Michael Jackson didn't go all-out trying to be white, but I think he made a real play for it. Quincy Jones said he supposedly took vitiligo medication for *lightening* skin rather than darkening it which is what white vitiligo sufferers take. His skin really did look pretty uniform, but I imagine the alleged chemical peels had something …
Michael Jackson didn't go all-out trying to be white, but I think he made a real play for it. Quincy Jones said he supposedly took vitiligo medication for *lightening* skin rather than darkening it which is what white vitiligo sufferers take. His skin really did look pretty uniform, but I imagine the alleged chemical peels had something to do with it.
I'm quite sure you indicated several months back you didn't think race-switching was a good idea, back when I said I'd like to read a book called "White Like Me," in which hopefully it elucidated whether becoming white solved all of someone's problems. But don't ask me to dig it up because it was awhile back.
'Race dysphoria' isn't a real condition like gender dysphoria is, it's socially induced, but I think you could make that case about a fair chunk of transgenders. But does it matter? Who cares why someone switches anything? I think it makes for an interesting experiment. I think if Buck Angel is okay, so is Rachel Dolezal. She may have come to it through having black adopted brothers, and she seems to have a lot of personal problems herself. But so what? She's been described by one guy as 'understanding the nuances of black experience' so maybe black culture (or any culture) can be 'learned'. Is it so terrible that she lives as she does, without having grown up black herself?
"I'm quite sure you indicated several months back you didn't think race-switching was a good idea,"
Absolutely. I don't remember that conversation but I certainly *don't* think race switching is a good idea. I don't think gender switching is a good idea either. I think it would be much better if we could help people to be happy and accept themselves in a way that didn't require life-long medicalisation and surgery.
But I would argue for the right to do all kinds of things that I personally don't think are good ideas. I think the issue for most people with Rachel Dolezal was the dishonesty (I just found it bemusing). It's not the efforts she made to look how she looked, it's the lie that this made her black.
Similarly, I think for some (most?) people who have gender dysphoria, medical transition really is their best option. So I think they should have that option. Just like being black, it's not the efforts these people make to look female, it's the dishonesty about whether they *are* female.
One reason (there are a few) why people feel differently about Buck Angel and Rachel Dolezal is that Buck doesn't try to lie about being female.
There is no question that for the gender dysphoric to transition is an enormous relief from a lifetime of despair, depression, and agony. But.
I am convinced that the genuinely dysphoric are not only a minority of the "trans" community, but a small minority.
The insistence by activists on immediate transition is irresponsible and their claim that puberty is too late is simply not going to fly. This is creating the backlash you predicted a few months ago and it is potent. Children in their early teens are not ready to make decisions like that.
Okay, I see your point. She *is* dishonest, and she has quite a checkered history of dishonesty - she got in trouble for welfare fraud way back. She's not someone I would want to be friends with, because of the pre-existing dishonesty, not because she was born white. If I knew someone like her (without the dishonesty) I think I would try to treat her as black but with the understanding that under the fake skin and whatever else she did to 'black herself up', it's still in my awareness that she's a white woman and I might sometimes talk to her that way, expecting her to understand. Which is how I would be with a transwoman I was friends with, there's still this tacit understanding that she is NOT the same as myself and I won't pretend otherwise if the circumstances warrant.
Jenny-now-Ian-Descenzio on Medium is like Buck Angel (one of his role models). He doesn't pretend he's not biologically a woman which is why I can so easily accept him (even though I had a private feeling of, 'Et tu, Brute?' when he first announced this. Jenny was often fairly aggressive and assertive before the switch so I can sort of see it, but I also wonder whether he is a 'bridge brain', someone who embodies a less sex-based way of thinking than others. I see this with a lot of people - some of it seems to be environment, culture, the way they were raised, but I think there may be a bit different brain wiring as well. (Speculation on my part).
Interestingly, when I pulled out the #2 article that Medium took down for 'hate speech' (despite being chosen for distribution for about ten days) and repurposed it for Vocal and my blog, I found a quote from a black social commentator and scholar, Dr. Boyce Watkins, back in 2015 when Dolezal was first 'outed'. He said, “She’s deeply invested in the black community. That’s really what bothers me about it; I looked at her track record, and she’s really into this. She’s teaching about black culture, she understands the subtleties of the black experience, she’s raising black children, she married a black man, she’s going to work for the NAACP. She does more for the black community than 99 percent of the black people that I know. And I know a lot of hard-working black people. So I can’t fault her for this, I just can’t.”
YMMV, but she's not just farting around. She's as serious as an auto accident about what she's done, which I can't say about a lot of other 'transracialists' or a lot of gender-switchers today, most of whom, as Dave Chappelle suggested, are doing more 'gender blackface' than being genuine and committed opposite sex members.
For what it’s worth, as an outsider to the black community, I see the Rachel Dolezal case differently. I read that her kids were black. And her friends. It felt like she wanted acceptance as an insider in the black community. I don’t condone what she did, but I understand it in the same way I understand a trans woman wanting to pass.
I think I understand why people are upset. It feels like it ignores the history of the black experience, in the same way that Alex ignored my history as a woman. But something about the force with which people came down on Rachel didn’t sit right. Maybe I am not as familiar with the case as others are, and also I am not black.
The arguments lefty blacks make against transracialism are *exactly* the same arguments they condone in regard to gender-switching, which is where the hypocrisy in the movement lies. They're right when they claim that 'race is just a social construct'. Well, there are clearly racial differences since, if I could still make babies, I could never produce a black or Chinese one unless I was impregnated by a black or Chinese guy. Racial differences are just surficial and reflect the way our bodies adapted to different climates and environments as we moved out of Africa. It's a lot more complicated with gender switching which is *not* a 'social construct' as they claim and involves a lot more medical effort for a true transition than race-switching would be. And it doesn't change what's between the ears, which grew up male/female.
