Ethics (if not, perhaps, truth more broadly) do depend in large part on what people have explained is harmful to them (and not merely making them uncomfortable).
The concept of white-to-Black “transracialism” doesn’t necessarily make me uncomfortable. Rather, it is that I have listened to Black people’s opinions on this issue, and they have explained what distresses them, so I believe them and defer to them on this issue. I am more than happy to outsource that question to them, as they generally have relevant expertise that I (a white person) lack. I am not going to argue about the fact of what they know or feel or why or how they know it or feel it. You may take it up with someone else who feels competent to argue about it.
My knowledge base and interest is in transgender experience, and I would like people to stop citing “transracialism” to troll transgender people and to imply that transgender people aren’t real. Race and gender are different in many ways, including in the regard of how one might transition.
This article I wrote, “Why Did Richard Dawkins Tweet About Rachel Dolezal?” was merely background for a much longer article I wrote, “How Did Richard Dawkins Undermine Transgender People?” I was prompted to write it after a related discussion popped up among people I actually know in one of my communities. Those people were raising general questions about whether cisgender men can ever be criticized for anything they say, and particularly whether cisgender men should be free to wildly speculate about transgender people, and more especially whether cisgender men are invoking an existing discourse when they say “Rachel Dolezal” or if they are simply pulling that name out of thin air and not meaning anything by it and it is just an amazing unintentional coincidence that Rachel Dolezal happens to be the name of an existing person, and whether cisgender men are always logical and neutral and transgender people are always emotional and biased, and how can we ensure that cisgender men’s feelings are protected while they antagonize transgender people because we wouldn’t want cisgender men to weep nor to enact more violence against the people whose criticism made them weep. There was a need for me to weigh in, since that is a community I belong to and I needed this discourse to stop.
Again, if you want to argue for the idea of transracialism, you need to take that up with someone other than me. Especially given that I lack the background or interest, it would not be productive, constructive, or kind for me to make words about that. No one would benefit.
I do maintain that white people presenting themselves as Black is, at the very least, simply *different* from transgender experience. I do not want to spend time listing the ways in which it is similar or different. I believe it’s rather obvious that it is significantly different and I, personally, want to leave it at that. I don’t think that a “transgender-and-transracial” discourse is helpful to anyone. I would like transgender people to be taken out of discourse about changing races, please. Most especially I would like certain Twitter influencers to cease antagonizing transgender people with uninformed, trolling, bad-faith “just asking questions” tweets. (This does not have anything to do with you. It has to do with the original reason I wrote my articles.) Of course you will talk about whatever you believe is good or necessary for you to talk about. I am just clarifying my position and my area of interest here, since you engaged with me.
