Why can you be trans-gender but not trans-racial if race is a social construct? - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14783999
QatzelOk wrote:But the word "sex" is used to mean something very different now than it was a century ago. In any case, this is a semantic sideline of absolutely no importance to the argument at hand, which is about gender roles.

People hack off parts of their anatomy because they feel trapped by their society's gender roles - not because they were born male or female.

Sure, but these gender roles seem impermeable. If it were possible to switch without switching genitalia, I'm sure people would probably just do that. But since we do live in the context of a cultural gender binary, gender reassignment might be a useful surgery for some people.

In Sioux culture, the Berdache(s) played the gender roles of women, and often played a major role in spirituality as a kind of social priest. Many gay Catholic priests back in the day (before the Sioux were destroyed by America) used to go to "save" the Sioux, in order to live out full gay lives. Even then, the gender roles (and social roles) of European Abrahamic socities were too constraining for full human development.

Another interesting tidbit about the gay Sioux was that, even if you were gay, you didn't have to become a Bernache. You could become a warrior and have great sex with very masculine guys.

I see what you're saying, but to me this is evidence that gender isn't always related to sex, since that sounds less like a man becoming a woman and more like a seperate gender that doesn't exist within the same realm as man or woman. Please note that some could argue that you are projecting the Western idea of homosexuality ("even if you were gay") onto the Sioux, because sex with other men hasn't always been considered an identity.

Hong Wu wrote:Back when I would try harder I would point out the physical phenomenon of how it takes more energy to bear children than it does to produce sperm. A gifted person can extrapolate from this why "gender roles" and gender differences exist in society. They are only arbitrary if you have lived a very easy life physically and aren't interested in reproduction, the latter obviously not being a sustainable perspective for any people.

Some may consider this an argument for anti-natalism. Many people see the same data and come to different conclusions. I do not conclude that women and men are inherently different just because one can produce a child, especially considering the fact that technology will make motherhood obsolete one day.

I'm also a firm believer that the courage to extrapolate an understanding from simple truths is more important than technical intelligence, this can be a dangerous trait to posses however and so the sheep always outnumber the shepherds.

A verbose argument for common sense, I assume. The problem with common sense is that without technical backing, it is useless. Knowing what to do will never be as useful as knowing why we do what we do, which is why capitalism makes sense in the long run. You'll always find labor to fulfill the role of "doing thing", but people who know how to best arrange those tasks are indespensible.
#14784012
@LV-GUCCI-PRADA-FLEX
Not sure what do you mean honestly.

put my self in who's shoes and their experience ?

Race is not really a thing other than what each society perceive it. There is no biological or genetic factor that makes someone of a race and anther of a different race. Its just something people came up with to distinguish themselves of others.
So how is the transition going to happen ?
If we wish to consider it in a social perspective, then people perceive race on skin color. so if someone was to change his race he or she should change their skin color ?

Trans gender people are ones who transition from one gender to anther due to gender dysphoria which is an actual medical condition.

You can abandon race by abandoning the social construct of race. There is no transitioning. Unless you're talking about someone adopting cultural aspects of anther race which is vague and non-nonsensical because race and culture aren't the same thing. Racial groups have multiple cultures. So if thats the case, then you mean someone is adopting a new culture not a new race.
#14784021
I'm talking about LGBTQ+. For reasons I have discussed elsewhere in this thread, I don't believe that being trans racial is a legitimate group to be protected. Although if we consider the concept of "passing" (as a white man or woman when the person is "black" by the one drop rule) then it might be said that it's not a hard and fast rule. If your safety is in danger, pretending to be a different race (or religion) can be lifesaving.
#14784128
About the Sioux being much more accepting of natural human sexuality than Euro-Abrahamics, LV-GUCCI-PRADA-FLEX wrote:...these gender roles seem impermeable...

...to me this is evidence that gender isn't always related to sex...

Gender roles and gender (male, female) are not exactly the same thing. Gender roles were only invented (assigned) as a stopgap measure to help biological couples to raise a family in relative isolation from the community. The European invention of a 'nuclear family' required behavioral modifications - like every other technology does.