Michael Jackson didn't go all-out trying to be white, but I think he made a real play for it. Quincy Jones said he supposedly took vitiligo medication for *lightening* skin rather than darkening it which is what white vitiligo sufferers take. His skin really did look pretty uniform, but I imagine the alleged chemical peels had something to do with it.
I'm quite sure you indicated several months back you didn't think race-switching was a good idea, back when I said I'd like to read a book called "White Like Me," in which hopefully it elucidated whether becoming white solved all of someone's problems. But don't ask me to dig it up because it was awhile back.
'Race dysphoria' isn't a real condition like gender dysphoria is, it's socially induced, but I think you could make that case about a fair chunk of transgenders. But does it matter? Who cares why someone switches anything? I think it makes for an interesting experiment. I think if Buck Angel is okay, so is Rachel Dolezal. She may have come to it through having black adopted brothers, and she seems to have a lot of personal problems herself. But so what? She's been described by one guy as 'understanding the nuances of black experience' so maybe black culture (or any culture) can be 'learned'. Is it so terrible that she lives as she does, without having grown up black herself?
"I'm quite sure you indicated several months back you didn't think race-switching was a good idea,"
Absolutely. I don't remember that conversation but I certainly *don't* think race switching is a good idea. I don't think gender switching is a good idea either. I think it would be much better if we could help people to be happy and accept themselves in a way that didn't require life-long medicalisation and surgery.
But I would argue for the right to do all kinds of things that I personally don't think are good ideas. I think the issue for most people with Rachel Dolezal was the dishonesty (I just found it bemusing). It's not the efforts she made to look how she looked, it's the lie that this made her black.
Similarly, I think for some (most?) people who have gender dysphoria, medical transition really is their best option. So I think they should have that option. Just like being black, it's not the efforts these people make to look female, it's the dishonesty about whether they *are* female.
One reason (there are a few) why people feel differently about Buck Angel and Rachel Dolezal is that Buck doesn't try to lie about being female.
There is no question that for the gender dysphoric to transition is an enormous relief from a lifetime of despair, depression, and agony. But.
I am convinced that the genuinely dysphoric are not only a minority of the "trans" community, but a small minority.
The insistence by activists on immediate transition is irresponsible and their claim that puberty is too late is simply not going to fly. This is creating the backlash you predicted a few months ago and it is potent. Children in their early teens are not ready to make decisions like that.
Okay, I see your point. She *is* dishonest, and she has quite a checkered history of dishonesty - she got in trouble for welfare fraud way back. She's not someone I would want to be friends with, because of the pre-existing dishonesty, not because she was born white. If I knew someone like her (without the dishonesty) I think I would try to treat her as black but with the understanding that under the fake skin and whatever else she did to 'black herself up', it's still in my awareness that she's a white woman and I might sometimes talk to her that way, expecting her to understand. Which is how I would be with a transwoman I was friends with, there's still this tacit understanding that she is NOT the same as myself and I won't pretend otherwise if the circumstances warrant.
Jenny-now-Ian-Descenzio on Medium is like Buck Angel (one of his role models). He doesn't pretend he's not biologically a woman which is why I can so easily accept him (even though I had a private feeling of, 'Et tu, Brute?' when he first announced this. Jenny was often fairly aggressive and assertive before the switch so I can sort of see it, but I also wonder whether he is a 'bridge brain', someone who embodies a less sex-based way of thinking than others. I see this with a lot of people - some of it seems to be environment, culture, the way they were raised, but I think there may be a bit different brain wiring as well. (Speculation on my part).
Interestingly, when I pulled out the #2 article that Medium took down for 'hate speech' (despite being chosen for distribution for about ten days) and repurposed it for Vocal and my blog, I found a quote from a black social commentator and scholar, Dr. Boyce Watkins, back in 2015 when Dolezal was first 'outed'. He said, “She’s deeply invested in the black community. That’s really what bothers me about it; I looked at her track record, and she’s really into this. She’s teaching about black culture, she understands the subtleties of the black experience, she’s raising black children, she married a black man, she’s going to work for the NAACP. She does more for the black community than 99 percent of the black people that I know. And I know a lot of hard-working black people. So I can’t fault her for this, I just can’t.”
YMMV, but she's not just farting around. She's as serious as an auto accident about what she's done, which I can't say about a lot of other 'transracialists' or a lot of gender-switchers today, most of whom, as Dave Chappelle suggested, are doing more 'gender blackface' than being genuine and committed opposite sex members.
For what it’s worth, as an outsider to the black community, I see the Rachel Dolezal case differently. I read that her kids were black. And her friends. It felt like she wanted acceptance as an insider in the black community. I don’t condone what she did, but I understand it in the same way I understand a trans woman wanting to pass.
I think I understand why people are upset. It feels like it ignores the history of the black experience, in the same way that Alex ignored my history as a woman. But something about the force with which people came down on Rachel didn’t sit right. Maybe I am not as familiar with the case as others are, and also I am not black.
The arguments lefty blacks make against transracialism are *exactly* the same arguments they condone in regard to gender-switching, which is where the hypocrisy in the movement lies. They're right when they claim that 'race is just a social construct'. Well, there are clearly racial differences since, if I could still make babies, I could never produce a black or Chinese one unless I was impregnated by a black or Chinese guy. Racial differences are just surficial and reflect the way our bodies adapted to different climates and environments as we moved out of Africa. It's a lot more complicated with gender switching which is *not* a 'social construct' as they claim and involves a lot more medical effort for a true transition than race-switching would be. And it doesn't change what's between the ears, which grew up male/female.