In an incisive, dense and stimulating work, the sociologist Rogers Brubaker questions the reasons why, in the United States today, the social acceptance of transgender situations has no equivalent in “transracial” cases.
Conceived by its author as an exploratory essay and not as a monograph, this book is served by an imaginative theoretical device and a writing that is as clear as it is elegant. Its starting point is the political, media and, to a certain extent, scientific reception, different, of two cases, that of the transition M-to-F i.e. Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner’s male-to-female relationship and Rachel Dolezal’s identification as African-American.
In June 2015, William Bruce Jenner, an athlete known for winning the gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and a member of the high-profile Kardashian family by marriage, began his transition to Caitlyn Jenner. At the same time, the parents of Rachel Dolezal, then president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), reveal that she is not black, as she has always claimed, but white. This news causes a scandal. Rachel Dolezal protests by explaining that she has always felt black. But, she is forced to resign from her position at the NAACPThese two cases are immediately linked in the media and social networks, the question being: if Caitlyn Jenner can be recognized as transgender, can Rachel Dolezal be recognized as transracial?
Constructivism in question
From this controversy in the form of an analogy, R. Brubaker seeks to examine the modalities of differentiated functioning of these two identification regimes. This gap seems all the more paradoxical to him since racial categories are more widely recognized as social constructions than sex and gender, where a form of bodily realism can sometimes persist, and should consequently allow more fluidity and circulation in identifications (p. 4). However, the opposite is happening.
These two cases therefore offer the author the opportunity to examine the social meaning of racial and gender identifications, first reflecting in the first part of the work (” The Trans Moment ”) on “trans” situations (“ to think about trans »). The first chapter thus analyses the discourses on sex change and race change, focusing mainly on the way in which these discourses envisage the legitimacy of these changes. Three types of positions then emerge: essentialistswho see gender and race as natural data, volunteerswho believe that gender and racial identities can be changed, and those who combine gender voluntarism with racial essentialism.
But the confrontation of these two cases also has a heuristic significance as shown in the second part of the book, ” Thinking with Trans “. R. Brubaker in fact distinguishes three types of “trans” situations to think about transracial from transgender. ” The trans of migration ” is the act of moving from one established category to another, most often through surgery and hormonal treatment. ” The trans of between » denotes an oscillation or an ambiguous positioning between the two established categories whereas « the trans of beyond » rejects existing categories and calls for going beyond them. However, if the Jenner and Dolezal cases correspond to the « trans of migration ” – although the latter says she did not take medication to appear black – the limits of the analogy between transracial and transgender that they reveal serve to show, according to R. Brubaker, the persistence of an objectivist conception of race.
This is probably where the main criticism of Brubaker’s argument lies. The Dolezal affair does not so much highlight the persistence of an essentialist conception of racial categorization as the differentiated legitimation regime of racial identifications compared to that which operates in the case of transgender situations.
If a constructivist position can be confused on a logical level with an unconditionality of identifications – the fact of being racialized as African-American being a social construct and not a biological given, it should be possible to define oneself freely as such -, it does not mean that any identification as African-American is acceptable; which is highlighted by the Dolezal case. In other words, having a constructivist approach to race does not exclude having a substantivist conception that strictly defines the conditions of belonging to this or that racialized group. And the scandal caused by the identification of Rachel Dolezal as African-American indirectly reminds us of the conditions under which, in the particular context of the United States, a person can be legitimately recognized as such. We regret, moreover, that R. Brubaker does not specify on this occasion that the issues would have been, at least in part, different if R. Dolezal had claimed racialization as latina or as Asian.
Caught in the confusion that could leaves hanging between logical possibility and moral permission, R. Brubaker’s reasoning reduces these two levels to one another. He thus mixes the logics of production of categories and the regimes of acceptability of identifications, or, to borrow the vocabulary of philosophy, ontology and axiology.
The Dolezal affair is therefore not a challenge to the constructed nature of racial categories, but rather to the legitimacy of an identification that does not fit into the criteria produced by the history of social relations, here between Blacks and Whites in the United States. And the fact that there is no absolute fluctuation in identifications does not necessarily mean a necessary return to a form of essentialism or realism of categorizations.
