in desperate need of someone to explain to me why antis think race is such a special and different social construct than gender that it cannot be changed.
people are oppressed for both race and gender, civil rights movements were led over both, both are encountered constantly in everyday life and influence how people see you. why is gender changeable, but race isnt? do they just think race isnt a social construct, that its... real? at all? because it isnt. its made the fuck up. kinda like gender.
read this post's last reblog please: https://www.tumblr.com/yes-she-talks/804405655329964032/hi-again-just-got-wifi-back-where-i-live-let-me?source=share
hope this helps! :)
copied and pasted from google docs, so i hope it formats well? im not proof reading lol, i need to go to bed
Though I am super grateful for your long response, it was a lot. I tried my best to go over everything, but if I missed anything, let me know. I also want to respond to the tags you left, so I’ll do that first. In the tags, as well as throughout your responses, you say that gender is internal, while race is external. I disagree, and believe that both gender and race are internal and external. First of all, since both are social constructs, you only have a concept of gender or race because of external pressures. If you were abandoned on a deserted island as an infant and somehow survived to adulthood, you would never develop a concept of gender or race because they would never be taught to you by those around you. While yes, everyone eventually internalizes gender and race, and begins to identify with those concepts, it starts off as external. Additionally, both gender and race heavily impact how you are categorized and viewed in society. You accept this for race, but deny it for gender, which confuses me. Gender is both a legal and social categorization, it appears on all legal documents, decides what roles you are expected (and mere decades ago required) to fulfill, what clothes you are expected (and were) required to wear, how you act, how you are addressed, and how people view you. I don’t see how gender is any less external or relational than race, or how race isn’t internal. Moving on, while I agree that gender has changed throughout history and in different cultures, I don’t see how race has ever been static. If race is what we think about people based on certain loosely grouped phenotypes, than that has changed constantly throughout history. Look at how the idea of what makes someone “white enough” changed in America in the 1800s, or the pan-African movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, or how the Spanish defined race under the Casta system.
Race and gender are similar because they are both social constructs that vary from society to society loosely (emphasis on that word) based off of physical characteristics. I agree that we shouldn’t take them seriously, because we made them up! Since they are not physical, scientific realities, they are far more malleable than some people would like them to be. But I can’t see how allowing them to be flexible, malleable, allowing room for human diversity and experience, and constantly showing that they are not based in some scientific reality, nor do they define a person’s existence, future, or worth, can be a bad thing.
Ok, now onto the post itself. You started off by listing the definitions of race, ethnicity, and culture in your argument. There are hundreds of different definitions (some of them stupid :)), but I personally like the AP Human Geography ones, so I’ll write them here. Culture is the shared beliefs, values, behaviors, norms, and material traits that a group of people practices and passes on from generation to generation. Ethnicity is identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth. It is based on shared cultural characteristics rather than physical or biological traits. (Though as an aside, I will say that a lot of definitions include ancestry as part of ethnicity. I think it’s important to note, however, that ancestry is only one part of ethnicity.) Race refers to a social construct that categorizes people based on physical characteristics such as skin color, facial features, and hair texture.
