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so heyyyy, with the new "i'm a white woman pretending to be black" thing (google Jessica Krug), we're gonna get another round of "if being transgender is okay, why can't you switch races???" questions from ignorant whites.
Let me try to answer that?
Let me try to answer that?
It has to do with the different ways bodies are constructed in society and in our heads, and the ways our brains map onto those bodies.
Trans people tend to experience forms of gender dysphoria. Their brains are built to map their bodies a certain way - eg, a trans man's brain will function as though the body has a penis, when it doesn't, which can be very jarring. This is documented medical fact.
Our relationship to our bodies is, in a lot of ways, rooted in what sexual organs we have, and even though gender is largely a social construct, there's a root of reality in there that trans people experience as distress.
That same dysphoric reaction doesn't exist for people pretending to be a different race because race isn't rooted in a physical reality in the way gender is. You also don't see these people who switch races using the same descriptions of dysphoria as many trans people do.
It's very often that a person chooses to be perceived as a different race because they consider it advantageous for them to do so - white women pose as black women because they believe that identity affords them authority to speak on "black" issues that whiteness precludes.
Note that Krug and Dolezal took on blackness in a very particular way: they took on the respectable black woman stereotype. It's important that both of these women are involved in academia - these women thought "I'd be able to speak better on this if I was black.'
So instead of acknowledging that taking on blackness was not their place, they instead fetishized and cannabilized black womanhood for their own ends, to be seen as more authoritative speaking to an experience they lacked access to.
Whereas a trans person will frequently have an uneasiness and dysphoric experiences before they found the language to describe what they were, these women who "became black" did so simply because they felt it advantageous to do so.
Krug, in particular, describes this with an awareness that she was deceiving people - as opposed to the transgender experience where trans people experience fear because they are living their truth but accused wrongly of deception.
The two experiences are so wildly different in how they manifest and how the individual views themselves and their relationships to society that it is to compare apples to oranges.
Addendum: to clarify what I mean by "gender is rooted in physical reality": by this, I simply was casting a large net in that people will adjust their bodies in physical space to accord to their gender, often unconsciously. NOT that "organs = gender."
Basically it's a matter of epistemological and ontological ideas coming together, and that's a really thorny issue to split apart. This thread is meant to be just one angle that can answer for that issue. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done to make this clearer.
