worse than the other, it diminishes the impact that racism has had and continues to have on the lives of PoC.

I don't think people have been making the argument that men identifying as women is worse than white people pretending to belong to another ethnic group. Both these things are wrong. The question is why are we expected to 'celebrate' men who identify as women, but condemn white people who identify as black? Surely anyone who appropriates the identity of another group of people should be condemned.

Is there any evidence that we're on that slippery slope here?

I’m not trying to call out anyone, so please don’t take this as a personal attack Grammarnut, but this would be an example of what I am talking about:

Grammarnut · 28/09/2024 22:01

I'd be far more likely to accept someone who identified as e.g. an Inuit, for some reason, than with someone who identified as the opposite sex.

If it is likely more acceptable for one vs the other, then yes this does start to come into play: The important word there is IF - 'if the comparisons start to slide into one being worse than the other'.

The Inuit people have faced discrimination on a massive scale. It would definitely not be acceptable on any level for someone to put on Inuit-face and pretend to understand what it is to be Inuit based on their fantasies surrounding it, any more than it is for a man to put on woman-face.

If you think about someone like Bob Marley, his dad was White so you could say he was at least half White. If you look at his chromosomes he would have had a Y chromosome found in Europe and not Africa. If you think that biology is all important then you might say he's more European than African.

He identified as Black. Or maybe mixed race. Or maybe African. Or Jamaican. Or West Indian. Or any combination of these. I don't have a problem with him calling himself anything that he wants.

Race is analogous to gender in some ways but not others.

I don't see how it has to be one v another to weigh up which is "worse", or to treat it as a competition about who can be most badly treated. 50% of the population are potentially on the receiving end of sexism toward women and anything from prejudice and poor treatment to actual violence. Black women are often on the receiving end of racism and sexism at the same time. I don't see how sexism is less serious when there is so much violence by men against women which comes from misogyny.

I would like a tw to explain the difference.

I think that some of the black women on that thread feel the same way about the comparisons as we do about transwomen comparing their experience to ours. For example, transwomen saying that they get periods because of the symptoms they get from their hormone treatment.

A trans activist once told me that it wasn't the same because there is a long history of white people oppressing black people whereas the same isn't true of men and women.

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

JFC @MissScarletInTheBallroom 🙈🙈🙈

Yeah, this is where the comparison doesn't work so well.

You can be mixed race. You can't be half male and half female.

Without wanting to whitesplain, I am told that people who are mixed race are often more inclined to identify as black rather than white, probably because they are perceived as and treated as black by other people, and experience racism.

I know....wtf.