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Back in my woke era, when Rachel Dolezal arrived on the scene I agreed with pretty much everyone that she was a horrible offensive malingerer trying to exploit affirmative action for her own selfish nefarious ends. As time has gone by, the parallels between transracialism and transgenderism (and trans-age, trans-disability etc.) have become increasingly difficult to ignore, it has not escaped my attention that essentially any given argument in favour of transgender inclusivity could be just as easily applied to transracial inclusivity with a trivial find-and-replace, and all of the arguments as to why transgender is legit but transracial isn't seem laughably weak and motivated. More and more I believe that these things are a package deal: accept Caitlyn Jenner and by the same principle you must accept Rachel Dolezal (and vice versa).
Tbh I would even go beyond this and claim that transracialism is much more reasonable than transgenderism. As a simple example, one of our neighbours is an asian woman who was adopted by whites in canada and who was 100% raised like a white canadian kid. She actively rejects anything that has to do with her biological ancestry and is very insistent that she is canadian through and through, in particular she hates being called asian ("that's just how I look, not what I am"). I may not entirely agree with her, but this makes a lot more sense to me than claiming something as obviously biologically dichotomous as sex is malleable and in particular can have an inverted social component.
It would also presumably be way easier to act on. Dyeing one's skin is way less invasive than the various transgender things.
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See also Scott on lived experience.
It’s one of those things which works as a fuzzy concept but starts generating contradictions when pressed.
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True, and contra the bullshit claims that sex is a "spectrum", it is actually meaningful to be "a little bit Asian" in a way it simply isn't when it comes to sex/gender.
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Rachel Dolezal and her ilk are at least a relatively fringe case; attractive to culture warriors because race is such a hot button issue, but not actually particularly common. In my experience hanging around trans/SJ/woke/etc youth communities over the past decade or so, the real "if you accept trans people, you have to accept this too" poison pill waiting in the wings (being desperately kept out of sight for PR reasons, but still existing in huge numbers that become unignoreable once you learn to spot them - a populist phenomenon on the identity-obsessed left) is trendy multiple personality disorder. It has many competing pseudointellectual frameworks for describing it, and accordingly it goes by many names, including "otherkin", but if you associate that term primarily with furries (as in the infamous litterbox hoaxes), you're probably picturing the wrong thing.
It's a new-age spiritual belief system where people degrade their real sense of identity, casually but with utter self-seriousness make any arbitrary number of tulpas, and treat them as real people sharing their body. People identifying as fictional characters, people identifying as Napoleon, people identifying as a "family" of fake people they made up. One starts to think that this was probably what was going on with Legion in the Bible. It's an extremely popular trend among kids on TikTok, but I think people tend to underestimate it and treat it as a passing fad; it was just as popular a trend among kids on Tumblr when I was in that demographic. Even in trans activist communities that generally have a bit more dignity to them, the multiple personality people get a foothold really easily, because it's imminently obvious to everyone that setting up community norms to make the multiple personality people uncomfortable in any way would undermine the transgender ideology itself. Many outright embrace this, and adopt intellectual frameworks for transgender stuff that are deliberately syncretist with the multiple personality stuff; people are increasingly and proudly framing their own transgender experiences as cases of demonic possession.
For the really committed, narcissistic multiple personality people, anti-trans jokes like "my pronouns are 'your majesty'" really aren't jokes; these are fundamentally people who have figured out how to exploit community norms to get everyone responding to their overtly delusional sock puppets and treating them with the full respect they demand.
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