Do you believe your gender is determined primarily by what you identify as? || Do you believe your race is determined primarily by what you identify as?
- Yes | Yes8%
- Yes | No19.9%
- No | Yes4.3%
- No | No67.9%
4,349 votesFinal results
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Conversation
Replying to
Yes/no seems right to me, if you mean something like sincere identification. Gender concepts rely more on internal traits a person can identify in themselves, whereas racial concepts rely more on external facts (e.g. history) that you can lack even with sincere identification.
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Replying to
The distinction between concepts that rely mostly on internally identifiable features vs. those that don’t? Another example might be the property of having a headache vs. the property of having malaria.
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I agree that there's a coherent distinction here, but what's the main reason that gender falls into the first category and race into the second, rather than (for example) being the other way round?
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It could just be a total accident, but I suspect the role race concepts play makes it useful for them to depend slightly more on external traits. I think we want to know if someone has been affected by them or someone in their family being identifiable as a member of the group.
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This is my theory for why trans-gender is more accepted than trans-race stuff; for us culturally, knowing what race you "really are" feels like it tells us more socially important factors for behavior than knowing what gender you "really are".
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if you meant 'gender concepts' and 'race concepts' as 'society's concept of gender and race' then that seems to match up with my view here
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I mean I think the answer here is that it's extremely important for an organism to *know* which gender it is, but there is -- almost by def -- no importance to *knowing* which subspecies population it comes from.
Thus gender has deep psychological correlates absent in race.
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This surprises me then that gender is the thing we allow identity flexibility in but race isn't. If race doesn't have such a historically distinct importance around knowing which one you are, I would have predicted ppl would be much more chill if you wanna be transracial
The intuition is that there is no inborn racial identity and so no basis for a trans-racial claim. It can only be explained as some sort of social move.
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Human tribalist instincts seem like strong evidence that it's useful to know which ethnic group you're in.
My hypothesis is that it's those instincts which make transracialism particularly taboo.
(Similar to what Amanda was saying about families above, but at a larger scale.)
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