On being transgender vs. being "transracial"

Rachel Dolezal is a civil rights activist and fomer adjunct professor of Africana studies. She pretended to be of African descent and was eventually discovered in her lie. In the wake of this discovery, Dolezal then claimed to be "transracial" and that this is analogous to being transgender. Of course, the public reaction from the black, activist, and academic communities has been to see Dolezal as nothing more than an imposter, even if one with benevolent intentions.

Of course, people that know a lot about being transgender will reject the claim that being transgender and claiming to be "transracial" are analogous. But it is important to be clear about why. And when we are clear, I think that it suggests that transfeminist philosophy should take science more seriously than it does. This is a first attempt at my argument to that effect.

So, why do we take being transgender seriously and not being "transracial"? In both cases, there is a claim made that is based on subjective experience. In my case, I have always felt more feminine than masculine and puberty arrived I found myself wishing I had a cis-female body. My body felt wrong to me. It felt like a disguise. This is why my therapist and my endochrinologist accept me as a trans woman. It is called proprio-descriptive authority. The medical establishment hasn't always accepted that people should have proprio-descriptive authority over their gender identification.

But Dolezal makes the same claim about her body. She wishes to make it look more African in appearance. She wants curly hair and darker skin. Why don't we accept proprio-desciptive authority in her case?

Before getting to the difference, I want to emphasize that this is not a trivial problem. Indeed, on many current theories about the nature of gender and race, they are treated as being roughly equivalent categories that are the products of social construction. And if they are both products of social convention, then it would seem that people should be able to transcendent those boundaries between gender and race alike.

However, I think that this approach to gender and race masks an important difference between race and gender and I think that the Rachel Dolezal case shows it. It is important to be clear about what it means to say that something is a social construction. Something might be entirely made up, having no tie to the world at all. Games involve such conventions. Call this a "free floating" social construction. However, there are also some things that are in part a product of social construction but are not free floating. These things are tied to the world in some way. So, for example, it is a social convention to have urinals in men's restrooms. This didn't have to be this way. It could be that we had a practice that everyone pees sitting down. But even though this is a social convention, it is not unrelated entirely to the way the world is. Most men have pensises and these allow them to pee standing up. The social convention reflects this reality.

I want to argue that, for social constructions, there are degrees of being tied to the world and that gender is more tied to the world than race. Or, at least, it is more tied to the body and non-conventional subjective experience than race.

There are two facts that are involved in convincing the scientific community that they should apply proprio-descriptive authority to transgender people. The first fact is the most important. Upwards of 40% of transgender people have tried to end their own lives. The suicide rate drops dramatically for those that are afforded the medical and psychological support for physical and social transitioning. The second fact is that there is a correlation between the brains of trans women and cis women. In a certain region the structure of the former is more similar to the latter than to cis men. In fact, there is even a theory based on this that one's internal sense of gender is determined by the presence of hormones in the womb and a certain time during the brain's development. Neither of these facts are true about transracial persons as far as we know.  Moreover, there are very few people that identify as transracial and none have them have killed themselves over it.

Now, I think that the subjective experience of being in the wrong body is validated by both of these facts. This experience reflects something in the body, an incompatibility between one's self-image and  the characteristics of one's body.

Okay, before you cry "biological determinism", let's actually be careful about what this scientifically realist approach to transgender people implies and what it doesn't imply. It implies that just as one's physical characteristics are determined by the presence and balance of hormones, one's subjective sense of one's gender identity could be influenced by the presence and balance of hormones. It doesn't imply the gender binary, however. Since the presence and balance of hormones in the body is a matter of degree (I've watched mine go from being like a cis male to being much closer to a cis female and it happened gradually). So, as they say, gender would turn out to be a spectrum on this view. The binary approach would be mere social convention and unnecessary. The upshot is that the scientific approach implies that we could (and perhaps should) pick better social conventions regarding gender.

Also, this argument doesn't imply that race is not real. It is a social construction that it not as closely tied to the material world as gender, but it is historically and socially real. Race is a category that was constructed on the basis of an appearance of difference that has turned out to have very little substance.

If my argument is right, then we need a better understanding of the claim that gender is a social construction. We need to do a better job of taking into account the subjective experiences of trans women, as the medical and scientific establishment has done.