{quote} How (in Reed's representation) does "identity politics" conform to neoliberal ideology?[/quote]
The two have nothing to do with each other. "Neoliberalism" is a term describing a specific economic philosophy and policies (go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/2? title=Neoliberalism ). "Identity politics" is a phrase coined by (mostly right wing) USAn pundits to smear people attempting to reform real discriminatory structures in US society.
right on the politics, wrong on the biology.
Pop "bed nucleus basal stria terminalis transsexual" into a search engine, and see some of the peer-reviewed evidence that transsexual experience is backed by brain structures. Sexually dimorphic structures in the brains of transsexuals are found to have the characteristics of the identification sex, not the assigned sex. Other sex differences have been found in the human anterior commissure, the interthalamic adhesion, INAH subdivisions of the intermediate nucleus of the hypothalamus, and in the corpora mamillaria. Identity politics may have all the problems pointed out, but transsexuals are driven into it by biology, not choice or strategy.
False. 80-95% of transgender M2T (male to transgender) do NOT have "bottom" surgery. The hetero transgender men who prefer females like to have their approrpriated female identity and their "ladypeen" too. Doncha know?
They are related very intimately in that they both put priority on individual choice and the right to a particular consumer lifestyle over democratic community and collective action.
This is useful to the neo-liberals because it helped delegitimize unions and transposed social action from class concerns to racial and gender concerns.
Terrific article, questioning a lot of assumptions, anger, and social context. I tend to accept 100% the identity of my trans friends, in whichever way they wish to express it and at whichever point, and that's why I would ask them--setting aside the particulars of the Dolezal story, are you positively sure that it is absolutely inconceivable for someone to feel about their race the same way you feel about your gender?
If I have to think hard about what upset me about the Dolezal story, it must have been the natural tendency, of me and probably everyone else, to seek authenticity and reject behaviors that appear not authentic. The particulars of Dolezalgate are such that she seems to have first identified as white and sought acceptance to the black community as such, and when that failed, she won the identitarian oneupmanship competition by becoming black. I think many people I know, cis and trans alike, would be pretty dismayed if a woman who encountered workplace discrimination chose, on this basis, to transition to being a man, or if a transwoman who experienced workplace discrimination chose to argue that she was assigned male at birth. That it is hard to imagine such opportunistic behavior might help explain why the lack of authenticity grates on us. But it is certainly not impossible that someone may identify with a heritage, a culture, or an aesthetic they were not born with.
One thing that comes to mind is the Moses myth from the book of Exodus and the Passover Haggaddah. Born to an Israelite family, Moses is cast away on the river and picked up by an Egyptian princess, brought up as Egyptian royalty, and discovers his real roots in the struggle for liberation. In this myth, why do we root for Moses when he finds his "real" identity? Would the story be more problematic if Moses had been an Egyptian prince, born as well as raised?
I want to also introduce a colleague's book that sheds some interesting light on this controversy - Osagie Obasogie's Blinded by Sight (Stanford University Press, 2014.) Obasogie interviewed people who were blind since birth about their experience of race and found that... like the rest of us, they experienced race visually. His inquiry into how race came to be something that is seen is worth considering in the context of Dolezalgate.
I can only echo points others have offered. Professor Reed's article was forwarded to me by facebook friends who charitably saw a connection with various rambling posts I issued regarding my discomfit with the "Rachel Dolezal isn't one of us" drumbeat and Reed's opinion piece. What can I say? The piece is penetrating, body-blow powerful, hilarious and most of all illuminating. I was frustrated by the chorus of authorities rushing to distinguish progressives' "good" acceptance of non-cisgender identities from Dolezal's apparent desire, however flawed, to embrace the race she seems to most identify with. And I noted the vehemence with which anyone who voiced sympathy or support for Dolezal was greeted (exhibit 1 Keri Wilson). Then comes Reed, who in this piece dissects the facile reasoning behind the received essentialist wisdom, demonstrates the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in the prevailing arguments, and teaches me a ton -- and I don't mean just googling the definition of "ascriptive." This is a brilliant and inspiring read. Thanks so much, Whit
Defending a pathological liar as an intellectual exercise is a prime example of what happens when stupid people get an education . Dolezal falsely sued Howard Univeristy as a white person. An outside judge ruled there was NO evidence supporting any of her claims. Was she FEELING BLACK, then? Dolezal says there is no prrof that her white parents gave birth to her, made up a black father, and her white dad says he will gladly take a DNA test. Dolezal said she has been to S. Africa. Not true. She says her white parents beat her with S. African baboon whips. She said, before transitioning that her black husband beat her as his white wife.This is your example of valid racial trannie?
