We Accept Transgenderism. Are We Ready For Transracialism?
It's coming, whether you like it or not. Biology appropriation will breach the next taboo. Embrace it!
Rachel Dolezal is still black, in case you were wondering.
Dolezal, a/k/a Nkechi Diallo (she legally changed her name in 2016) is now on OnlyFans, where she hawks beauty and fashion tips, and box braid tips for her fellow sisters.
She's done her best to stay out of the public limelight since she lost her job along with her position as President of the NAACP Spokane chapter after her parents busted her. She isn't much in the news anymore. She's trying to live as quietly and blackly as possible.
Her critics were outraged at the implications of the Black Like Me 'racial tourism'. Many argued it was a deeper version of 'blackface', another example of white privilege, choosing to be a different race when black people don't have that option.
I've argued they do, although it's not as easy for them at this time. However, this indicates a new R&D market for skin lightener and vitiligo medication manufacturers!
Dolezal has stuck to her guns despite global condemnation. It's funny how the arguments made against 'transracialism' don't seem to apply to transgenderism.
'Gender blackface'
“She’s deeply invested in the black community. That’s really what bothers me about it; I looked at her track record, and she’s really into this. She’s teaching about black culture, she understands the subtleties of the black experience, she’s raising black children, she married a black man, she’s going to work for the NAACP. She does more for the black community than 99 percent of the black people that I know. And I know a lot of hard-working black people. So I can’t fault her for this, I just can’t.” - Dr. Boyce D. Watkins, black social commentator and scholar, defending Rachel Dolezal in 2015
Among many controversial comments Dave Chappelle made in his contentious Netflix special The Closer last fall was, "[Women] look at transgender women the way we Blacks look at Blackface. They go ‘oh, this b---- is doing an impression of me!’" That troubled critics who thought he was suggesting some transwomen are mocking women the way minstrel show performers mocked black people a century ago.
Is it truly 'blackface' if Rachel Dolezal genuinely identifies with being black and started a new life elsewhere living fully as a black person, the way people who've chosen the other sex do?
We don't recognize 'racial dysphoria' and perhaps there is no such thing, whereas 'gender dysphoria' has been recognized for thousands of years by many different cultures. As the left today celebrates 'gender fluidity', as the LGBTQ community years ago mainstreamed sexual preference fluidity, what if we embraced all fluidity types, whether we personally engage in them or not, and encourage living for awhile in the figurative 'skin' of someone we aren't?
The popularity of the trans movement in the teens forced me to rethink my critical opinion of Rachel Dolezal. Race-switching is popular with white women, and black women and their white allies have pushed back aggressively against it. But when feminists push back against men doing the same, especially when some seem driven for reasons other than true gender dysphoria, those critics are called 'transphobic' and 'TERFs'.
Suddenly, calling what certain transwomen are doing 'gender blackface' sounds less inaccurate.
Rachel Dolezal is hardly the poster child for black people, or transracialism. She comes from an embarrassing history of dishonesty and fraud, including welfare fraud. The impetus for her decision to 'go black' may have been her failed attempt to sue Howard University for discriminating against her based upon 'race', among other things, when she was denied scholarships and other opportunities.
Still, you can't ignore one thing: She's stuck to her guns, after a global shaming and 'cancelling' pile-on. Dolezal isn't the first to switch race but she may arguably be the pioneer in the modern day's eventual acceptance of transracialism. It's coming. No one can stop it. And the transgender movement will drive that change.
Breaking the last taboo
The left has enshrined 'identity' and 'lived experience' as the holy, unquestionable dogma with which one is commanded to treat others. Their most extreme demand on human intelligence and critical faculty is that we're supposed to accept any man who says he's a woman, regardless of how much effort he puts into it. The brewing backlash against biology denial has manifested as the recent FINA Swimming Federation's new mandate restricting most transgender athletes from competing on women's sports teams. Elsewhere, feminists are pushing back aggressively against allowing sex offenders to identify as women so they can push themselves into places they don't belong, with access to women and children.
Twitter bans users for 'misgendering' biological men as happened to Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy. Thou shalt accept any man's word that he's a woman because he says so.
The inevitable move, of course, is to breach the next taboo--Thou shalt not culturally appropriate a race or ethnicity that is not yours.
Hypocrisy always gets called out, and it's 100% illogical to claim a man can become a woman on his say-so but a white person can't declare themselves black and take the cosmetic steps necessary. One can't claim white racial transitioners 'aren't really black' because they didn't grow up with the lived experience of racism at birth, yet deny the same argument against biological males who weren't born into misogyny as natal women are.
The trangenders guilty of 'gender blackface' are the ones who make a mockery of what being a woman truly is when they appropriate unearned female victimhood by claiming discrimination they chose. As has Stephen Terence Wood, a/k/a David Thompson, a/k/a 'Karen White', who seemed more interested in presenting as a victim than a woman, and getting into a women's prison, where the convicted pedophile sexually assaulted two female inmates.
'Gender blackface' is responding to critics by inviting them to 'suck my ladydick'. (Pro tip for aspiring women: We don't threaten each other with our genitals. Offers to suck your dick are rank noob moves.)
Similarly, those genuinely guilty of 'racial blackface' specifically make fun of or mock black people, like this long list of celebrities. Ted Danson's appalling performance (with Whoopi Goldberg's support!) in 1993 at the Friar's Club is the dictionary definition of everything wrong with blackface.
