#transracism

Realistically, you probably should be talking to someone who experiences racism. I'm going to take a shot at summarizing some of what I've read in what I hope is clear language. But chances are I'll fuck up to some extent. I have a small platform, corrections welcome, contributions will be reblogged.

Upfront note, "transracialism" is more correctly used discussing situations such as a person with multiple and complex racial or ethnic backgrounds. This is more to do with people from a majority using it to claim they can be placed in a disenfranchised minority, which is how terfs are using the term, but that use in and of itself is improper and appropriated. Just so you know where this is headed.

Big picture, the short and simple is because race and gender are different. Honestly, I don't think debating radfems on their own terms is really worthwhile, so from a narrative construction standpoint, that's the start and finish. "You are equating two things that are different and trying to argue from a foundation of false equivalency which undermines experiences of both gender and race."

They are both socially constructed, but from different foundations. They act on society in different ways, and the way their definitions change are also different. You can't slap "socially constructed" on everything and act like that makes it the same.

Explaining those differences is complex because at a certain point we either have to describe the entire history of gender or race across different cultures, or just accept they are different. In western culture, there's a significant generational component to the structure of race. For multiple centuries race has been and still is constructed to serve power, to remove agency and freedom and health and welfare from people deemed non-white, and this history continues to affect those groups of people today. A white person can't opt in to those generational accumulated effects. Like, a white person can appear black and experience anti-black state violence, but a white person can't experience an entire family and often entire social group who live day to day with that threat. Just for the easiest example.

Something else imposed by western culture is a specific construction of gender and various forms of power and control determined by that construction. However, this construction is imposed on everyone under western culture, regardless of how their race is constructed. And if we consider the colonial aspects of western culture, it's fair to say that specific construction of gender is widespread. The historic (and let's face it) present day colonialism of western culture includes attempting to impose western gender hierarchy onto every other culture. The practical upshot of this is that different races living in places heavily steeped in western culture and colonialism (for example the USA) are likely to have very similar experiences of such gender hierarchies including things like toxic masculinity, misogyny, and hatred of transgender people.

Now the fun of intersectionality is that these are not going to be hard, fast, and inflexible. Culture doesn't just move one way, spread one way, and there's never an easy or clear answer. It's something that makes trying to discuss these complex aspects of society with radfems and terfs and such a frustrating experience, because their narrative is "you have to provide a simple answer that is unassailable to any variations in experience and also will be true universally and forever." The social nature of humans isn't like that. It's similar to creationists who demand increasingly incremental fossil records showing the evolutionary process, and when there isn't one they think they've proved all of evolution wrong.

Likewise, radfems believe that if you reach a certain point where you can't provide a universal answer, the whole concept is wrong. Both methods of debate suffer from the false assumption that everything happens in a consistent, mechanical, predictable, and quantifiable way. And maybe someday we'll connect superstrings to the human gender and discover the mechanical secret of love. But for now the world is messy and inconsistent. The only reason a radfem wants to argue about social constructs is to use the idea of universality to convince people of an essentialist world, to justify exclusion, racism, trans hatred, antisemitism, etc as being "just science."

In short they want to use a bad narrative technique of demanding infinite proof (sometimes also a form of sealioning) to undermine both the fluidity of gender, and the historic impacts of racism.

Anyway, getting back on track, trying to process the social construction of race and gender through the same lens will ultimately result in fundamental errors in understanding both. They interact, affect each other, but culturally and historically and in most ways they are constructed differently, imposed differently.