The white man who wrote BLACK LIKE ME never said he was a black person in a white body!
He put on dark make up to pose as a black person BECAUSE he did not know how it felt to be black and suffer daily injustice. Rachel Dolezal claims she identified with blacks, their feelings, and struggles from as early as five years old! How do you do that when most blacks don't identify as black in preschool! All kids have only vague notions of race well up until age eight or ten. Even blacks who lived during Jim Crow often say they didn't GET that there was racsim and they were black until they got bigger.
How can you even validate Dolezals insane claims? Oh yes, you are just trying to play debate club.
This would be very different if Dolezal were a white man. A lot of black men are giving her a thumbs up, who would scream Elvis must die!!!!- if Rachel was Ronnie.
A white man claiming to know what its like to fear murder by cop and being viewed as a criminal from the time you are 12, would get the hammer dropped on him. So would any black woman who had married this fraud and had kids with him.
There are writers who take complex issues and explain them in simple language. There are writers who take simple issues, and bury them in complex language.Then there are writers who take complex issues and turn them into academic boiler plate-which is a sophisticated form of gibberish. Reed is one of the latter. At the very least, his piece needs a re-write. It could easily be reduced by half.
I promise you there is nothing silly about my post. The silly thing in this thread is how little White people understand Black people in this country. That lack of understanding is very important since it allows Liberals to engage in very subtle forms of racism. I'm sure from your total lack of comprehension of what I wrote that you are probably one of those people. Pat yourself on the back.
You are making assumptions about the nature of Rachel Dolezal's personal experience that you have no basis for. That's actually a main point of the article - did you comment without reading? I really hate that. It wastes everybody else's time explaining to you what it is you're trying to talk about.
Somebody beat me to answering your question, and it's a perfectly good answer.
I'll say the same thing to you that I just commented to somebody else - did you even read this article? Because you're offering to explain to me and to the author of it why the Dolezal story is so important, but the author was trying to explain to you why it is so incredibly important! Too many self-styled blogger-activists are insisting that this is just another example of a white woman taking the focus off of them, that they're pissed about all the attention she's getting - THEY want to think that the questions this chapter has raised don't matter. They do, very much. Because we need to be careful with the ontology that we're creating with the popular anti-racist discourse. It's not that "anti-racism" per se is flawed, but the logic of the rhetoric used might not be beneficial in the long run. This author is pointing out problems in the rhetoric that are highlighted by the confluence of Elinor Burkett's much-maligned piece and then the Dolezal story. It is all very important.
How am I 'dogmatically' fascist? How does my post make me an anti Semitic Zionist?
Are 'Israel brown shirts' antisemitic?
Make some sense please.
To clear things up I'm not a big fan of Zionism but I like Jewish people. Only had good interactions on a personal level and befriended many Jewish people before and after I knew there was any difference. This discussion was about black people who are currently being stomped on in the US. I used a comparison to how Jewish people were used as an underclass in Germany in the 30's. I thought that was one historical episode we can agree on. Apparently not. Please read the posts and try to think out what you want to say before you type.
Tripe, served large. The kind of tripe that trans-intelligent people attack with gluttonous intent.
If living in Disneyland becomes an acceptable practice, can all of humanity just pretend that everything is okay, or will there be consequences?
You know, consequences. The thing that most adults face for making moronic life choices.
Excellent Op-Ed, but one minor critique. In paragraph 7 you refer to Jenner as a 'he' twice. I know in her coming out she asked to be referred to by male pronouns, but she started using female ones at the beginning of this month. See her twitter for proof (I cannot link it as I am a new user).
starkimpossibility: "I cannot let this be stated as fact."
