Hi Sam, thanks for your polite replies.
I didn’t say “gender is the same as race.” I said it is a social construct, like race. In fact they are different, as you point out. Race is a distinction without a difference. There are no biological differences between the races, whereas there is an actual biological difference between males and females. This does not, as you suggest, make the appropriation of womanhood by biological males somehow less problematic than the appropriation of blackness by Dolezal. In fact it is more problematic. We could imagine a day where race did not define categories of humans, and those of us interested in equality are working towards that day (though it often seems we are going backwards since the tragic election of 2016, but that’s another story.) However, there will never be a day that the biological differences between males and females will be irrelevant, because those differences are what allow the species to continue.
The basis of what it is to be female is to be born with female anatomy and chromosomes, and therefore the potential to gestate and lactate. The basis of female oppression is the unequal treatment we receive on the pretext that our reproductive potential means something about our intelligence, or skills, or other qualities. The claim that a person born with male anatomy and chromosomes is actually a woman because he prefers a certain kind of activity, or dress, or has “gendered” feelings, does not make him a woman. In fact one could quite scientifically prove that a person with male anatomy and chromosomes is exactly NOT a woman, and drugs, surgery and magical thinking will not change this. Whereas with race, we could all trace our family tree back to ancestors in Africa if we go back far enough. Race is imaginary. Sex is real.
A person can have a “psychological need” and yet that does not compel others in a free society to meet that need. A male-bodied person is free to dress and act any way he wants, and to change his name and request to be called by female pronouns. Most of us would honor such a request out of politeness and respect. That does not mean that person is actually a woman, and should therefore be legally allowed into female only spaces, or legally allowed to compete on female sports teams or take Olympic medals in female sports. That does not entitle him to insist that lesbians consider him as a sexual partner. One person’s psychological need does not entitle them to take away limited resources from other people, or to compel them to act as if they believe things they don’t believe. No medical practitioners or psychologists would suggest that it is appropriate or healthy to allow the psychological expression of one group to marginalize and harm another.
I am not saying “everything can be substituted and exchanged,” nor trying to hijack your argument. In fact your argument is the exact argument I have had bouncing around in my head for months now — the argument of appropriation. Why is it valid in matters of race but not of sex? That’s what I keep wondering. Then you expressed the argument so eloquently, about race, and I felt moved to share that I feel *exactly* that way about the appropriation of womanhood by male bodied transactivists and their supporters.
You mentioned that Dolezal does not “agree with those substitutions” and I can’t respond to that. I haven’t read her book and I don’t care much about her, except that she represents the way that our culture is aghast at appropriation when it’s a nutty white woman transgressing on black culture, but totally willing to silence women when it’s males appropriating from us. I don’t know why this should be so.
Please note that nothing I have said means that I think that trans* individuals should be deprived of civil rights, health care or legal protections. I am not saying people should not dress, act or even “identify” however they want. I am saying we should not be required to pretend that a man can actually be a woman, and that to require us to do so as a culture is an act of appropriation of breathtaking audacity. And the case of Rachel Dolezal provides a fascinating window into the ways that women, as an oppressed group, are denied self-definition in a way that no other oppressed group is.
