There are some reasonable objections one can make to transracialism. The trick is that those objections usually also work as objections against transgender. I think that’s why the reaction against Rebecca Tuvel’s article was so vehement: it forces us in the trans movement to think about hard questions we’d rather not think about. But we need to think about them, if we’re going to have a chance of defending transgender identity in an era backlashing against it. I think a healthy defence of transgender should also be a defence of transracialism.

The first and perhaps most important such objection is that there are plenty of other categories in which few if any would reasonably accept self-identification as the criterion for identity. Identifying as otherkin doesn’t mean you’re actually a wolf. I don’t think anybody wants to say that someone who has lived for only thirty years should be able to access retirement benefits without a tax penalty, just by identifying as a 70-year-old. Why would we treat race, or gender, differently from age or species?

The key is that that question should not be rhetorical – and I think Tuvel has a good response to it. That response draws on feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger’s quote that “rather than worrying, ‘what is gender, really?’ or ‘what is race, really?’ I think we should begin by asking (both in the theoretical and political sense) what, if anything, we want them to be”. Gender and race, like a $100 bill, are social constructions: they have real and powerful effects on our social lives, but collectively, a society does have the power to change those effects. (Sex and ancestry are concepts with much more grounding in the physical world, but most of what we talk about when it comes to gender and race moves far away from these.)

And in an ideal society where human biology is still what it currently is, I would argue, gender and race would not be determined by presumed biological differences – but age still would be. We would still expect that a biological six-year-old cannot vote, regardless of self-identification. But we wouldn’t want people’s life opportunities to be determined by biological sex, by ancestry, or by phenotypical characteristics like skin and hair colour. At least, I wouldn’t want that. I strongly disagree with complementarians who think that biological sex has significant ethical implications. But if anything, the complementarian case for tying gender identity to sex is stronger than any case for tying cultural identity to biological descent. Biological sex at least has physical effects on reproduction. I don’t think a meaningful concept of biological race even exists (but more on that another time).

The other important objection to Tuvel’s view comes from Tamara Winfrey Harris:

Ms. Dolezal’s masquerade illustrates that however much she may empathize with African-Americans, she is not one, because black people in America cannot shed their race . . . I will accept Ms. Dolezal as black like me only when society can accept me as white like her. (quoted on Tuvel 270)

But this is exactly why the comparison to transgender is important! Nowadays, liberal North American circles do accept trans men as men just as they accept trans women as women. Thus people raised as women, the marginalized sex group, can shed their gender; they’ve been given that right just as people raised as men have. That wasn’t the case as recently as fifteen years ago. On gender, those of us in urban progressive enclaves already live in a utopia that Harris barely seems to dream of: we are in a world where people raised female do accept me as female like them, and society can accept them as male like me.

The sad part of Harris’s position: if it had been the accepted position that “I will accept Caitlyn Jenner as a woman like me only when society can accept me as a man like Caitlyn Jenner” – if female-to-male transition was a prerequisite for male-to-female transiton – that would have been a barrier to this change happening. I absolutely agree with Harris that a white person becoming black should come along with a black person becoming white. The question should be: how do we make that happen? How do we get to the point where black people in America can “shed their race” if they want to? These questions should not be rhetorical!

Indeed, many in the African-American/ADOS community themselves sometimes sadly seem to act as barriers to it: they want to prevent other black people from “shedding their race”. For example, Alabama columnist Roy S. Johnson claims that Pope Leo XIV and his family are black whether or not they identify that way. Many seemed deeply offended by Michael Jackson’s lightening of his skin. I don’t know if Harris shares that approach, but if she does, then her position is disingenuous: for then she would be saying “I will accept Ms. Dolezal as black like me only when society can accept me as white like her, and I will try to stop society from accepting me as white like her.” Harris’s meaning then would be Kendi’s: that we should simply accept the racial, and therefore gender, identities that society forces on us, whether we like it or not.

Such an approach is deeply worrying. Surely, when some people are victims of racism, we should be working toward a society where nobody is a victim of racism. But I see uncomfortable parallels here between Harris’s view and that of historian Nell Irvin Painter, where the “solution” is the exact opposite: to make everyone a victim of racism, to make white people live under enforced racial segregation in just the way black people have had to. Painter seems to have given up on the goal of bringing black people up, and instead switched to the goal of bringing white people down; Harris at least suggests a similar view. We can do better than that. Let’s not work to imprison white people in their race the same way black people have been. Let’s instead work toward the other, better alternative that Harris implies but does not follow up on: a society where black people, and everyone else, can shed the misleading and harmful category of race. In a world that accepts transgender identity, accepting transracial identity – in both directions – seems like a good start to that.