Edit for context:
My view is transracial isn’t valid and this person is trying to dogwhistle. I’ve already blocked this person, and now they’re going after my friend saying my friend is transphobic because they disagreed with them about transracial being a thing (they’re purposefully leaving the context out so my friend looks transphobic when what my friend really said was transgender is valid but transracial isn’t)
The best way is asking: what’s your point? Is it that transgender shouldn’t be accepted or that transrace should?. And proceed from there to either defend transgenderism or criticize transracism accordingly.
First let me start by saying I strongly dislike the race therminology, but I’ll use it here for consistency, although normally I would call it ethnicity.
The difference between those lies in that gender is a social construct, and race is not. Race has some biological meaning, just like sex, people can’t change their sex (yet), they can’t change their race (yet).
Gender is a social construct, it’s things that have nothing to do with biology but that we as a society attribute in general to a specific sex. A similar concept for race would be culture, a person can be of the sex male but prefer to wear clothes usually associated with female sex, just like someone can be of the white ethnicity but prefer to hear music usually associated with black ethnicity. I wouldn’t call Eminem or Michael Jackson transrace, what would that even mean?
I genuinely don’t know enough about what people who claim to be trans racial are even saying and why they’re saying it to form an opinion on it. My gut feeling is that it isn’t valid and they’re bad actors, but my gut has been wrong before.
So if someone told me “trans racial is just as valid as trans gender” I’d either not respond or just say “I don’t know about that.” and leave it at that.
Gentle reminder that if you believe someone is a bad actor and using dog whistles there isn’t a point in responding to things like this because you aren’t going to change their mind.
Does it really matter if someone is either
No race, no gender. No problems.
Gender anarchism and race anarchism. People be just people. Social constructs shall not be a dividing reason, let everyone behave however the hell they want as long as they don’t hurt others and be happy.
Also US race concepts are kind of weird in general. I suppose the history of slavery and segregation did a number on people’s perception of race.
This is exactly why I think “transgender” does more harm than good and I’ll die on this hill. What’s the point? The people who are going to accept the way you express yourself aren’t going to care if it conforms to gender stereotypes, and the people who aren’t won’t suddenly change their minds if it does.
All it does is reinforce the very same stereotypes that gave you gender dysphoria in the first place. It’s saying that gender norms are valid, you just got assigned the wrong ones. Live your truth, express yourself how you want, alter your body however you want, but don’t validate oppressive stereotypes in the process.
Literally the only rational answer. Stop giving a fuck about what people look like unless you’re explicitly looking for someone to fuck
This reeks of, “I don’t see color,” which is bullshit racists say to justify ignoring the plights of people of color in the US.
We need to see color if we ever want to possibly attempt to correct the deep, systemic problems we have with racism.
Also US race concepts are kind of weird in general. I suppose the history of slavery and segregation did a number on people’s perception of race.
There is no “did” here, it’s ongoing.
I get your point, but you’re missing the point of what the person is saying. They said that if no one cared about gender or race transgenders or transrace wouldn’t be an issue, it would be seen similarly to people who dye their hair or undergo plastic surgery to change something they don’t like on themselves, i.e. cosmetic changes that society in general doesn’t give a crap.
If society treated race the same way we treat shoe sizes, i.e. they exist, we recognize them when it’s needed but understand that outside of picking a shoe you don’t care about it (there are no toilets for people who use size 6, or a special door that only people with size 7, and people certainly don’t require your shoe size in your CV and use that as a decision point as to whether they will hire you). IF we could get everyone to think like this, then we wouldn’t need to worry about the plights of any group because they would be in the past. That being said, this is not realistic because people are habit creatures, and if you grew up being taught to be racist and are never confronted about it you will keep those beliefs, that’s why it’s important to break stereotypes, that’s why affirmative actions are important, not because it helps the individual break through a societal barrier (although that’s important as well) but because they help society break from the preconceived notions that have engrained in most people’s minds through centuries of oppression.
The ideal future is one where gender or race doesn’t matter, but the road there goes through recognizing the plights that each gender and race has to face and adjust society to compensate for them so they can live “similar” lives and that on the long run society walks towards a more diverse and inclusive group. It’s easy to have a prejudice against someone different from your “normal”, which is why it’s important to break “normal” views and extremely important to normalize taboo behavior.
This is absurd talk. I don’t want people generalizing me for my race or gender, and I wouldnt do it to someone else either.
You must go around treating every minority as if they are a victim of something. I’m sure they greatly appreciate your refusal to see them as an individual.
This race/gender anarchism would help trans people as the general public would stop giving a shit how people choose to behave and what they are interested in.
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Do you mean there is slavery and segregation still going on on the us?
This wasn’t really the point I was making, but yes actually. Regardless of how you try to restrict your definitions in a pre-emptive act of goalpost-moving, slavery still exists in the US under the thirteenth amendment as a form of punishment, and our prisons are full of them.
And yes, segregated schools (and even things like “segregated proms” within supposedly-integrated schools) still exist.