Because the Sioux didn't have this technology (or Abrahamic propaganda), they were able to go with the flow of their sexual desires. They were free.

And Abrahamic Euros destroyed their culture and replaced it with ideologically paralyzed slaves (us) who are locked into our various experiments with behaviorism.

Really, the Sioux-French gaysex-priest dialectic was probably the happiest and most sexually satisfying time for homosexuals in North American history/pre-history. Euro-Abrahamics are so lost in their texts and technologies that "the penis" is mostly used as a bookmark for advertisers, or a hate object for feminists.
#14784135
Suntzu wrote:Never realized Indians were queer. :D

They integrated all sexuality into their various social roles, in the same way that they integrated natural phenomena into their spiritualities.

Less civilized peoples are less married to fakeness and behaviorism than more civilized peoples. Civilization is fake, like the plastic island in the Pacific Ocean.
#14810006
Good piece by Adolph Reed Jr on this.
From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much
Spoiler: show
That is to say, as is ever clearer and ever more important to note, race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class.

This perspective may help explain why, the more aggressively and openly capitalist class power destroys and marketizes every shred of social protection working people of all races, genders, and sexual orientations have fought for and won over the last century, the louder and more insistent are the demands from the identitarian left that we focus our attention on statistical disparities and episodic outrages that "prove" that the crucial injustices in the society should be understood in the language of ascriptive identity. The Dolezal/Jenner contretemps stoked the protectionist reflexes of identitarian spokesperson guilds because it troubles current jurisdictional boundaries. Even before that, however, some racial identitarians had grown bolder in laying bare the blur of careerism and arbitrary, self-serving moralism at the base of this supposed politics. In an unintentionally farcical homage to Black Power era radicalism, various racial ventriloquists claiming to channel the Voices of the Youth leadership of the putative Black Lives Matter "movement" have lately been arguing that the key condition for a left alliance is that we all must "respect black leadership." Of course, that amounts to a claim to shut up and take whatever anyone who claims that status says or does. Those of us old enough to remember Black Power and the War on Poverty also will look around to see which funders or employers they’re addressing.
...
I’ll conclude by returning to the Dolezal/Jenner issue. I can imagine an identitarian response to my argument to the effect that I endorse some version of W*****, or the view that "feeling black" can make one genuinely black. The fact is that I think that formulation is wrong-headed either way one lines up on it. Each position – that one can feel or will one’s way into an ascriptive identity or that one can’t – presumes that the "identity" is a thing with real boundaries. The issue of the line that Dolezal, who has now resigned her NAACP position, crossed that made her alleged self-representation unacceptable is interesting in this regard only because it highlights contradictions at the core of racial essentialism. In addition to the problems of articulating what confers racial authenticity, if what we have read about her approach to expressing black racial identity is accurate, she seems to have embraced an essentialist version of being black no less than do her outraged critics. W***** do so as well, and we must admit that Dolezal’s performance and apparent embrace of culturally recognized representations of black womanhood rests on an aesthetic purporting to embody respect and celebration rather than the demeaning racialist fantasies that shape the commercial personae of the likes of Iggy Azalea. Moreover, even if Dolezal may suffer from something like racial dysmorphia, the expression of her fixation has been tied up with commitment to struggle for social justice. She may have other personal problems and strained or bad relations with family members, but those are matters that concern her and those with whom she interacts. They do not automatically impeach the authenticity of her feelings of who she "really" is. And I doubt that we’d want to start a scorecard comparing her and Republican Jenner on that front.

