"If it's not a mental illness and just a discomfort due to being the sex they are and not the sex they want to be then trans-racialism can exist within that set-up the exact same way."
On the surface we agree here and I actually find it disingenuous when people hastily dismiss this argument as if it's supposed to be silly while it's a _completely_ valid proposal at face value. You're suggesting people be allowed to identify as they choose in a similar way if we're already suggesting that they can in another. Obviously that's fair and deserves consideration.
Transracialism doesn't particularly bother me personally, just as I can't imagine any of this stuff ever having a profound impact on my life, but I can see a potential argument against it. As a society we appear to have come to the consensus that while women and men aren't _expected_ to be either feminine or masculine, it's perfectly fine to acknowledge that women are more often feminine and men are more often masculine. It's obviously way more complex than this but it's the root of much of gender identity.
Our society looks upon race in a very different way. We consider attributing innate behavioral qualities to a race as stereotyping or even racist. Any patterns we find are always easily explained by cultural differences and the coincidental environment. Our society's perspective seems to be that, all coincidental environmental factors removed, we shouldn't expect to find significant behavioral differences on average across race as we do across sex.
This puts a transracial person in the position of being asked to explain what they actually mean by not feeling as if their birth race. It seems it would be a difficult thing to explain without stereotyping various races on some level. Meanwhile if someone feels they were born the wrong sex, they're discussing differences on average that we've collectively deemed valid. These typical differences are the very makeup of gender. It's this key difference that renders one proposal so much more open to question than the other in my opinion. Were behavioral differences on average across race recognized as facts, this would be almost exactly the same thing, but they're not.
That said, I don't really care on a personal level. It doesn't hurt me a bit if someone wants to identify as another race. I don't understand what it even means if they're not stereotyping, but it doesn't hurt me. If it's decided to be racist then it has to be addressed obviously.
As for trans people, regardless of whether or not you choose to call it a mental disorder, there's also a compelling argument that it begins with a genetic predisposition. Sex expresses itself in the brain as well and we regularly see things such as MtFs who experienced early onset gender dysphoria having brains more closely resembling those of cis females than cis men. Studies on sets of twins that contain at least one trans person are also interesting. Among the dizygotic, non-identical twins, the other twin is also trans only 2.6% of the time. Among the monozygotic, identical twins, this is 33% of the time. That's a pretty insane jump demonstrating that not only the environment is at play here.
I don't think we really have any perfect solutions for any of this right now. We'll just have to take it one step at a time.
IIN That I think trans-racialism makes as much sense as transgenderism?
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"If it's not a mental illness and just a discomfort due to being the sex they are and not the sex they want to be then trans-racialism can exist within that set-up the exact same way."
On the surface we agree here and I actually find it disingenuous when people hastily dismiss this argument as if it's supposed to be silly while it's a _completely_ valid proposal at face value. You're suggesting people be allowed to identify as they choose in a similar way if we're already suggesting that they can in another. Obviously that's fair and deserves consideration.
Transracialism doesn't particularly bother me personally, just as I can't imagine any of this stuff ever having a profound impact on my life, but I can see a potential argument against it. As a society we appear to have come to the consensus that while women and men aren't _expected_ to be either feminine or masculine, it's perfectly fine to acknowledge that women are more often feminine and men are more often masculine. It's obviously way more complex than this but it's the root of much of gender identity.
Our society looks upon race in a very different way. We consider attributing innate behavioral qualities to a race as stereotyping or even racist. Any patterns we find are always easily explained by cultural differences and the coincidental environment. Our society's perspective seems to be that, all coincidental environmental factors removed, we shouldn't expect to find significant behavioral differences on average across race as we do across sex.
This puts a transracial person in the position of being asked to explain what they actually mean by not feeling as if their birth race. It seems it would be a difficult thing to explain without stereotyping various races on some level. Meanwhile if someone feels they were born the wrong sex, they're discussing differences on average that we've collectively deemed valid. These typical differences are the very makeup of gender. It's this key difference that renders one proposal so much more open to question than the other in my opinion. Were behavioral differences on average across race recognized as facts, this would be almost exactly the same thing, but they're not.
That said, I don't really care on a personal level. It doesn't hurt me a bit if someone wants to identify as another race. I don't understand what it even means if they're not stereotyping, but it doesn't hurt me. If it's decided to be racist then it has to be addressed obviously.
As for trans people, regardless of whether or not you choose to call it a mental disorder, there's also a compelling argument that it begins with a genetic predisposition. Sex expresses itself in the brain as well and we regularly see things such as MtFs who experienced early onset gender dysphoria having brains more closely resembling those of cis females than cis men. Studies on sets of twins that contain at least one trans person are also interesting. Among the dizygotic, non-identical twins, the other twin is also trans only 2.6% of the time. Among the monozygotic, identical twins, this is 33% of the time. That's a pretty insane jump demonstrating that not only the environment is at play here.
I don't think we really have any perfect solutions for any of this right now. We'll just have to take it one step at a time.