Without getting into the separate considerations about social consequences and power structures and choice vs. birth, but sticking with the central assertion, the science disagrees.
Try a simple google search: "neurobiological evidence for sex-specific brain differences in transgender people." There very well seems to be evidence of a physiological basis for gender, not circumscribed by only one physiological aspect, e.g., as genitalia. Also, there is a growing majority of scientific opinion that race is not to be found in our biology. That fact also is readily searchable.
Let's say for argument's sake, however, that you and the author maintain that those facts are incorrect; their scientific prevalence, nonetheless, at the very least, puts a damper on the blanket assertions and derogatory comments presented in this article.
This isn't a political, ideological, sociological or philosophical issue.
A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality. by Zhou et al Nature (1995) 378:68–70.
Our study is the first to show a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals
.
Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus. Kruiver et al J Clin Endocrinol Metab (2000) 85:2034–2041
The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions
When we can determine someone's "race" by an MRI scan of the brain, the way we can someone's sex, then the comparison is apt. Not until then.
What ahistorical crap. There are male and female bodies. I feel my body as
male when I urinate, when I shave, when I sit down, when I scratch my
hairy back, etc. I do feel there is some innate and intrinsic aspect to
having a male body. I can see how people can feel they belong in a
differently sexed body. However, there are no "Latino/a" or "African
American" bodies. Those bodies are created by a racist caste system. I
don't feel "brown" until someone makes me feel "brown" by treating me as
if I were a different race. That's why even white Latinos can be made
to feel "brown" because race is not simply about possessing a certain
kind of body. There is no innate, intrinsic "Black body" that can be
trapped in a white body. That's just essentialist, racist crap that
ignores the history of race and the fact that it is a social
construction. Appreciating African American culture or dark brown skin,
or curly black hair, doesn't mean you "identify as an African
American." You identity with a race because others identify you as that
race. There's no freedom of choice. That's what makes race a horrible
burden. I would love to be Latino and not be "brown," but I don't get to
choose that, do I? This article assumes that by insisting that race is
not cosplay or that race is not a choice we are preserving some idea of
an authentic African American. When what we're saying is that race is
not about choice; it's not about freedom. It is what traps us.
Passing (for white or black) doesn't change that one bit. Race disappears when white power and privilege disappear. To claim that one
can be transracial is the same as claiming that race is not about
history or society; it's about an innate Black body that we can choose
to embody (if you're white). That is what upholds the structures that
reproduce inequality.
Dr Reed, you make very eloquent points, however your heteronormative decision to use male pronouns with which to refer to Caitlyn Jenner distracts from that immensely. Hearing feminist discourse referring to women as 'dames' would be similarly jarring. I am always amazed by the need for people to refer to others with names or pronouns that cause the referent pain. If someone prefers to be called by their middle name do you insist on using their first?
As a physician who has treated hundreds of transgender patients for over a decade, and as a transgender person myself, I would like to answer some of the questions you pose.
"What does any transgender person do before the moment of coming out?" In a word: suffer. There is a truism in psychology that people only change when the pain of changing is less than the pain of staying the same. With the amount of stigma, transphobia, and discrimination they face you can imagine how significant that pain must be for people to transition. I have treated countless people who showed up at my clinic at the point where the decision is transition or suicide. This is why non/pre-treatment suicide rates are in the 20-40% range. Moreover the stigma is quite unbalanced with transgender women (like Ms. Jenner) facing the lions share compared with transgender men like myself. While transgender people are a smaller population than LGB people, in 55% of all hate motivated murders in the US, transgender women were the victims. Moreover the lions share of that mortality is faced by transgender women of color. Even though she is white, Ms. Jenner is an aberration not only in her political leanings but in her socioeconomic status as well. Poverty, prison, rape and homelessness are facts of life for many transgender women in America. That reality is multiplied many fold for transgender women of color and those who live in poverty. (I would link to a reference available from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs - but as a new registrant, I can't.)
