Anti Radqueers! Please read this description of our personal experience with race dysphoria.
This isnโt a vent, but we want to maybe help people who are on the fence about radqueers, or people who think being transrace is inherently racist, understand what itโs actually like, beyond just saying "I want to be a different race."
So personally, we are a DID system, and so each of our alters have varying races, but our internal view of our race is different than how we want to appear bodily, and our bodily racial identity doesnโt change very much. We are transafro and translatino, but we frequently fluctuate between being more of one or more of the other.
For our trans-Afro identity, race dysphoria in our experience looks like:
โข being embarrassed or uncomfortable when our face gets red or pale
โข feeling like our skin tone is too light and that itโs embarrassing and makes us feel helpless
โข being ashamed of our hair type and being incredibly jealous of people with certain afro hairstyles
โข feeling like our self-expression is limited or that people would treat us differently if we were black or mixed race
Our Latino dysphoria often looks like:
โข trying to thrust ourself into Hispanic pop culture and fantasizing about growing up around it
โข obsessing over learning spanish as rapidly as possible
โข wishing we were born in a Latin-American country and reminiscing about a childhood that we missed
โข hating that people see us as white and fixating on our features and skin
โข wanting to take a DNA test with the hope that weโd suddenly find out we actually have Latino or African ancestry and genetics (which we donโt)
I hope this helps some people understand why people may use this label, or maybe just helps you guys humanize us a bit more.