Transgender and Transracial Identities
An article summary and commentary
In a Boston Review article, Robin Dembroff and Dee Payton argue that we shouldn’t compare transracial and transgender identities for sociopolitical reasons. Before I give my commentary, I’m going to give a summary of the article.
The first thing to note is that the authors reject gender essentialism. Essentialism in general may be characterized as the doctrine that (at least some) objects have (at least some) essential properties, meaning there are certain properties that a thing must possess in order to be that thing. So for gender essentialists, they think that there’s some natural trait that makes all women women and all men men. And if you don’t have that natural trait, then you’re not a woman or a man.
The authors claim that there isn’t one biological trait (or even a set of biological traits) that all and only women (or men) possess that’s given to us by nature. And they support this position by pointing to the fact that there are variations of sexual traits. For instance, some women don’t have ovaries, some can’t give birth, etc. And they have similar thoughts about race. They don’t think there’s a particular biological trait that necessarily determines what race a person is. And they support this claim by pointing to the fact that racial categories have changed over time.
So my understanding is that the authors believe gender and race are both social constructions and that they are both malleable because they’re social constructions.
Since the authors reject essentialism, they don’t think the right question is to ask whether this person really is what they claim to be. Rather, they think the appropriate question is whether we ought to consider them to be what they claim to be. Should we consider someone to be a woman simply because they self-identify as a woman? Should we consider someone to be Black simply because they self-identify as Black?
So they’re switching from a metaphysical question to an almost sociopolitical one.
According to the authors,
When considering whether to revise rules for gender or race classification, we think that there are important considerations at both the population level and the individual level. While it is important and good to value a person’s autonomy and respect their identifications, we also think this good must be weighed against the population-level effects of revising our classifications. In cases where revising a classification would have a negative sociopolitical impact that outweighs the good of respecting how an individual identifies, we think that the classification should not be revised. And we think that revising the rules of race classification to accommodate transracial identification into Blackness is a case like this.
The reason why the authors think that transracial identities shouldn’t be accommodated is because of the sociopolitical goal of reparations. They say,
…we think that race classification should (continue to) track—as accurately as possible—intergenerationally inherited inequalities. More directly, we need conceptual and linguistic tools for identifying those who are entitled to reparations for racial wrongs,
Central to this argument, then, is the observation that in the case of Blackness, inequality accumulates intergenerationally. This is a crucial part of their argument. Reparations are there to address intergenerational inequalities—inequalities that have been passed down.
Furthermore, according to the authors, “Gender inequality does not primarily accumulate intergenerationally, if only for the obvious reason that the vast majority of households are multi-gendered.”
In response, I’m not entirely sure what they mean by this. What they might be saying is that while mothers experience some disadvantages, fathers experience some advantages and that both sons and daughters come from homes with that dynamic. So it wouldn’t be the case that the mom’s disadvantage would just pass onto the daughter. There’s some countering force from the dad’s advantage. And if there was some disadvantage passed down from the mom, it would also pass down to the son as well.
Importantly, “[w]hile parents often are responsible for ingraining patriarchal ideas and rigid gender norms in their children…this is not a ‘passing down’ of socioeconomic inequality itself but, rather, of a socialization that perpetuates gender inequality.”
So this is an empirical claim that they’re making. Racial inequality is primarily passed down but gender inequality is not.
To be clear, the authors are not saying that sexism is ahistorical; there’s obviously a history of it that affects women today, but the inequality is not primarily passed down. If I’m understanding them correctly, the authors believe that gender inequality is primarily perpetuated by every generation believing in and endorsing sexist ideas.
Moreover, to the extent that gender inequality is intergenerational, both transgender and cisgender women suffer from it, according to the authors. This marks a central difference between transgender-inclusive classification in the category “woman” and transracial-inclusive classification in the category “Black.” While transracial individuals avoid much of the weight of anti-Black oppression and White supremacy, trans women and cis women alike are burdened by the legacy of patriarchy.
So this is why the authors think that transgender women and men should be recognized and treated as women and men (respectively), but that persons should not be recognized and treated as Black solely on the basis of self-identification.
Commentary
I get the impression that the authors think that reparations should only be used for the “passing down” of socioeconomic inequality. So since gender inequality does not primarily get passed down intergenerationally, do they think that women shouldn’t get reparations? I’m not sure because they don’t argue for reparations for women in the article.
One of the examples of reparations they have in mind is affirmative action, but many countries have gender quotas when it comes to political representation, which is a form of affirmative action. What would the authors say in response to that? Perhaps they wouldn’t necessarily be in favor or against. Perhaps the point they will emphasize is that gender inequality is not primarily intergenerational, and therefore, even if we decided that there were good reasons to implement some reparations for women, it would have to be weighed against the benefits of changing the definition of woman to include trans women. And when we do that utility calculation, the result is still that we should change the definition of woman.One claim the authors make is that trans women suffer from gender inequality as well, but this claim only seems to be true of trans women who have transitioned. A male-bodied and male-presenting person living as a man, and who everyone treats as a man, wouldn’t suffer from gender inequality even though they self-ID as a woman. Assuming that what makes someone trans is an incongruence between self-ID and gender-assigned at birth, it seems that the authors’ argument doesn’t include all transwomen.
I don’t see why we couldn’t make distinctions between people who self-ID as Black and people who are traditionally considered to be Black. We could specify that reparations are only for people who have suffered intergenerational anti-Black injustice. So we could still respect transracial identities without giving them reparations, right? I don’t really see a problem with that.
Another question I have is what the authors would say in response to transracial identities that aren’t politically important. What if the topic of reparations wasn’t even relevant? For instance, what if an Asian person identified as White? Would the authors be against that? What sociopolitical goal would outweigh the respect we would owe to that person to recognize their self-ID? I don’t know what they would say.