Piny said, “You think, then, that there are certain presentation cues that male-assigned people do not have the right to display, such that they are commonly understood to be associated with women? Because that’s what this comparison implies.”

No I don’t think that’s what it means–at least not too me. I have trouble with many gender drag shows, particularly those where people perform as women because they often involve some of the most insidious stereotypes of women–that we only care about our appearance, that we are defined by our bodies and not our minds, that a woman is more “real” if she has a certain physique, and probably some other things that I’m missing. I think this has been the problem with racial drag shows too.

Cressida J. Heyes
“Changing Race, Changing Sex: The Ethics of Self-Transformation”
Journal of Social Philosophy June 2006 - Vol. 37 Issue 2

In other words, is drag the same as blackface? To be honest, I tend to think it is.

You think, then, that there are certain presentation cues that male-assigned people do not have the right to display, such that they are commonly understood to be associated with women? Because that’s what this comparison implies.

I think it would be demonstrably incorrect to assert that ‘progressives’ are more uncomfortable or oppse to interracial marriage or adoption or multiracial identites than with transgenderism. I can only think of one progressive organziation which is opposed to either interracial marriage or adoption–the National Association of Black Social Wokers. They do not seem to have any position on transgender issues of any kind.

In other words, is drag the same as blackface? To be honest, I tend to think it is.

I would never refer to the “black ethnicity” or “black ethnic identity.” But I can understand it when people do, only when they can take for granted that they are situated in certain parts of the U.S. where there is only one Black ethnic identity, which is African-American.

Because I take it that there are other Black ethnic identities — Ibo, Yoruba, Zulu, Haitian, West Indian, Afro-Cuban, etc. What kind of identities are these if they are not ethnic?

Racially a member of any of these ethnicities will be classified, willy-nilly without any choice in the matter, as part of the Black race in the U.S. context. And this may matter more to how they are treated than any self-definition of theirs which is ethnic or cultural.

Ethnically I think there may be more freedom to join with a Black ethnic category even if one is not Black, except of course that a common experience of racial oppression or colonization has perhaps become an ethnic binder and source of solidarity over the centuries within many Black ethnic groups.

Even so, the ethnic identity is to my mind the collective property of the members, who have the right to determine membership by criteria they choose. This has gotten muddled with Native Americans, perhaps precisely because the issue of who is a Native American has gotten caught up in racial thinking (i.e. within U.S. Federal law) not merely ethnic thinking. Racial identity is unambiguously imposed from without, by the larger system in which some groups are relatively dominant and may have historically imposed the terms.

This distinction can impose clarity. Maybe too much clarity, because people in the U.S. meld race and ethnicity by not making this kind of distinction, and therefore insistence on a clear distinction is probably a bad way of understanding how U.S. Americans define themselves!

Analogies to gender — not too many. But we can ask questions by analogy. Analogous to the racial question: how are people who deviate from normative gender seen/described/termed by the larger society? What are the externally imposed categories which define the social landscape they have to navigate? Analogous to the ethnic question: how do they form communities? What are the distinctions among themselves (or from normatively gendered people) which they use to define themselves into communities? What are the criteria by which people are accepted or not accepted into these communities? (not that such criteria are stable or anything — which goes for the original ethnic example too)

To put it another way, there existed a time in recorded human history in which there was no concept of race as skin color. There has never existed a time without the concept of gender. Gender is a human universal fundamental going back to the dawn of time.

Of course, race exists now as an inescapable part of modern culture. It is closely linked with ethnicity. Being black is therefore not just a skin color but also an ethnic identity. I think this is an important distinction. A person who is visually black is recognized as such whenever she deals with anyone. A black-l0oking person is identifiable as such before she moves or opens her mouth. It is not an invisible identity. However, somebody who has been accepted into the black community may have black ethnicity. This person would be an invisible minority in the same way that gay folks are. The person who is visually black is going to have a different experience than somebody who is only ethnically black.

I think it may be problematic to confuse racial and ethnic identities. And I think the comparison to transgender people may also be problematic.

I think you hit the dot on the nose, so to speak. Uh, that, and there’s something else big in there: the social status divide in much of America between people of color and white folks has grown to be much more obvious and gigantamous than the social status divide between women and men. There has been a notable amount of catching up on the sexism front; not so much with racism.

