Another problematic addition to the forums!
Days ago, a story berating a (now former) George Washington University professor named Jessica Krug for faking a number of black identities over the course of her life and career and using those fake identities to actively deny actual black people social and career opportunities appeared in my daily email from Digg, indicating it to have been among the most popular articles of late among Digg's heavily liberal user base. This recent revelation appears to have taken the left by storm, prompting renewed sanctimonious condemnations of what apparently is a small phenom known as "transracialism" where ethnically white people (mostly women) opportunistically pretend to be black for advantage in like black studies departments and black activist groups and circles, sometimes by claiming that they're "psychologically black", whatever that means. Another famous example of this phenom would be, of course, the case of one Rachel Dolezal, an ethnically white woman who wound up presiding over a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for some time until, when revealed to have a purely European ancestry, she claimed to "identify as black" because of her lifestyle (e.g. liked hip hop music and other stereotypically "black" stuff) and was promptly drummed out of the organization. Anyway, the liberals and the progressives have of late spent much time and energy condemning this stuff anew because of the new, high-profile case of Jessica Krug.
Personally, I find this a fascinating position for such incredibly woke people to take. A question immediately forms in my mind. That question was aptly articulated by Meghan Murphy in a recent article on this subject for her web site Feminist Current:
"I am...amused when it comes to the obvious questions around why it is appalling for a white person to adopt the identity of a person of colour, but not for a male to insist he is female because he prefers a dress to pants or because he enjoys the sense of power he feels waltzing into the women’s change room, knowing that if any woman dare protest, he is completely within his rights to accuse her of a hate crime.
The very same people who believe women like Krug and Dolezal should be tarred and feathered, who complain that to identify as something you objectively are not constitutes “gaslighting” and “violence,” will, with a straight face, insist there is such a thing as a “female penis” and that “men menstruate too.” Not only that, but these very same people would not hesitate to cancel a friend or colleague who dare ask what the difference is between a white person who claims to be black and a man who claims to be female."
In case you didn't catch it either here or in the thread title, the question is: if transracialism is bullshit, why isn't transgenderism? What is the essential difference between these phenomena that makes it okay for say a biological male to "identify as a woman" but unacceptable for an ethnic Caucasian to "identify as black"? Why do Western leftists regard the one thing as a parasitic, exploitative form of cultural/identity appropriation, but not the other? What is it that makes the one thing here more real than the other? Sincere question. I really would like to see what kind of mental gymnastics are required to reconcile the two obviously contradictory positions.