"transgendered people’s are true immediately provokes a "Who says?" Modern evidence based medicine? Specifically the AMA, both APAs, ACOG, the AAP, etc. You make assumptions that the arguments for transgender identities are somehow just based in discourse about identity politics. For example, just as twin studies speak to the heritability of sexual orientation, they also speak to the heritability of gender identity - between 30-60% of the expression of cross gender identity is likely heritable. Do you make the same 'who says?' argument about sexual orientation?
"I’m pretty sure that in most of the United States it’s still marked on one’s birth certificate. That’s not the delivery room, but it’s pretty damn close." And doctors famously got that wrong in many instances of people with intersex conditions. They also get it wrong in the case of transgender people. If they did it with race or sexual orientation they would get it just as wrong too. You are assuming a level of competence or certainty that simply doesn't exist in medicine. Moreover I have a friend and colleague who delivers babies and she tells the parents: "well your child was born with a penis, and most likely that means he's a boy. But we won't know for certain until your baby is old enough to tell us". She certainly has patients who have selected themselves based on her practice otherwise, but she's never had a negative reaction from that.
"gender is a 'fundamental attribute' of our existence. But gender is no less culturally constructed than race." Why do you insist that these two ideas are mutually exclusive. I've asked many transgender people the following question: "if you were going to be on a desert island for the rest of your life and never see another person, would you want hormones and surgery before you went?" The answer is universally yes. Gender is a fundamental internal sense of ourselves as male or female (or somewhere between the two). The wrongness felt by transgender people is not just due to the way others treat them, but also based on the body in which they live. However gender is also a cultural construct that places immense social pressure on people to conform to idiotic concepts of maleness and femaleness. Transgender people's internal gender dysphoria is compounded by navigating these cultural constructs but it is not simply the result of them. In fact, that idea - wanting to transition simply because of the social benefits of the other gender is a rule out in the diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria in the DSM-V.
"how can we legitimize transgender identity... without the psychological stigma of dysmorphia" You can't. However there is a tremendous amount of gender dysphoria that transgender people suffer before transition. I've personally experienced it and I have seen it in every patient I have treated with the exception of those who are post transition in whom the dysphoria abates to a non-clinical level. It does get better but like treating cancer or diabetes, active treatment is necessary. Moreover the pathology is not in the identity but in the dysphoria between one's identity and body. Make the body congruent (enough) with the identity and the problem is mostly solved.
I will admit that there are many in the transgender community that are vehemently against 'pathologization', however they are both wrong from a scientific and nosological perspective, but also misunderstand what would happen were the diagnosis of gender dysphoria made to disappear. The only argument to allow people in prison or people dependent on government sponsored insurance to be able to access care is that of medical necessity. Without a diagnosis such necessity cannot be supported. However in my experience those who are most vehemently opposed to such a diagnosis are generally educated white transgender women from enfranchised backgrounds. One case regarding a prisoner on which I consulted a number of years ago required me to make the argument for medical necessity and I asked the attorney to ensure her client was OK with that. The response was that she wouldn't care if I called her a mass murderer who practiced bestiality on chickens (stated more colorfully than that) - as long as we could get her the services she needed. Unfortunately those who most need the benefit of the diagnosis often never have a place at the table when discussions of depathologization occur.
I don't disagree with you overall stark impossibility. But the fact remains that, while race is ENTIRELY socially constructed and learned, gender identity is arguably not--perhaps some combination but there is lots of evidence that we are born feeling "female" or "male" or liking either girls or boys. "Race" as we know it is entirely dictated by environment, society and perception. There may be genetic elements to race, but they do not result in common behaviors or tendencies beyond susceptibility to certain diseases etc. Should the ideal be a genderless raceless society? Sure. But there is a difference between yearning to be accepted by another culture or racial group and feeling like you have a physical deformity and that needs to be corrected. Would transgender people not have such feelings if gender was not so fixed by society? You don't know anymore than I do, and while we don't know I think we need to trust the experience and feelings of the transgender community.
I'm an anthropologist. Trust me, gender is ENTIRELY socially constructed. Arguable? Sure, in the way that everything is arguable: but you would lose this argument. It varies too much between cultures, to the extent that in some, our stereotypical roles are virtually reversed. And so many cultures have had more than two genders.