Now that that’s out of the way, I want to address some of the points in your first paragraph. To be honest, the definition of ethnicity and race in particular are kind of fuzzy, but I would say that transRace people frequently are transitioning to another ethnicity as well as another race and culture (at least if you go by the definitions I provided). If ethnicity is identity with a group of people based on shared cultural traditions, then it’s certainly possible to identify with that. You may point out that ancestry is a part of ethnicity, but I would argue that it is often a less important part. For instance, if someone never knew that they had Irish ancestry, and they never cared about Ireland, but they find out that they have a lot of Irish ancestors, does that suddenly make them more of an Irish person than someone who was adopted and raised by Irish people, but who does not have Irish ancestors? Ancestry might be important to some, but I do not think it is the end all be all of ethnicity, especially since many people are not aware of their ancestry. Lastly, you say that “Just because I learn Japanese, learn about Shintō and Buddhist traditions, and immerse myself in Japanese culture, I don't become one of the Japanese people. It's false equivalency. Basically the same thing as saying if a cis-guy wears a dress, paints his nails, and grows his hair out, things that are commonly associated with femininity (whether this association of feminine/masculine is GOOD is another story) then he's a girl.” I agree with this entirely. Yes, you could participate in a culture entirely and not be a member of that ethnicity. The only thing that makes you a member of that ethnicity, in my opinion, is identifying with that ethnicity. Similar to how a man can dress feminine, but he is a man unless he identifies as a woman. I value what the individual identifies with more than what their ancestry or DNA says they are. For example, I have a friend who has born in China, but adopted as an infant by white parents in the US. If she were to say that she wasn’t Chinese, because she had no connection to or knowledge of her ancestry, and because her parents are white Americans and she was brought up in a white American culture, who am I to tell her that she is wrong? She might still face racism due to her physical features, but if she internally identifies with white Americans and their culture, who can tell her that she is wrong? (Sidenote, if she identified as Chinese, even if she had no experience with the culture, that’s valid too)
(As a note, I did skip over parts where you criticized the RCTA community for focusing on popular culture and misunderstanding / misappropriating culture. I think these arguments lean into hasty generalization territory? But whatever, let’s say that every single person in the RCTA community has bad intentions, and also appropriates culture, and are edgy 13 year olds. Even if that were true, I still believe these arguments and ideas have merit, independent from whatever community decides to embrace them. I guess it’s like, if you looked at people who have a very shallow understanding of feminism, who call anyone born male evil and say that women are divine feminine or whatever, you may get a very bad impression of feminism. But a lot of feminist ideas are good, and that doesn’t change even if sometimes people misunderstand them or are shallow in their usage of those ideas. I hope that makes sense, I feel like I worded that terribly lol. Basically, please judge me on my arguments, or even my own personal behavior, and not Tiktokers.)
In the second paragraph, you talk about how gender and race are not the same, so how you feel internally only matters for gender, and not for race. But I still don’t understand why you believe that. The reasons you provide in the second paragraph are that gender is based on psychological/psychosocial experiences, while race is “grounded in ancestry/lineage/historical context(s)”. Race isn’t based off of ancestry or lineage, and it is affected by historical context, but so is gender? And I am confused by how gender is a psychological or psychosocial experience, but race is not. If we’re saying that gender is psychological and psychosocial because how you are treated and raised affects your development, than surely that’s no different from race, which also affects how you are treated and raised. If we’re saying it’s an internal feeling, well, race can also be felt internally. When we got our first headmate who wasn’t the same race as our body, she looked and felt differently than the cisRace folks. And the headmates who are aRacial feel differently than those who are cisRace in our system.
Onto the next paragraph, and wow this is getting very long. I’ll try to be more concise! Anyway, you say that because race was created as a tool for oppression, it is always cultural appropriation when someone transitions to another race, because they want to join a group without the same “historical background” (I’m assuming you mean experiences of discrimination, or the hardship that came from historical events here?). I don’t see how, if someone is joining a group, they do not begin to share the history of that group. Since they are joining the group, they have to now take on the shared burdens of that group, similar to how trans women take on the burden of misogyny, or Muslim converts take on the burden of Islamiphobia. Maybe you would say that the only way to share history is to be directly related to someone from that place, but I just think that’s an odd requirement given that the technology that would allow us to know, for sure, if we actually have DNA from a certain area or not, is very new and not available to everyone. Like, that was never how it worked before, because people are adopted and people cheat and people move to new places and become accepted into new communities, so you never really know where your blood is from, and I don’t believe that it matters. What matters is that you identify with a community, act as a part of that community, and take up their burdens.
Skimming over the purple person paragraph, because I think I covered that already, but I’ll quickly say that yeah, it’s not behaviors alone, but identity that also works to decide race / ethnicity.
In the next paragraph you talk about dysphoria, and I want to bring up some stuff here. We are a system, and we see ourselves as individual people despite being trapped in this one body. We have different identities, personalities, preferences, ideals, appearances, all of it. Not one of us looks a bit like our body, and as a result of all of this, we get a lot of dysphoria. I do not see how you can say anything, really, is solely classified externally and not internal. We have been classified our entire lives as a girl externally, but most of us do not align with that internally. We are also classified as one race, one nationality, one age, one height, one weight, etc, and most of us don’t align with those internally. For whatever reason people use those categories, it doesn’t matter to us, not to me, because I don’t identify with those. I can understand that the things this body is affect reality, like I can understand that I have to go to the gynecologist even though men don’t typically do that, and I understand that I can’t buy pants for someone my height because this body is shorter than I am, and all that, but it will never change how I see myself. If that makes sense. You say “Dysphoria fundamentally has no bearing on what the outside world views your label as. That's what race is, no matter what we think about it.”, which, really? The entire reason I have dysphoria is because the outside world views me as something I am not! And as someone I am not.
