Rachel Dolezal publicly identifying as black on the Today Show got a lot of people drawing
a lot of false comparisons between the idea of being transracial and being transgender.
Who better than a cisgender white lady to explain why that's a load of misinformation.
I would just like to state for the record that I feel like I am wallowing in privilege right now.
For those of you who have been off the internet and avoiding all media entirely for the past
few weeks, Rachel Dolezal is the former formerly thought of as African-American spokesperson
for the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP who was recently outed as white by her
white parents. Moving past Dolezal's questionable to say the least, life decisions I wanted
to focus in on this problematic idea that she's quote unquote transracial in the same
way that say Caitlyn Jenner is trangender. Because equating the two simultaneously devalues
both the black and the transgender experience haphazardly tossing both of them into the
giant bucket labeled 'othering'. The go-to transracial equals transgender argument is
that hey both race and gender are social constructs so we're basically talking about the same
thing right? Uh, wrong. In the same way that plums and grapefruit are both fruit as implied
by the 'fruit' in the word grapefruit, they're highly different things and not only because
plums just kind of look like adorable butts. Whereas a transgender person transitioning
is the process of aligning their internal and likely inborn gender identity with their
outward physical appearance and embodiment, a so-called transracial person like Rachel
Dolezal actively passing involves splitting oneself in two. For instance Time Magazine
writer Meredith Melnick defined passing as quote, 'Identifying with and representing
oneself as one race while denying ancestry of another.' Another definition published
in the Ohio State Law Journal takes an even harsher tack. 'Passing is a deception that
enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by
prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct.' That word deception
is a key reason why this transracial equals transgender argument often equals transphobic.
Not to mention how gender identity and racial identity function quite differently in society
as well. Society giveth and taketh away privileges based on our gender but race also plays an
important role informing this overall American hierarchy. For that reason what I lack privilege-wise
being female I make up for to some degree being white. While Rachel Dolezal told Matt
Lauer in that Today Show interview that she began drawing herself with quote 'the brown
crayon' when she was a kid, she nonetheless was never growing up living life as a black
girl and a black woman, the things that experientially define blackness. Whereas a transgender person
from childhood is growing up with that maleness of femaleness because of the way that gender
identity operates inside of us regardless of what our bodies look like and how people
treat us based on that. While Dolezal may choose to call herself transracial and publicly
identify as black, she will never be black in the same way that Caitllyn Jenner or Lavern
Cox are women. As an addendum, things like skin-lightening and eye reshaping aren't examples
of people molding their outside appearance to match some inward racial identity but rather
chase aesthetic ideals in search for cultural status. For instance in the case of Michael
Jackson regardless of how much skin-bleaching and facial reconstruction he underwent he
would never be deemed white. All of which has got me thinking that transracial in this
context is nothing more than a dangerous distraction away from the real, lived experiences of both
transgender people and people of color.