That points to the other way that this affair has exposed identitarianism’s irrational underbelly. The fundamental contradiction that has impelled the debate and required the flight into often idiotic sophistry is that racial identitarians assume, even if they give catechistic lip service – a requirement of being taken seriously outside Charles Murray’s world – to the catchphrase that "race is a social construction," that race is a thing, an essence that lives within us. If pushed, they will offer any of a range of more or less mystical, formulaic, breezy, or neo-Lamarckian faux explanations of how it can be both an essential ground of our being and a social construct, and most people are willing not to pay close attention to the justificatory patter. Nevertheless, for identitarians, to paraphrase Michaels, we aren’t, for instance, black because we do black things; that seems to have been Dolezal’s mistaken wish. We do black things because we are black. Doing black things does not make us black; being black makes us do black things. That is how it’s possible to talk about having lost or needing to retrieve one’s culture or define "cultural appropriation" as the equivalent, if not the prosaic reality, of a property crime. That, indeed, is also the essence of essentialism.
...
The problem the Jenner comparison poses is that, if identity is inherent in us in ways that are beyond our volition, how can we legitimize transgender identity—which is gender identity that does not conform with that conventionally associated with biological sex type—without the psychological stigma of dysmorphia? Confounding of sex and gender is the ideological mechanism that seems to resolve that conundrum. Thus, notwithstanding my earlier suggestion that Talusan misses the cultural fluidity of gender because she is naïve anthropologically, she may also have an important ideological reason to deny it. It is only by treating gender roles as somehow endowed at birth that she can contend that transgender identity is "almost always involuntary." That is, in the context of essentializing political discourse, gender identity must express a condition as "natural" or inherent equivalent, or prior, to biological sex type. Transgender identity requires being read as in effect "hardwired" only within a normative framework in which access to the domain of recognizable identity deserving of civic regard depends on essentialist claims, and the only way transgender identity can meet that standard is to collapse distinctions between sex and gender – even though that move, as Burkett argues, cuts against the grain of the perspective the women’s movement has fought to advance for at least the last half-century. Nor does this view acknowledge the grave political mischief ideologies of essential human difference have underwritten in not at all distant history, from segregation and other forms legal discrimination and imposition of separate spheres to genocide.

The transrace/transgender comparison makes clear the conceptual emptiness of the essentializing discourses, and the opportunist politics, that undergird identitarian ideologies. There is no coherent, principled defense of the stance that transgender identity is legitimate but transracial is not, at least not one that would satisfy basic rules of argument. The debate also throws into relief the reality that a notion of social justice that hinges on claims to entitlement based on extra-societal, ascriptive identities is neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness. In insisting on the political priority of such fictive, naturalized populations identitarianism meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality. In that sense it’s not just a pointed coincidence that Dolezal’s critics were appalled with the NAACP for standing behind her work. It may be that one of Rachel Dolezal’s most important contributions to the struggle for social justice may turn out to be having catalyzed, not intentionally to be sure, a discussion that may help us move beyond the identitarian dead end.
#14810045
So... does anyone actually believe in this thread both gender and race would be social constructs ? :?:

I believe race is a pure social construct and in fact not a biological reality at all in the first place. Meaning there really is only one human race. Meaning if you define any group of people based on some arbritary property - most popular choices are skin color and religion, and then you pick two people at random from this group and another person not belonging from this group, its perfectly possible that one of the first group is closer in overall biological makeup to the outsider than to the other insider.

And the brain isnt hardwired to assume anything about looks. Aside from the fact most people would like to look prettier than they do, and theres this thing called plastic surgery.

Put any two groups of people together and they will immediately start to mix. Its obvious that in a 1000 years, unless mankind has managed to make themselves extinct, most people will be some mix of white, black, yellow and red.

While gender is a biological reality, not a social construct. People are born with a certain biological gender and their brains are wired to a certain gender. Usually those two are a match, but sometimes some sort of error occurs and then thats a transgender. Exactly the same as with sexuality, usually people are heterosexual but some people are bisexual or homosexual. Well thats a lot more frequent than transgenders.
#14810061
Negotiator wrote:...And the brain isnt hardwired to assume anything about looks. Aside from the fact most people would like to look prettier than they do, and theres this thing called plastic surgery.

This isn't true. Our brains are hardwired to judge the "attractiveness" of people based on our previous experiences with people who look similar.

Before (((mass media))), it was the day-to-day interaction with neighbors and family that influenced who we find attractive and unattractive. But now, it's "the Skinner Box" of our masters that tells us what we "like."

(((Religion))) used to tell us what to like and not like, and we were told NOT TO LIKE gays and trans-genders. Now, our (((Elite's))) strategy has changed and we are being manipulated to desire new things that "work" for our masters.
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