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?