Rex Kerr
2 min readSep 22, 2022

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There's a premise here about choice that needs to be supported.

The argument that transgenderism is an involuntary identity is mostly based on the existence of gender dysphoria--despite very clearly not being physically who they identify as, we compassionately say: gosh, how awful--to have this deep-seated sense of who you are not aligned with the reality of your physiology. Maybe we can help you!

But your arguments against transracialism sound exactly like the arguments against transgenderism. "Just choose to live as your physiology--if you're a woman, be a woman; if a man, be a man. You choose to identify the wrong way and thereby choose your oppressors. Just, like, don't. There's something wrong in your head if you do that--you don't need acceptance or understanding, you need a psychologist."

If you map Dolezal's life story, swapping race for gender, it's almost a canonical example of gender dysphoria, right down to early (childhood) expression of transracial identification. So why are we so sure the underlying psychology is so different? Are we confident that Dolezal actually has any more power to choose her feelings on this than a homosexual has to choose their attraction or a transgender person has to choose their gender/sex identity?

We can criticize her, as you did, by saying: well, if race is just a social construct, why do you care so much? But we have to criticize ourselves equally: if race is just a social construct, why do we care so much? We don't have to change bathrooms or sports or the names of products or what med school students refer to. It's easy.

So if we're not going to extend our understanding this way, but we want people to extend their understanding this way with transgender people, we'd better have some pretty good arguments.

("Gender dysphoria is recognized medically; racial dysphoria isn't" is not a good argument on its own. "Racial dysphoria has been studied with the same degree of effort as gender dysphoria and found to be not a real phenomenon" would be a good argument, except the premise isn't true, so I'm not sure we can make that argument either.)

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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