'Racebending' and 'Womanface': Discussing Social Constructs

Juxtaposing race and gender is always very tempting but rarely edifying.

“Why can’t you transition from one race to another?”

That’s not a trick question, I promise. If you’ve ever encountered it in the wild, usually on social media, it will most likely have been phrased as one, no doubt, and more than likely in a context that is meant to delegitimize the existence of transgender people, or call the validity of our identities into question. Transphobes tend to invoke a kind of reductio ad absurdum that makes sense only if you’ve already bought into their premises, and much of their ‘argumentation’ relies on stating truths about (trans)gendered existence in a mocking tone under the assumption that, when faced with how utterly farcical the conclusions of trans-acceptance are, people will completely abandon it as the ludicrous idea it so obviously is.

Still, I’d invite you to think about this question, because it’s a sticky one. Most people understand on a certain level that transitioning between genders makes more inherent sense than “transitioning” between races, that the latter is indeed quite preposterous, but they probably couldn’t tell you why. Which is where the gleeful transphobic line of attack jumps right back in: “Oh, they’re both social constructs, are they not? If gender and race are both made-up, if you can discard your assigned gender, why not do the same with your ‘assigned’ race?”

Let’s sit with that for a moment. I honestly encourage you to think about this argument before continuing to read, because the core equivalency it relies on is an important one to explore and deconstruct.

One thing about this claim ought to stand out: the idea that because ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are both ‘social constructs’, they are equivalent in some fundamental way and therefore must share essential properties and be reasoned about similarly. Crucially, what this argument really wants to assert is that if a progressive social model truly wishes to regard both race and gender as independent of and unmoored by biology, then what applies for one should also apply for the other. It’s reductio ad absurdum again, one that relies upon an instinctual rejection of the idea that one can change their race. If you, as a progressive, think that the idea of a white person transitioning to Black or Asian or any other race is absurd, you must then also realize that the idea of transition between genders is equally absurd. If you don’t, then you have a contradiction in your worldview, and you are required to explain why you feel so differently about the supposed ‘arbitrariness’ of race versus that of gender.

A part of me actually quite likes this argument, because it’s almost based in sound logical principles. Rather than simple name-calling or decreeing some progressive ideal as against ‘common sense’, it’s an actual attempt to engage with the worldview and try to expose a flaw in it. Rhetorically it is a question that almost demands an answer, some justification for why these two cases are dissimilar.

Too bad the core reasoning is based on a complete misunderstanding of what a ‘social construct’ is.

Race and gender are indeed both social constructs, but so are the number of hours that divide a day, the number of days that comprise a ‘week’, the notion of ‘currency’ and ‘nations’, and the very language that you’re currently reading this article in. All of those concepts being socially constructed does not make them equivalent, else a promise today would be as good a payment for a hamburger as cash on Tuesday. The actual sticky wicket is that most people don’t understand what a social construct is particularly well, past perhaps grasping the idea that it connotes something intangible and therefore immaterial.

Every social construct is thus violently collapsed into a singular, false equivalency—that is, they are considered to be “made up”—and asserting that something is a social construct can conveniently be discarded, ignored, or declared a ridiculous argument in some way, because the thing under discussion is obviously real. To a gender-conservative, whose core project has always involved the naturalization of the binary gendered hierarchy, you might as well call gender a “figment of the imagination”, despite the fact that feminist theory knows all too well just how concrete and material gendered social relations truly are. We might then do well to not fall into this same misconception, and understand what a social construct actually is.

Simply put, a social construct is an abstraction that derives meaning by consensus.

Well, maybe that’s more ‘concise’ than ‘simple’. Starting from the more basic examples and working our way up, we see that a lot of social constructs are ‘agreements’, a way to establish a common understanding of a socially-relevant idea. Think of measurements: how long a meter is, how much time elapses in one minute, what sub-divisions and units we need in order to standardize and disseminate information in a systematic, regular manner—these are all things that require consensus, a common understanding of ‘seconds’ and ‘liters’ and exactly how many notches there should be in a ruler. These are all “made up”, yes, in the most technical sense, but that makes them neither meaningless nor totally divorced from the material. A ‘meter’ has the meaning it does because we’ve given it that meaning, and it does indeed describe something tangible: distance.

This applies equally to less concretized notions, like a ‘community’ or a ‘nation’. ‘Nationhood’ only takes the measure of someone in extremely binary terms—whether one is a member of that nation or not—but brings with it a whole host of presumptions and connotations, of being ‘from’ a particular geographic bound, of growing up with a particular shared culture and history, of speaking certain languages and not others and oftentimes of bearing certain, specific animosities. Socially-constructed though it is, ‘nationhood’ carries with it many material inferences. The line on a map that cleaves one state from another may have no real-world equivalent in the actual landscape, but the bullets one would accrue in one’s back for attempting to cross it without proper authorization are fatally real all the same.

Keeping this in mind, we may already have our answer. Why do the rules for ‘gender’ not apply to ‘race’ as well? Because gender and race are not the same concept. They are different ideas, different constructions and they connote vastly different things. One could walk into a room and announce that they were race-transitioning and it would be just as meaningful a statement as claiming that their race is ‘about seventy degrees Fahrenheit’ or ‘the Gregorian Calendar’.

Though, I surmise that while that’s certainly true, it’s not a satisfying answer, is it? We know race and gender are different, but could we expand upon how? What makes one more ephemeral than the other?

If race is an abstraction, what exactly is it abstracting?

There is an axiom that has been so far implicit to this exercise that is best made explicit: that we will primarily be discussing ‘race’ from a Western, largely US-centric perspective. That is the context within which ‘race’ is most meaningful, and theirs is the conception of race that is most commonly exported and understood, even in nations where other social divisions are more important and relevant. This juxtaposition of ