as small as a world and as large as alone

10:18pm June 1, 2015

Thanks for the history! I did know that a lot of “transracial” blogs are troll blogs, as are a lot of blogs that mush together someone’s being otherkin and someone’s being trans. I did not know that almost all transracial blogs were troll blogs; I figured it was something some people had honestly asserted about themselves and that had made some POC angry.

The thing about all this, to me (and I am not speaking for anyone else here!), is that if we decide that the only thing that matters is self-identification, it’s difficult to see how one could say anything is wrong or disrespectful about someone actually being transracial, though. Even if no one is. Because if you are exactly what you think you are, and that’s the end of the story, how can it possibly matter what you think you are?

I think that’s where some people get lost in all this, and why some people get upset. Because it’s really hard to know “identity matters here” and “identity doesn’t matter there.” Where being something like a transmedicalist is easier. “Do you have dysphoria? How severe is it? Do you feel an intense need to alter your body, even if you can’t afford it or have trouble jumping through doctor-hoops?” 

That doesn’t mean people who are discounting identities, or self-reporting, or self-diagnosing, or the like, are right. It certainly doesn’t mean they’re not being mean.

But it does mean that some people think there are extra elements to things, besides just identity, because just identity is really murky and confusing.

I don’t know what the answer is. I know sometimes I don’t feel convinced by people who say “this thing is my identity” and sometimes I do. I don’t know if the reason I sometimes am convinced and sometimes am not is prejudice or not. (And it’s not always “that’s not an identity;” it might be “I believe Fred when he says this is his identity, but I think Sheila is lying or is not going to maintain this identity for very long.”)

But I feel troubled sometimes because I think people try to ignore that feeling of “wait, I think there needs to be more here” in an effort to not seem “mean,” and I know for myself, sometimes it feels like I’m being asked (or even demanded!) to not listen to my instincts about it.

I think transracial is different from these other things because it’s almost entirely made up to begin with.  Although there’s definitely always been some white people who claim to be some other race “inside”, it’s just not a common thing at all (not as a thing they’d compare to being trans, anyway) and the entire word and stuff was coined by trolls who had been recently trolling the trans community, which the trans community rapidly forgot in its urge to be outraged about this.  Which, if it existed, I would be outraged by too, and I am outraged wen I see white people claiming that they’re American Indian because being Indian is about whether you “feel [stereotypically] Indian”, not about whether you’re actually Indian, or some weird shit like that.  So I’ve seen that stuff, as well as a lot of white people who want to be another race (but don’t feel that they are that race inside or something) but I haven’t seen it called transracial  and conceptualized a certain way until trolls got hold of it, and even then most people who did it would not identify as transracial or even know what the word is.

I’m definitely not saying that everyone who takes on these identities is for real, or that being transracial shouldn’t be really fucking offensive when it’s actually not trolls.  It’s just that it is mostly trolls and they deligt in every person they can get to care about it as a “major issue” rather than mostly a bunch of trolls sitting around laughing at “SJ” people whose emotional reactions they are leading around by the nose.

In fact, these communities (Otherkin, plural) have various informal ways of dealing with people who are lying about their identity for shits and giggles, so it’s not like it’s not known that it happens.  In the plural community it’s particularly known as a problem where a real plural system will be getting to know a fake plural system, only for the fake plural system to vanish and all these people they thought they were getting to know turn out to be a lie, and that hurts people who put a lot of time and energ into getting to know each person that they thought were real people like themselves. There’s some understanding when someone’s been forced into it by psychiatry (as well as anger at psychiatry for convincing so many singletons that we’re plural) and don’t know it), but for people who are just joining the community on a whim to have fun role-playing as something they’re not, there’s less sympathy.

So I’m not saying it’s a black and white issue where you have to believe everything you’re told no matter how outlandish or imporbable.  But I do think it’s really damn hard to see inside a person’s soul and know that people like the are utterly impossible.  And that’s what I was trying to talk about, is more a blanket attitude some people have that “plurals can’t be real because I can’t imagine being plural” and that kind of thing.  Like I don’t understand plurality but I have friends who are absolutely definitely part of plural systems and I don’t have to understand it to believe that this is how some people experience their identity.  Same with Otherkin.  These are known real things that have existed a really long time.  Sometimes the idea is even part of someone’s culture – for instance some Otherkin are from cultures that believe in past lives where you were an animal or other nonhuman thing, and they believe they still retain some qualities from those past lives.  I don’t believe in past lives, but I do think identity is infinitely more complex than we usually think it is, and that includes the sometimes-present ability to remember things from the perspective of other people and animals at different points in history, which seems like having past lives.But that’s just my interpretation of the information I have at hand, other people believe differently, obviously.  Some don’t believe in these phenomena at all, others believe in them as literal past lives, and I’m sure some people believe in them as deceptions of the devil, while others think it’s about being “psychic” or something.

Anyway I’m getting off track there.  What I meant to convey wasn’t that you should never judge individuals, just that as groups of people it’s pretty hard to say "nobody can possibly experience themselves in a certain way, it’s all made-up bullshit for attention”.  People can experience themselves all kinds of ways, and there’s nothing inherently offensive to me about seeing yourself as a fairy or a cat, or experiencing yourself as only one among many people in your body, like there’s literally nothing offensive about that in the way that transracial stuff is (and is designed to be) offensive.  I can’t describe the difference but there’s an extreme, very real difference going on here.  And I was speaking about blanket condemnations of entire identities as “not real” and often jumping to “acceptable targets for bullying because not real”.  

Oh and I forgot to mention, when I talk about coining the word transracial, I mean as used in this context.  It was already a word for people of color who are adopted by white people – “transracial adoptees” and so on.  But the people who made it up in this context didn’t know that, I’m almost certain.  They just combined “trans” and “racial” for maximum offense value to both trans people and PoC.  And it worked. Big time.

But most of these things, I don’t feel like it’s even my business to police the boundaries or anything.  And it’s especially not my business to decide that an entire, relatively common (compared to what most people think) experience of oneself doesn’t exist and that everyone who does that is making it up for attention and (somehow, I don’t know how this leap happens) therefore an acceptable target for bullying.  I don’t even think that making it up is always bad – sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, it depends on the individual context.  Like surviving the psych system?  Make up whatever you have to, I will almost never care.  Using nonhuman identity to handle serious problems in your life when you’re just a kid yourself?  Almost never going to condemn someone for that, either.  Coping mechanisms are coping mechanisms and sometimes taking on different identities is a coping mechanism (it’s also something adolescents do a lot of and are frowned upon for, even though it’s often an essential part of growing up — but then for some reason adolescents are frowned upon in general).  

Anyway.. definitely not telling you not to trust your gut with individual people, I’m talking about condemning entire communities as fakers who make it u for attention, and then mercilessly bullying and mocking them. And yes there is a difference between Otherkin and transracial even if words can’t do it justice.  That’s the problem with my post is I’m talking about things that don’t go into words well, and if you take it just as the words, you’ll probably run into trouble.  (Like the only way I can equate transracial with Otherkin is by language and language-like thinking, I can’t equate them outside of language because my own gut tells me they are utterly and totally not the same thing.  Neve take anything I say as the words alone, there’s always something non-words behind the words.  And just because you could technically apply the words I say to transracial people, doesn’t mean I would ever apply those same words to them.  I’m not mad at you for not knowing that or something, it’s not like I said it explicitly, so I’m making it explicit now, I don’t ever think in terms of hard and fast rules that apply in all contexts equally, that’s… whyI’m chaotic-good instead of lawful-good, really, I can’t fit my values into a system, ever, and I judge literally everything by context, not by rules.. So nothing I say is a rule, pretty much.)

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