The study found that minority students became more isolated and less exposed to whites within a school although districts were statistically more integrated.[44] Another 2013 study found that segregation measures increased over the previous 25 years due to changing demographics.[29] The study did not find an increase in racial balance. Racial unequality remained stable.
[…]
A 2013 study corroborated these findings, showing that the relationship between residential and school segregation became stronger between 2000 and 2010. In 2000, segregation of black people in schools was lower than in their neighborhoods; by 2010, the two patterns of segregation were “nearly identical”.[46]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_segregation_in_the_United_States#Segregation_since_the_1960s
And even still, they’re openly moving to bring it back more widely: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/02/us/louisiana-justice-department-desegregation-order
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/02/us/louisiana-justice-department-desegregation-order
That said, what I was referring to was the lingering effects that are very real, even if they are not immediately evident to an outside viewer. I could tell you’re not from here, because if you were, you’d understand what I’m talking about. Just because the letter of the law says something, does not mean anything about what things are actually like in practice. 400 years of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, etc. doesn’t just vanish overnight. Especially when not a single fucking thing is done to try to rectify or repair it.
Depends if I have time and I want entertainment at that moment, I know they are trolling and don’t care and usually people just want to get me angry at them so I calmly responded to everything they say as it’s a real legitimate question, treat every question as if there truly caring about it. Most people will just back off after a bit because they can’t get me all angry and pissed off. It’s quite entertaining watching them get angry and wound up because I was trying to answer them honestly and nice way. Doesn’t always work but it’s just something I do I learned really pisses off those kinda people
Why not ask more questions about it? And if they insist it does no damage, it wouldn’t matter either way
The differences between the sexes is much less than people like to pretend. Every cell in your body has different modes it can operate in. Many, perhaps most, cells have estrogen-dominated and testosterone-dominated modes. If you change the dominant hormones in the body, every cell in the body switches between these modes. Trans people who medically transition are simply taking advantage of the body’s existing mechanism of secondary sex characteristics.
Ultimately, any person could have a male- or female- typical phenotype. If you put the right hormone injections into a fetus at the right time of pregnancy, an XY fetus would be born with a vagina and a uterus. And the opposite is true as well. These conditions sometimes happen naturally with intersex conditions. Every human body has the potential to develop along a male- or female-typical path. It’s just a matter of what hormones are passing through the body at what stage of development.
But race? There’s no comparison. Cells don’t have different expression modes that correspond to different racial phenotypes. There are no “black hormones” that a white person could take to gain many of the characteristics of black bodies. There is simply no equivalent to the medical transition process many trans people undergo. There is simply no equivalent to the fundamental rewiring of the body that occurs on a cellular level with trans medical treatments.
Are you saying hormone injections or other medical measures are necessary for you to consider someone transgender? I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t agree with that. Correspondingly why would that be required to be transracial? You’re right that hormone differences aren’t involved in race, but how does that invalidate the whole concept? TBH it sounds the same as the anti-trans argument, “it just doesn’t make sense.” I mean I can see people reacting like, “If we allow this then it would be easy to abuse.” Well maybe, but that seems like another issue. I’m just now dipping into this and trying to understand it.
Those who seek outrage will find it every time. Yes, obviously there are some trans people that don’t seek out medical transition. That’s why I said “trans people who medically transition.” But language can be overly inclusive. We don’t need to start every single writing on trans people with three paragraphs describing every exception and caveat. Obviously when you talk about a group, any group, you have to talk in generalities. If you insist on starting every comment about trans people with paragraphs of caveats and provisos, you make actually getting to the point impossible. You water down the language to the point of uselessness. At at time when trans rights are under assault on all sides, I don’t mind focusing most trans discussions on the material realities and needs of most trans folks.
Most trans people want to medically transition. Are those that don’t somehow invalid? No. But we also don’t need to start every discussion with a thousand caveats describing every sub-category within a group. There are atheist Jews and there are gay Muslims. That doesn’t mean every discussion of those faiths is centered around these rare exceptions.
I feel like your over focusing on the medical aspect
I took to mean like how you compare say breeds of dogs. Both a golden retriever and a German Shepard are both dogs,.both k-9 members of the space species.
All fo them have the biological ability to be both male or female as it’s a secondary trait controlled by hormones.
While race is basically genetics and your DNA. You cant just edit your DNA and rewrite your body to express characteristics of another race.
You can’t just make your body suddenly become a red head, or grow an afro. You can’t just suddenly force your nose or cheek bones to rearrange themselves.
You can’t just shrink to lengthen your bones.
Most of what makes up human “races” is just the breeding of our ancestors.
In the future we may be able to change all of this and custom design out bodies. But that wouldnt be a natural change unlike hormone therapy.
Instead of taking advantage of a natural ability of the body, you would be entirely overruling it and entirely creating something new that isn’t natural.
Basically you would be performing eugentics. For good or bad.
Transracial doesn’t exist because “Race” in the context that they want to use it doesn’t exist.
