#vs being kidnapped and put on display in the fucking zoo

[yak-leather-whips]

I just made a really good point in a youtube comment which will surely be lost over there, so I’m gonna bring it over here so the little gay people in my phone can give it the appreciation it deserves:

The reason transgender is a valid identity while transracial is not isn’t because somehow race is more real than gender. They are both social constructs which hinge on how people perceive you. The difference lies in the kind of performance, and the role we play in it.

Gender requires you to actively participate in the performance. Its requirements go beyond simply physical characteristics to include prescriptions for dress, behavior, career ambitions. All of this requires your active participation in order to be upheld, and it incentivizes this by making gender a privilege conferred on those who conform. A gnc cisgender woman can be “degendered” against her will for failing to perform femininity correctly. Likewise, cis men are constantly forced to uphold the performance of masculinity in big and small ways, or else be accused of not being “real men.” Gender is a role which requires certain behaviors, and in order to incentivize this, it confers certain privileges, but only on those who conform to an appropriate degree, punishing those who fail to do so harshly. In doing this, it makes us complicit in a way, but also unintentionally gives us a choice. When you tell someone “conform or be punished,” some subset will go “…I guess be punished.”

On the contrary, there is no lack of performance that gets you out of race. There is no “conform or be punished,” it’s just “be punished.” It’s an arbitrary category, just like gender, but one we are given no direct role in the maintenance of wrt how we are perceived. Rather, race is a category which is entirely externally applied without regard to whether you willingly perform it. “Performing whiteness” (whatever the hell that means) doesn’t get you out of punishment, because race is a performance which requires no participation on your part.