“Because ethnicity is not what we feel, not what we think, not how we dress, how we eat, nor what we speak. It is where we are from, the people we are related to, the ancestry and history we share. And race is the box we are put in based on our ethnicity by others.” Ethnicity is just identifying with the culture your ancestors had, so it is related to what you feel and what you think.
Ok, I think I addressed all the arguments you set out. I felt like the later paragraphs were mostly repeating earlier statements, so for the sake of your poor eyes I didn’t address them. Thank you for reading this far, but if you’ll allow me, I want to talk about one more thing. My headmates didn’t choose to be transRace, they just are that way. And I could find all the sympathetic reasons and traumatic memories that I could to try and justify that, but at the end of the day, sometimes people just feel like they should be part of another race. Like our mom explaining depression to us as a toddler, sometimes people are just sad, there isn’t a reason. And like, when we were first exposed to the concept of Body Integrity Identity Disorder as a child, someone said that sometimes people just have limbs that they feel they shouldn’t have. This just happens sometimes, humans are weird and complicated and stuff like this happens, and I genuinely believe that this is a part of us that can never change. So, what are we supposed to do about it? I understand the concerns people, particularly minority racial groups, have about this. Maybe you worry about letting someone you see as an oppressor, someone who is part of a majority group, into a safe space, and that is fair. And maybe there is no perfect, easy solution to this, but I just want to say that we (my system, most of the transRace people I know here on tumblr) are not hurting anyone. It’s not our intentions to be edgy or provocative, but rather just to exist as ourselves, and I believe that we deserve to live full lives and have at least somewhere where people see us how we see ourselves. I don’t know a perfect solution, but I want to say that we are not your enemies, just people trying to make sense of this world, like everyone else. Thanks so much for reading, I truly appreciate you and your discussion <3
Okay, so I'd like to write this essay in a much more structured way this time lol..but basically
The way I define a social construct isn't that it's something variable, but that it's something society builds for us. For example, money is a social construct. The concept of money - of pieces of paper having internal tradeable value - is entirely a function of what we define it to be.
Money is a social construct, but this doesn't mean you can "change" or reinterpret this construct: you cannot identify as wealthy and become wealthy.
For most cisgender people, gender has been tied to biological sex. (Even this comes with an asterisk, which I'll discuss in a little.) But biological sex is not inherited. It is equally likely to have a male or a female child. And so, gender expression for cisgender people is rather limited in the fact that not just a few group of ethnically close people with similar backgrounds and culture is theirs, it is a whole 50% split of the population. Why does this matter?
Gender is a NON-RESTRICTED social construct. Gender is neither the majority not the minority, it just is.
I feel like your argument conflates origin with structure in some ways? Like, yes, both gender and race are socially constructed but let's say I was isolated on a desert island, I would still have ancestry and an ethnicity of some sort that I can group into races.
Here's where I want to actually clear up one of my own issues in my argument - the circular reasoning differentiating race and gender.
Race and gender track 2 different things entirely. Gender is a person’s internal psychological relation to sexed embodiment and social role, allowing them to engage in the reproductive framework. It can be based on biological sex, but it's not necessary to engage or choose to not engage in the reproductive framework.
But race HAS to be external. Race doesn't describe any kind of psychological relationships to ancestry. Race is your physiological placement within ancestry groupings.
And before we jump to race boundaries changing historically (eg: Irish communities joining the "white" race in areas like America after historically being marginalized) this is due to institutional reclassification rather than individual reclassification. No matter how many of the Irish, at that point in time, declared themselves white, they would not have been viewed as so.
To refute your infant point, again: if I stranded a male infant on a desert island, he wouldn't need to be taught gender to develop testes, to have a deeper voice, and to have a male-geared biological and reproductive framework. His race, though, would be non existent because race is only applied from out-in, not in-out. This was the crux of my argument. The reason why we feel like race is so important to stay within certain ancestries is because it was formed from viewers outside in, not psychological and individual interpretation.