I was not born "feeling" like a woman. When a trans woman says that she has always "felt" female, I don't know what they are talking about. It's like saying I "feel" like a human. So no, gender is not based on how you feel - only being transgender is based on how you feel. And only on how you feel. Again, you can't know how Rachel Dolezal feels, so you have NO rational basis for claiming that there is a difference. Period.
You were not born feeling like anything, merely because you don't remember. You have no idea what you "felt" like as an infant. But there are children barely out of infancy who clearly express to their parents that their physical gender is wrong. These kids have not even had time to be influenced by gender norms. I'm not for defining everyone by their genitals, believe me. I think it would be great if someone born with a penis was allowed by the world around her to live as a woman and be accepted by sexual partners and loved; but that is not what many trans folks are even saying. Many do find love and acceptance before getting surgery and still have a compelling need to physically change their bodies. They are saying, as someone else here commented--a doctor who sees trans patients I believe--that even if sent to a desert island where other people couldn't dictate what genitals they should have, would they still want surgery? And they say yes. Because they are PHYSICALLY uncomfortable. Do I understand that on a personal level? Nope. Do I think it gives them some special status? Not really, I just think that to compare what science and actual trans people have explained as a medical issue to Rachel Dolezal--a woman who clearly came from a troubled background and who, yes, I feel more sorry for than anything, but consciously crafted a new identity for herself to further her career--is complete bullshit.
Well done. What was the original song/poem called? "The Very Model of a Modern Major General", or something like that?
This comment is quite a breath of fresh air. I've been really startled and concerned by the tendency among nominal progressives on this issue at least not only to accept lock, stock, and barrel but even actively to seek out and defend militantly the absurd and potentially dangerous determinism emanating from anthropologically naive and ethnocentric neuroscientists, wannabe geneticists, hucksters for an "evolutionary psychology" drawn from a comic book understanding of our species's history, and overt reactionaries. They're all over my discipline as well; I sometimes describe them as people who live very parochial and insular lives around only people like themselves and who are therefore inclined to imagine that whatever they see out their living room windows in Natural Law. It brings to mind Stephen Jay Gould's observation in The Mismeasure of Man: “Resurgences of biological determinism correlate with periods of political retrenchment and destruction of social generosity.”
For what it's worth, I used a masculine pronoun to refer to the person known as Bruce in part to distinguish that person from Caitlyn. I don't dispute that Republican Jenner may have felt like Caitlyn in the public identity of Bruce as well. That's just not how the rest of us knew that person.
As to suffering, how do you know that Dolezal didn't suffer in her own yet equivalent way to the suffering you point out is typically experienced by transgender people before coming out? My point in asking that question was in response to the assertion that Dolezal "lied" in representing her as black. Immediately preceding the reference to what a transgender person does before coming out is a reference to Jenner, asking whether we consider operating within the publicly recognized identity as Bruce to have been lying. Either Jenner and Dolezal were both lying, or neither was. There's not enough sophistry in the world to paper over that fact.
I would reinforce your rejection of this new determinisms by adding that what some people are getting excited about as the “discovery” (it’s only a discovery to those who just discovered it) in the last few years of the significance of epigenetics and its potential for resolving or transcending the nature/culture dichotomy don’t recognize is that conceptually that position doesn’t have to differ much at all from fin-de-siecle neo-Lamarckian social theory. In fact, some of its adherents, I believe mainly outside genetics, openly have invoked Lamarck without understanding that Lamarckian social theorists were no less determinist than their Darwinian counterparts; as George Stocking points out, their determinism was just tougher to challenge because it was so fluid — incoherent — in its causal claims. Ironically, that’s the reason the anti-racist challengers like Boas in the years around WWI determined that they first needed to establish that race and culture were distinct by demonstrating the radically different paces of biological and cultural evolution in our species. They felt they had to invalidate Lamarckianism to challenge racialism effectively. That would be an old-fashioned debate it could be helpful to think about. It’s also telling that Nicholas Wade did a mea culpa in the NYT to announce his acceptance of epigenetics. Nothing has changed in his argument; gestures to epigenetics just give him an additional layer of obfuscation for his anti-egalitarian determinist bullshit. The key points, however, are those you make in this comment. And it is mind-bogglingly parochial and ahistorical that it has suddenly become so difficult for intellectually and politically serious people to notice the great variety of expressions of gender around the globe, present and past. I guess the appeal of technofetshism and scientism are more powerful than I'd imagined.