“Women should be WOMEN! Because that’s good and special!” stuff was more prominent some generations ago, same time as when the idea of a transgendered person was almost unthinkable. And some of the we-embrace-you-if-you-embrace-your-culture stuff falls in the same basket. That kind of gender/cultural policing comes from both inside and outside the gender or culture, and maybe it has something to do with the frustration of people who’ve *tried* to use the paradigm of the higher social status category and had it fail for them because of prejudice against their physical signifiers.

I mean, there’s some nasty whispering about trans people in parts of the feminist community, too. Sometimes the reaction to an FTM transition is something along the lines of “You’ve sold out”, and sometimes the reaction to an MTF transition is “Stop appropriating my identity!” Compare, respectively, African-American people “acting too white”, and the anger frequently expressed against white kids with dreadlocks. It’s the same, “Don’t steal my place in my large pond / Don’t get into my small pond” thing.

Thanks for the post. To be brief, I was the only white kid in a lower middle class, predominantly black community until high school. Then we moved to an upper middle class community with opposite color ratios but was heavily jewish.

I found it was easier to assimilate into the particular black community I lived in than the jewish community. I think this had something to do with the cerimonialy exclusive nature of the Jewish community in question.

I also noticed some of the parents were insulted by my knowledge and understanding of the social norms, coloquialisms and beliefs of lower middle class blacks. Some parents were protecting their kids by teaching them to fear lower middle class blacks.

During the assimilation into my new community, some of the kids poked fun at me for knowing this and using the slang from time to time. I also created a bit of the problem for my new public school because most of the material in the classes I was in were one or two years behind what my private lower middle class school taught me. So unfortunately for some of the parents, they couldn’t point to me as a “stupid” kid from a lower middle class community.

As it was, one of the very, very jewish kids in the advanced program befriended me and really enjoyed learning what I knew. He began to explore the black community, attending community forums and reading up on black culture.

Eventually he became a transgender. He completely changed his dress and appearance to look black. He found a black wife who was born in Africa and moved into the lower middle class community to provide research on education in economically depressed areas. He has his PhD and at our last reunion claimed I was one of his inspirations. I hope I didn’t disappoint him by telling him I was not an inspirational leader trying to break down racial lines. I was just a kid trying to get some friends.

All that said, I think you’ll find significant geographic influence on this issue. I’m from Los Angeles, which I’ve found to be one of the more progressive trans racial metro areas.

Regarding “transexuals”, I can tell you another thing: It is pretty offensive to define people by a medical condition. Do you call people “cripples” or “club foots” or “cleft palates” or “single eyes” or “birthmarks”? Are not the people you describe in fact men or women? I’d comment on “transgenders” but I have no idea what that means, but it doesn’t sound very flattering.

Regarding who is more accepting, I can tell you one other thing: Liberals like to congratulate themselves on how progressive they are in “accepting” people who are different. It takes some hard experience to learn that acceptance is not doled out according to political views. Most of the time, what one encounters is not acceptance at all but only tolerance. Tolerance is not acceptance. The only difference between progressives and conservatives is how violently the intolerance is expressed. As for acceptance, let us be clear, there is precious little of it any where.

Patronising dissertations that attempt to lump together all forms of “gender variance” under one term tend to not help. I do not believe you had untoward motives, but it all smacks of “those people”, does it not?

carry on.

However, it appears that they were so successful at passing that my mum can’t conceive of the idea (and my dad was absolutely horrified when my sib tried to bring the topic up), despite the fact that her brother and one of his sons were very dark-skinned, but the family story was that this came from a (I kid you fucking not) “Black-Welsh” heritage. (I haven’t blogged on this because my parents read my blog, but they’re not net-savvy enough to follow me through comments threads)

So for the first 30 years of my life I totally thought of myself as white, and that is my major racial identity. But I’m now pretty sure that I’ve got indigenous ancestry, but because of generational denial/ignorance I have no idea whether that ancestry is Koori, Murri, Luritja, Yolngu or Torres Strait Islander or what. I have a friend who performs in Aboriginal dance troupes but could “pass” for white if she wished to, and I’ve been discussing some of this with her, but as she grew up openly acknowledging her aboriginality she can’t fully relate.

So, as I feel in transition from a mono-racial to a multi-racial identity, am I trans-racial?

I know the who transracial adoption and multiracial identity stuff is really popular, but I have to look into this area.