It's reasonable to accept transwomen when they're sincere, or simply if they're respectful of natal women's rights and definition. Could I accept a racial transitioner like Rachel Dolezal if I knew her? Yes, I could. But I'd distance myself from the criminal and dysfunctional Dolezal.
What if racial fluidity, like gender fluidity, is a good thing?
Does it matter why people want to switch gender? While the underlying ideological agenda appears to be muddying the language to erase gender inequities (a highly questionable tactic, and offensive to those who define women biologically), others offer other reasons why they transitioned, not all of them being gender dysphoria. Some have cited not wanting to live in a homophobic or misogynist world, something that sounds horribly inauthentic. Is that the answer to toxic masculinity, the fear of femaleness, the root of misogyny and by extension, homophobia? Conforming better to toxic masculine ideals? Is that what gay rights activists fought for as they struggled to emerge from the closet fifty years ago?
I disagree with these reasons, but people have to the right to live the way they want, and for some at least, to make a huge mistake.
Does it matter if a man is autogynephilic and gets off on dressing as a woman? Does it matter if someone's 'touristing'? Is it a bad thing to experience life in an identity you weren't born into?
We teach children to imagine how they might feel in others' shoes to better understand why people act or think as they do. Imagine you're that black person no one wants to be friends with. Imagine you're a woman who's been forced to have sex with a man. Imagine you're a Trump supporter in a trailer park who doesn't believe in white privilege. Why do these people believe what they do? Why do you believe what you do?
If embracing gender fluidity allows us to better accept those who don't align with our sexually dimorphic society, then why not racial fluidity? The left argues that race is just a 'social construct' anyway, so why should it matter what color we choose? If we can medically transform our bodies to fit another gender, why not another race?
The highly controversial 1961 John Howard Griffiths book Black Like Me detailed a white journalist's experience living as a black man in 1950s America. He experienced America's pre-civil rights racism in a way no other white people had. It greatly impacted the way he thought about racism, particularly when he sat on a toilet in a Mississippi 'colored' public men's room, not because he had to go to the bathroom but because he needed a respite from the onslaught of hatred. And he thought, "I can't do this anymore," and realized he had the choice, unlike natal black people.
Perhaps that's an experiment the left might consider, and support making it easier for people of color to transition as well, so they can 'live white' if they choose. It's possible to whiten your skin with vitiligo treatments as Michael Jackson proved, but may be more expensive and risky than 'going black'. On a theoretical basis, it offers an escape for those who don't want to live in a racist world. Inauthentic, yes, but the left already embraces that.
I would love to read a book called White Like Me. I want to know what a black person's experience is growing up in a racist society and living at least for a little while 'accepted' into white society because no one knows what's under the skin. I want to know if it solved all their problems, and what they think when they experience 'white privilege'. I wouldn't be offended as a white person. I sincerely embrace fluidity overall as something that can one day make us more tolerant, even if it doesn't today.
For this to work, racial and gender transitioners need to understand they can't ever have the same lived experience as one who was born into a certain identity. A transman didn't grow up with male privilege and male acceptance, and a transblack person didn't grow up with racism and white supremacy. A transwoman didn't grow up with the relentless assault on their bodies that many women experience, even if they were bullied for not being 'man' enough. It ain't the same thing. What identity 'fluids' need to embrace to make all of this work is to always be respectful of the natal members of the group they've appropriated.
This is one area where the transgender movement fails, and why the backlash is brewing. It's thanks to a small select set of hyper-privileged ex-men exhibiting as much narcissistic entitlement as women, as when they presented as men. It endangers the much broader community of transfolk who don't hate women, don't want to threaten them, and recognize that many are already allies, and many more might become them if the community stood up to and challenged the gender abusers.
It's a lesson for transracialists. People who switch race can't claim to be 'exactly the same' as their adopted group, and the particular danger will come from the historically privileged white people who, like some men, will find it more difficult to abandon the entitlement between their ears than their old wardrobe.
Several years ago I re-connected briefly with an old (black) college friend who was immersed in Native American rituals and religion. I asked why and he said he was part Native American. He certainly didn't 'look' Native. But I thought good for him, even as I cringed to read he was planning to undergo a 'Sun Dance' (Trigger warning: It's painful!) What does it matter if he's not Native himself, raised in a middle-class New York family rather than a reservation, and wasn't subjected to the same pathologies and discrimination suffered by Natives? Growing up black isn't the same. Immersing himself in a culture not strictly his own must surely have broadened his mind plenty, and in the end, how much does 'blood' really matter anyway, when you don't grow up living and being as that particular identity?
'Transitioning' looks more controversial than it is because we're so spitefully divided against each other. What if embracing fluidity in all its forms made us better humans? The problem within the trans community regarding who is 'really' a woman is merely that: A problem, but not an insurmountable one. Much more might be accomplished for gender fluidity overall if we could sit down together and work out a compromise, rather than hurling increasingly-meaningless labels at opponents. We can do the same with racial and ethnic fluidity.
After all, if they're all merely 'human constructs', what difference does it make?
When I'm not contemplating adopting my new personal identity as a gorgeous, slim, 21-year-old millionaire supermodel, I return to reality to help women and others reclaim their power on my website, Grow Some Labia.
"What if embracing fluidity in all its forms made us better humans?"
Well, for one thing, it's fraud. I don't see how fraud in any form can make us better humans.
Otherwise, great essay that will make certain people's heads explode, mostly due to their own rank hypocrisy.