If the confusion of the terms, or the concepts, of "sex" and "gender" is naïve, then it's a naïvete that is becoming more and more widespread. For instance, the recommended op-ed by Ms. Burkett remarks that "So long as humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be 'assigned' genders at birth". Is gender a social construct or a set of biological characteristics? No one seems to know, because people have decided that these terms mean whatever they want them to mean.
Re alreed comment: "Are you as startled a I am at how much nominal progressives in this moment want to deny the sex/gender distinction and to insist that gender is in effect hardwired?"
What is startling is such an anecdotal straw man argument (found in the rest of that comment), as if it means anything in the slightest, about irrelevant childhood changeability, when the American Psychological Association already speaks clearly about that very consideration: "A pervasive, consistent, persistent and insistent sense of being the other gender and some degree of gender dysphoria are unique characteristics of transgender children." (As I can't add a link, google: apadivisions.org/division-44/resources/advocacy/transgender-children.pdf.) The slightest research on the matter shows that there is a distinct sense of gender identity, an identity not to be equated with socialized gender roles, nor equated with genitalia. The science already shows how that may come about. At the very least, such developments and assessments by professionals actually involved in the field should give this author pause, and encourage him to grapple with actual, existing research instead of insulting others (particularly in the body of this article) about their supposed naivety.
response to previous comment:
Gender diversity is exactly the point, starting with biological diversity. Gender identity is one aspect of the equation, adding more diversity not less, which is not to be confused with gender roles as put forth by a specific culture. Talusan, by my reading, does not confuse gender roles with sex or gender identity, nor does she miss the fluidity of gender, culturally or biologically. Quite the opposite. Gender identity may be "almost always involuntary," but not what we do with it, and that involuntary biology is not even limited to the binary. Not everyone who is gender queer desires to transition. That option to transition is one response, of many, to the actual experience of dysmorphia. Dysmorphia is not the stigma, which is something else. Dysmorphia is the actual experience of disconnection in one's self, starting at the youngest ages, not the business of being unable to meet society's expectations (which again is something else).
So, in short, individuals are all different; some are quite at home being intersex or gender queer. Some are not at home with their circumstances, biologically or culturally. And of course different cultures provide different contexts for gender expression. The personal choice to embrace a particular gender role, or to transition, is distinct from the gender identity. A person can feel they are a gender separate from their genitalia, not just from personal responses to a culture, but because their biology is telling them so. Biology is not just the genitalia. Thus, we are actually discussing an explosion of diversity, not a confounding of sex and gender role.
Are you as startled a I am at how much nominal progressives in this moment want to deny the sex/gender distinction and to insist that gender is in effect hardwired? How in the name of sweet reason can there be biological bases for what are obvious cultural constructions? And the notion that reports from 3 year-olds that they embrace a gender different from their biological sex type counts as evidence that trans identity is innate is another stunner. I wonder whether some of that inclination is a product of overattentive parenting in the middle class or a hangover from the "believe the children" absurdity that emerged from and rationalized the ritual satanic abuse hysteria in the '80s. It makes me scratch my head at whether anyone pushing that line has ever had children. I recall that at age 3 my son was convinced that he got ideas from his stomach. At the same age the son of a good friend regaled me with a long, Beowulf-like saga about how his father had killed three lions on a hill the day before in Amherst, MA.
Having grown up adoring the lyrics/music of Gilbert and Sullivan I couldn't believe my eyes that you DID IT!! you captured the essence of this very contemporary social challenge....perfectly and I ended up singing yr reply (on key) with a smile on my face.Thanks MarcusBales.~!!
Has Adolph Reed every supported anyone's right to be white and not accused of "passing for white"? I doubt it.
http://melungeon.ning.com/forum/topics/5th-union-presentation-by-a-d-powell19