Genetically there’s only one “race”; that’s the human race. If they want to identify as a different culture, it’s purely a cosmetic cultural thing, not biological or genetic. Whereas as being Transgender is biological. Therefore, you can safely tell people like Rachel Dolezal to fuck off and go back to fifth period science class.
Gender isn’t biological. You’re conflating with sex
Well trans people, if they medically transition, quite literally change their sex.
If they don’t, they’re still transitioning their gender. Exactly how much they decide to change themselves doesn’t matter. That’s the point of the term.
Trans people transition BOTH their sex and their gender. The term “transgender” is a broad umbrella term. But most people under that label do seek to physically change their bodies. You’re arguing semantics, I’m arguing the lived experience of living breathing human beings.
The it sounds like you should be arguing for different semantics, that match the experience of living breathing human beings.
white people stop acting like we live in a post-racial society challenge!
also, being trans was never biological, that’s called bio-essentialism
Uhh while gender is a social construct that’s existed in countless forms though out all of history.
Sex and transsexual are VERY much a biological thing.
You can’t just say trans isn’t biological. Transgendered isn’t, but gender isn’t biology.
Sex IS biology and transsexual IS biological.
You need to be specific if you want to get into actually defined scientific terminology.
Saying that race isn’t real is not the same as saying that we live in a post-racial society.
it is actually because how could racism exist without race? the only people who claim race isn’t real are white
“Race” was invented by racists. There was a lot of fake science here in Germany in the 30s to “prove” that not only “human races” exist, but even so that they have different worth.
So this is what I always still hear when someone is using the word - and commonly they are racists.
I do understand where you’re coming from, and I totally agree that there are a fucking lot of supremacist people and yes - if I had been a teenager in the 30s, people would have seen I’m blonde, blue-eyed and tall. So I would have that privilege and still it is a privilege in the modern world.
Prejudices about skin color exist, I absolutely agree. Racists exist, I agree. Just “race” - every time I hear that, it’s like something out of the Nazi textbooks my grandfather had to use at school.
OK, so at least you’re conscious that the word race makes you uncomfortable. and I’ll ask this in good faith, why do you think that is? maybe because acknowledging that your white phenotype, something you have no control over and could never change, gives you privilege over non-white people?
I promise you that the words you use or don’t use won’t make racism go away, confronting internalized racism will. and that’s what white privilege is, the opportunity for us to go our entire lives without ever having to acknowledge race still exists, white supremacy is commonplace, and we’re part of that system because of societal brainwashing that begins at birth and is lifelong unless we deconstruct said programming.
I don’t really think I can come up with a more concise way of summarizing the idea than anthropologist Audrey Smedley did on the first result of the Google search “race social construct”
Race is a culturally structured systematic definition of a way of looking at perceiving and interpreting reality.
I would recommend you read something like “Feminism and ‘Race’” from Oxford Readings in Feminism or some of bell hooks’ work to understand the idea better.
extremely simple question for you, if bell hooks believed race isn’t real then why does she call herself Black? do you seriously believe she means that in a “race doesn’t exist” way? 🤦♀️
You do not need to believe race is a biological reality to acknowledge that the perception of others as you (+ your ancestors) being a member of a race has materially affected your identity
so I never said it’s a biological reality, just that it’s real because white supremacy is real. seems like we agree
It’s nonsense because race is a social construct.
But so it’s gender, so this isn’t really a good argument is it?
white people, we learn one sociological term and run it into the ground. it doesn’t mean what you think it does.
“A social construct is an idea, category, or framework that gains meaning through collective agreement within a society”
The racial lines of division are arbitrary and different in each society. Therefore, a social construct.
Remember, it wasn’t THAT long ago that Italians weren’t considered white. Now they are.
someone said that in a thread on lemmy early, i cringed. it seems the only people that think transracial is a thing is primarly done by white people. i wonder if thats the same person were talking about.
and yes i was thinking about rachel dolzal. or white people claiming they are native american, because they have less than 1-5% of thier dna, your still a white asf guy. and a white guy pretending that he is filipino, because he drives a tuk tuk.
I don’t know anything about this issue but apparently the presumption here is that your view is the right view and you’re just asking how to splain it to the person. My question is about the “I’ve already blocked this person” part. Instead could you possibly just limit your conversation to other subjects? It keeps looking like we’re all getting more and more isolated from each other as we develop extreme aversions to anyone not having our exact POV about everything, so we shove them out of our world. It reminds me of survivalist bunker mentality.
Is there something like “trans smart”?
If there is, I’ve definitely seen some “trans-dumbasses” as well as “cis-dumbasses”
Did they say that they define as dumbasses?
Block them.
“You are wrong. Gender and race are two different things. Transgender people have been around since time began, transracial was invented few years ago to appropriate and diminish transgender people’s experiences. it’s not transphobic to be against something that was recently invented to invalidate transgender people. ciao”
but tbf it seems like that person’s tryna start shit so I’d just block and report em
Yeah fuck it, it’s 2025