All I can say about dysphoria: Do you know how in the weather app, it'll say "feels like" and a temperature, next to the actual temperature? Dysphoria, from my experience, can be like that sometimes. The real, big, number is nothing close to what it feels like and how I experience the world. I may see it as hotter or colder. But that doesn't mean that that number is any less of an accurate representation of the temperature.
As a trans kid growing up, hating my huge hands, my low voice, my lack of menstruation, etc. all as proof I'd never be a woman- similar to your explanation, I understand now (post transition) as a teen I didn't need to see a gyno, I didn't have to wear pads, etc even if that wasn't what I felt. Biologically, I was a boy - gender wise, absolutely not. My allosomes were XY, not XX But that didn't mean my dysphoria was less valid. I think RCTA is similar - because of how we view race it's not possible to transition RACES.
I want to refute a few more of your points and then wrap it up - first of all on the adopted friend point, you kind of refute this yourself: she might still receive racism based on her physical features. Society does not care about how your friend internally identifies. Systemic racism will target her as an Asian for her Asian Ancestry. This proves that race is external, not internal.
On your AP HUG definition, firstly - I think you skipped over the word "share" here, when I think it does a lot of the brunt work. Sharing, by nature, has to be reciprocated. The group has to accept you as a part of the cultural ecosystem, has to share traditions w u, etc. You can't swap this out for individually liking or/and enjoying a tradition. This is fundamentally modifying the AP HUG definition. Unless a group identifies with the individual, the individual doesn't identify with the group. idk if this really makes sense lol?? but i can try to explain more fo what i mean later if you want!
On misogyny and converting to Islam - this doesn't really make any sense to me. You cannot "absorb" intergenerational trauma or systemic history. A trans woman faces misogyny because she is perceived as a woman in the present. A Muslim chooses a belief system. But racial discrimination is fundamentally tied to lineage. A person pretending to be Black does not inherit the generational wealth disparities of Jim Crow or slavery. Claiming you can just "take on the burden" minimizes the actual, lived history of marginalized people. History is not a backpack you can choose to put on.
On BIID - your headmates are real people in your consciousness - the brain is incredible and no one person or entity's brain is quite the same. - but the human brain cannot the generate historical ancestry that's needed for cataloguing race. And BIID is a neurological mismatch where the brain's physical map doesn't recognize a limb. Gender dysphoria is a mismatch with a biological sex framework. Race is not hardwired into human neurology. There is no "Black brain structure" or "Asian gene map." Therefore, "racial dysphoria" cannot be a neurological mismatch; it is a psychological affinity for a culture, incorrectly mapped onto the concept of race.
On ancestry - Ancestry does matter, even if it's confusing and you didn't know about your DNA roots directly - we've practiced ancestry and racism without knowing exactly who had affairs and who adopted who. The U.S's disgusting one drop rule is a horrific, but accurate example of this.. but RCTA is just kind of getting rid of that ancestry all together, yk?
"I agree that we shouldn’t take them seriously, because we made them up! Since they are not physical, scientific realities, they are far more malleable than some people would like them to be." I...would like to say I agree but this is a very risky statement, (just bcuz a social construct isn't based on scientific reality doesn't mean it doesn't carry real weight)
Apartheid, the Holocaust, segregation, and redlining were all based on these made up social constructs. If you told a marginalized group they shouldn't take their race "seriously" because it's "malleable," you erase. the material reality of how constructs govern survival, and safety. You cannot casually opt out of the serious nature of a construct just because it's socially built.
Adding to your point on dysphoria - it's not a one and done experience, right? If dysphoria was only related to outside-in-perception, then people on desert islands would feel fine with their body, right? Except, no. The trans experience is super wide, and some trans people don't feel dysphoric, per se, but gender euphoric when they feel like they are what they should be. Or any number of experiences. Trans people can be completely accepted, transition, and can still struggle with deep seated dysphoria related to anatomy. if you say dysphoria is purely a reaction to "being mislabeled by society," you get rid of the internal, bodily, and neurological realities of trans experiences just to make it fit their narrative that race and gender are the exact same thing.
Alright, hopefully i got everything!! I think discussions and back and forth like this is great. Have a great day!!
