Before  anything I’m going to start of by pointing out that I’m trans but I’m white. So my space in talking about this will come largely from the fact that I’ve had many people including my father try to invalidate transgender identities by saying “well if trans race identities aren’t a thing then I’m sorry transgender identities can’t be either.” So this is mostly coming from a place of defending my own identity but also calling out racism. But since I don’t actually experience racism or understand all of the complexities of this topic I invite this to be a discussion and something people can add to via comments.

So often I hear this argument that tries to invalidate transgender people, and a large response in retort to this attitude is “well you just can’t compare them because they’re different things.” I totally agree with this and it is in fact the reason. Unfortunately, for some, it’s not enough to understand. So in order to justify my identity and also keep people from muddling race and gender, I’ve thought about it a lot and decided to share my reasoning so far in explaining why we can’t simply equate the two.

First I’m going to look at the way power and oppression work for gender and race. To a degree every one is affected by the way gender operates in our society, from birth certain expectations are exerted on us, the expectations can limit us and people attach the validity of gender identity on “proper” gender performance, this is especially the case for trans people. However from what I’ve seen the same can be said of people of color, there are certain expectations and things to perform to be considered valid and there are also layers of oppression that come with those expectations, but this is not something white people experience. It’s a widely accepted idea in our Western society that white people can be poor, rich, aspire in any career, be queer, be straight, be trans, be nice, not so nice, have a mental illness, have a disability, literally anything, and for each of those things white people can be, they experience it in a way that they aren’t going to be punished or looked down upon because of that characteristic in relation to their race. Because power and oppression for race and gender operate so differently and in this way there is room for people to embrace, shift through, resist, etc. the expectations that are placed upon them because of gender. The same can not be said about race, a white person should not claim that they are ‘trans race’ because they have not lived their life in a way where certain expectations and oppression are placed upon them in our white dominated society.

To add on to this I think it’s also important to bring up the aspect of historical context of race and gender and how that history interacts with power and oppresion. Gender and race have both been shaped throughout history but gender has been something that hasn’t developed exclusively in any culture it has stretched it’s long reaching tendrils across the globe. It has certainly interacted and developed differently in different cultures, but it has been present in most throughout human history. Gender is not something that has been passed down generation to generation, it is an internalized and socialized feeling something that is a very individual experience that has the potential to be independent from anything in that person’s family history. However in regards to race, children of color live with nuances of the racism their families have faced in the past, in public and in their household. They will be stereotyped, profiled, and many more things because of their family background and the color of their skin as a result of the way history has shaped perceptions about people of color. They experience this in a way white children never will.

Girl slamming an awful gendered expectation placed on women. Image source: elitedaily.com/news/world/likeagirl-young-women-gender-limitations-video/1104139/

So I apologize if I haven’t touched on everything here, and I hope people have constructive things to add to this conversation because it has been a popular misunderstanding in a largely cis, white dominated society. So I believe equipping ourselves in being able to explain why transgender identities are possible while ‘trans race’ identities aren’t, is a really important tool in creating more understanding in the world about the existence of trans people and also about the way racism operates in our world.