You are not your trans race
Ah, here I am ranting again...
This time, it's because I've seen far too many people espousing the idea that the only meaningful difference between being transsexual and transracial identity is societal acceptance. And that is, how you say, uhh... utter and complete horseshit.
(a quick note - I'm using the term transsexual rather than transgender in this mini-essay. this is because i personally identify as transsexual, and can only speak for myself. others may have different experiences of dysphoria.)
There are two large differences between the transsexual experience and the transracial experience in my mind. First, sex is much realer than race. Although sex is not binary it certainly is a biological reality. People who are considered male or considered female tend to share most sex characteristics from their respective constellations. A female brain will show slightly different electrical activity than a male brain under a dynamic MRI. Some of this is certainly due to the different life experiences those considered male or female will face. However, research also shows that activity in the brains of trans people more closely align with their sex or gender identity than that of their natal sex. This leads me to believe that some of this difference is natural, rather than learned.
In contrast, the brains of racialized peoples and white people show practically no variance under DMRI. There are, however, some structural changes to the brain. Between white people and black people in the United States, specifically, the data shows one very interesting trend: the brains belonging to white people showed increased size in regions related to bias, while the brains belonging to black people showed increased size of brain regions associated with trauma. From this and other research, researchers have concluded that the only difference between brains belonging to white and black people are shaped purely by society factors: oppression, privilege, and trauma.
Consider also that races in America have very little to do with actual ancestry. People who are considered black in America have incredibly diverse ancestry. Their ancestry may include one or several of the many, many regions and countries in Africa, the Middle East, and even Asia. In addition, most black people in America also share their ancestry with various colonial powers such as Spain, France, England, etc... The only reason blackness exists as it does in modern America is because it was made so. White people decided that people with a skin-tone darker than the arbitrary goal-post are black. At the end of the day, race and racialization is created by shared oppression, and/or solidarity, and/or resistance... but never by biological reality.
The second difference is just the icing on top, really. There is zero, and I do mean ZERO record of transracial identity being adopted by anyone in the entire world prior to 2012. Trust me, I have looked. I searched. I scoured. There is nothing. Some claim that John Roland Redd, who went by the stage-name Korla Pandit for most of his life, was transracial. I disagree. According to his own account, he adopted his stage name and persona to make a name for himself in LA at a time when it was very difficult for a black person to break in to the mainstream entertainment or music business. Before adopting the name Korla, in fact, he had also gone by Juan Renaldo and claimed to be Mexican. Even so, Redd was only active from 1940 - 1998. And that does not make a long and storied history.
So do we have records of trans people going back farther than the 1940s? You could say that. You could also say that there is a history of trans people dating back literally as far as records remember. This indicates to me that transsexual is a way which one can be, meaning that it is inherent to humanity. Transracial, however, does not seem to be endemic to our species. In fact, with its first appearance in 2012, it is almost certainly a social phenomenon.