Distinct regimes of subjectivity
However, R. Brubaker’s main argument for distinguishing transracial identifications from transgender identifications is to recall that they obey logics where the question of choice as opposed to biological data plays out differently. Indeed, in the case of sexual and gender identification, it is accepted that the choice is personal, that it is based on an individual psychological reality that can be disjointed from the initial bodily data (p. 7). The transition from one sex to the other will thus bring physical appearance into line with psychological feelings. This is also why some transgender people prefer to talk about gender or sex confirmation (” gender or sex confirmation ”) rather than sex or gender change (“ gender or sex reassignment »).
On the other hand, racial identification is not just a matter of individual choice. As the position taken by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association during the Dolezal affair (cited p. 63) reminds us, it cannot be done without the recognition by other members of the group of the person who claims it:
Belonging is not just about individual feelings – it is not just about who you claim to be, but also who claims you (as a member of the group).
In the case of identifying as African-American, historical heritage is, in the United States, the main criterion for recognition since, to be considered as such, it is necessary to have had slave ancestors and not just black ones (which shows that heritage, if it is linked to it, is not systematically confused with heredity). We also remember in this respect the way in which the question arose in the case of Barack Obama in 2008 at the time of his first candidacy for the presidential election. Being the son of a Kenyan, he was black without being able to directly claim to be African-American and it was only through his marriage to an Afro-descendant that he was able to connect to this history. Thus, unlike sex and gender, racial identification requires in principle an inscription in the common and collective history of the group in which one recognizes oneself.
In this sense, these two types of identity change are not legitimized in the same way because the authenticity of the identification is not measured by the same criteria. In transgender cases, only the word of the person concerned counts since the driving force behind a change of sex is a requirement for personal and psychological authenticity. On the other hand, it is not enough to identify oneself to African-Americans to be able to identify as such. Without the prior recognition of the other members of the group to which one claims and which functions in this case as a authenticationphysical transformation is considered a form of imposture. However, in the case of Rachel Dolezal, the question of usurpation is all the stronger since the deceptive nature of her identification and consequently of her physical appearance was the subject of a revelation by a third party — in this case her parents. It is surprising, moreover, that R. Brubaker did not take the time to expose the differentiated structuring of the two cases by further historicizing the issues. The Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner case functions as a confession that allows us to play on the themes of the frankness or sincerity of the person concerned. e. On the contrary, it is a revelation or a particular type ofouting that affects Rachel Dolezal. In this case, having lied about one’s identity is then added to the moral condemnation of having passed oneself off as a member of a minority group and a victim of the history of the United States even though one is part of the group that was its oppressor.
Moreover, it would probably have been interesting to place the distinct modalities of acceptance of these two cases in the history of the thematization of the trans question in struggles linked to gender and sexuality and in anti-racist struggles. The former — or at least some of them — affirmed the fluidity of categories and the possible circulation from one identity to another as one of the main instruments for challenging a gendered social order and its hierarchies.
On the other hand, race change is not a central issue for anti-racist movements, firstly because, historically, suspicion has always weighed on transracial situations: African-Americans passing themselves off as white being perceived as traitors to the cause by their peers and as usurpers by the upholders of the racist order; whites identifying with African-Americans being accused of redeeming themselves easily or taxed with opportunism. This is the reason why anti-racist movements have aimed not so much at the circulation between racializing categories as at the overcoming of a social order inherited from a racist system by means of recognition policies aimed at the valorization of stigmatized and disqualified identities and justice policies aimed at correcting the discriminatory treatment suffered by members of racial minorities.
The limits of analogy
It is indeed the structural homology between race and gender, notably because in both cases it is a question of power relations that are manifested in hierarchical categories constructed socially and historically and that bring the body into play in a distinct and variable manner, that invites us to question the similarity of the Jenner and Dolezal cases. However—and this is the limit of the analysis proposed here by R. Brubaker—that the analogy between a transgender situation and a transracial situation is thinkable and conceivable in terms of the logics of categorical production does not necessarily mean that the two cases are socially received as equally acceptable or legitimate. Moreover, the whole point of this confrontation is to bring to light the differentiated social and subjective effects that appear when we move from the register of the construction of categories to that of identification.