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Caitlyn Jenner, gender, identity, Michael Jackson, Nell Irvin Painter, race, Rachel Dolezal, Rebecca Tuvel, Sally Haslanger, Tamara Winfrey Harris
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?
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