Quite tangential to this discussion (and rather self-involved, TBH; I apologise in advance, I’m just kind of thinking aloud here…), but since you bring it up… ;-)

Given the current political climate, this is something I’ve been thinking about lately — race and gender passing — vis-à-vis myself. On the one hand, I am blessed to pass as white; on the other, I have the somewhat mixed blessing of passing as female.

I could be seen as a white-passing PoC: I am what some call ‘mixed race’ (whatever that means; it seems to me that everyone is of mixed race).

(But let me state clearly: I am white, steeped in that privilege, raised white in white society by a white mother, and I will not appropriate culture or experience to which I have no claim. I bring up my mixed race only to make a specific point.)

I ‘pass for’ white, unless I’ve been in the sun and colour my hair black (as I did, one time, on a lark), in which case, as it turns out (and much to my white-girl shock), I cannot pass for white. What a small genetic twist could have completely altered my place in society. It boggles the mind.

Something like the genetic twist which marked me as male; something that, as it turns out, I most certainly am not.

When it comes to my ‘assigned race’ I see no reason to argue with society’s default assignment. Some might point to the privilege which has gone along with that default. A few might argue that I am ‘betraying my racial heritage’. Bigots might even say that I am ‘posing as’ white, when, in ‘truth’, I am not. (I am way past the ‘One Drop Rule’.) All I can say is that, even if in some genetic sense I am ‘of colour’, nevertheless I do not experience that. So, no, to that I stake no claim.

But not so when it comes to the default sex that society assigned to me. That I could not abide: it is there that I staked my claim. I walked away from the privilege that went with that default. Some might say that I have ‘betrayed my sex’, others that I am ‘posing as’ female, when, in ‘truth’, I am not. What I say is that I am female, because I do experience that. I do not ‘pass as female’, I pass as me.

Whilst I altered my socially perceived gender only with considerable effort, I could (with trivial ease) alter my perceived race, with nothing more than a tan and a dash of hair dye. So what about these questions of identity and passing and ‘truth vs subterfuge’, and even genetic determinism?

I am chromosomally ‘male’, but I am female. I claim this, not as appropriation, but as identity. I am socially treated as female: I pass.

I am genetically ‘of colour’, but I am white, I identify as white. I’m socially treated as white: I pass.

Had my hair colour chanced to follow my father’s DNA rather than my mother’s, it seems probable that my life experience would be different. At the least, my whiteness would be open to question, as my gender once was. And if I then bleached my hair to pass as-white, as I felt my identity to be? Would that then be subterfuge? Based on nothing more than the colour of my hair?

And, conversely, had my sex chromosomes tracked my mother’s rather than my father’s, my life would, to say the least, have been considerably easier — and not open to question. No accusation of subterfuge would then issue.

Now tell me where that ‘truth’ lies.

(Well now, that was a whole lot of rambling…I’m thinking it might be worth working this into a proper essay…)

Tasha, thank you for sparking this.

❤ Allison