The Conflation of Gender and Racial Impersonation

I had a hard time picking one today. I’d grabbed all the low-hanging “Questioning Transgender” fruit in previous sweeps, leaving only a few articles that touch on anything I haven’t covered before. Trans-Race is one of the few I haven’t touched that attacks transgender people directly, and is a topic I’ve skirted a few times - the comparison of transitioning into the other sex to “blackface.”

This is actually a fairly common comparison, made as if it were completely reasonable and acknowledges all possible realities surrounding race and gender, but it’s really just an offensive form of appropriation. I’ve linked to Queen Emily’s Race and Transness article before, which covers the topic fairly thoroughly (and is why I’ve held off on this for the past two weeks).

Angelita Manzano’s article immediately begins with an imposed fallacy, a false argument she applies to trans people:

The claim is often made that claiming there is a category called “woman” is a way of reinscribing sexist categories, and we should be trying to get rid of sexist categories, so let’s just deny “woman” exists. I’m saying that claiming that there is no difference between someone born with a vagina and raised as a girl, and someone born with a penis and raised as a boy (that the latter may simply choose to belong to the category of woman) is analogous to saying that there is no difference between someone born and raised Black and someone born and raised white–that the latter may simply choose to belong to the category of Black.

She implies right off the bat that trans women claim there is no difference between a trans woman and a cis women, and immediately makes a racial comparison. The problems with this paragraph are:

• Saying that claiming a trans woman can really be a woman is like claiming that a white person can “simply choose” to become a black person. She’s implying, as so many radical feminists like to do when discussing trans people, that the decision to transition is a matter of “simply choosing.”
• That there’s no difference between using hormones and surgery to change sex and living full time in the social role of “woman” and the simple act of asserting that one is now a black person.
• That manhood and womanhood derive from the penis and the vagina, respectively, and have nothing to do with how you’re socialized, how you’re treated, how you’re expected to act, and so on.

Accepting any of these require denying the lived realities trans people experience as well as what it takes to change sex. It also conveniently ignores the realities of gender and race by conflating them into basically the same thing, and tries to make the idea of changing sex sound like a frivolous decision.

It’s necessary for her to establish the idea that race and gender can be conflated like this so she can write the following paragraph without immediately losing her (presumably unfavorable-toward-trans people) audience. The entire second paragraph is about how it’s not possible to destroy racism by simply switching to a different race - for her, as a woman of color, to make herself more white. Now, this is not not unreasonable: You don’t destroy racism by acting more like the people with the racial privilege. Condoleeza Rice and Michelle Malkin make that much clear. Of course, this has nothing to do with why trans people choose to transition, but as we can see, Angelita believes it does, having absorbed the transphobic radical feminist teachings rather well:

Similarly, we can say there’s no such thing as gender, and in a certain sense, that is true–gender is not a biological fact. However, if we deny that there is such a thing as “woman” (that we can just choose to live whatever gender we want) that means that there is no such thing as “man”–i.e., there is no class of people (men) that have unequal power and privilege over another group of people (women). In other words, by denying the reality of women and men, you deny the reality of patriarchy. So if I chose to live my life as a man that would do nothing to destroy the system of male supremacy. And destroying male supremacy is what I think feminism is about: we must get rid of patriarchy in order to get rid of gender roles.

Now she brings it around, equating trans people’s approach to gender with white people who claim to be color-blind with regards to race. This paragraph is ridiculous. The existence of men and women as discrete categories is a reality that trans people have to negotiate constantly. We can’t deny the existence of men and women because this is central to what we have to live with. Transitioning isn’t about denying anything, about supporting or ignoring the patriarchy. It is not a political act - it is an act of survival.

She also criticizes transition because it won’t destroy the patriarchy. But, really, who seriously claims it would? Does open heart surgery threaten the patriarchy? How about insulin injections? Maybe taking antibiotics to cure strep throat? Hormones and surgery are medical treatments for trans people. Transitioning has nothing to do with politics by itself. It may inform trans people’s politics (and it really should - transition moves one down the social ladder several steps just for being trans), but it is not defined by or as politics.

This is emblematic of the peculiar radical feminist view that “the personal is political” means that everything personal must be interpreted as a political act, whether you engage in BDSM, are a sex worker, choose to marry a man instead of pretending to be a politically caricatured lesbian. This makes it remarkably easy to identify “enemies” and ostracize and slander them. When you’re reducing a person’s most fundamental decisions and perceptions of herself to whether her identity is congruent with your politics, you’ve ceased to see her as a valid human being, and instead look upon her as a token for your own goals.

In a lot of ways, radical feminism (as seen online) is defined more by what radical feminists hate than what radical feminists support.

Anyway, back to the male privilege argument:

When I say that there is such a thing as “Black,” I’m not reinscribing categories but simply admitting the truth about the world we live in today. When I say that there is such a thing as “woman,” I’m not “reinscribing” categories–I am simply admitting the truth about the world we live in today. And as much as I would like to someday live in a world where someone with a penis would not have power over me, that’s not the world that I live in today. Denying this truth, denying that someone born with penis and raised a boy has greater access to power and privilege than I do, does nothing to get rid of male dominance.

The overall tone of the article is meant to imply, “Once a ______, always a _______.” So, if you’re born white, raised white, and try to claim you’re black, you’ll still received white privilege from society, even if you personally do your best to not exert that white privilege. Everyone still sees you as white, they treat you as white. You have an easier time getting good jobs, getting into good schools, and so on. She wants this to be extended to trans women: Once a man, always a man. Even if you look like a woman, smell like a woman, dress like a woman, act like a woman, sound like a woman, have an F on your driver’s license and a surgically constructed vagina, you’re still receiving male privilege. The superficial change of claiming an identity on a whim is just like the profound change of altering your body. That if you ever received male privilege, it taints your life forever after. That it is in fact a personal failing that earns you condemnation, and forever bars you from acceptance.

It also serves as the source of many offensive stereotypes about trans women - that we “take up too much social space,” for example, and that we only want into women’s spaces because “women aren’t allowed to say no to men.” In short, the original sin of male privilege serves as a convenient lever to discredit everything about trans woman identities.

I’ve also found it difficult to ever have dialogue with transphobic feminists about male privilege. Any actual discussion will put chinks in the idea that trans women benefit from uncomplicated male privilege, either during the period of our lives when we were seen as male, or during our entire lives because we are allegedly unable to relinquish it. Actually talking to a trans woman and finding out that, “Yes, men treat me like I’m ignorant and talk over me all the time too” makes it difficult to hold the line on this particular point. As with every other stereotype perpetuated by transphobic radical feminists, this must be asserted over and over again to maintain the illusion of trans women as ultra-feminine, socially domineering, men in dresses without any ability to connect or relate to womanhood. We’re too loud, too male, to be accepted. This is, of course, a caricature, a cartoon figure intended to serve as a bogeywoman to keep us out of woman-only spaces.

Comparing gender to race in this context is simply another way to establish that caricature, to link the idea of “trans woman” to “caricature,” in this case, to the idea of white people claiming to be people of color. Many radical feminists go all the way and directly compare transitioning to blackface.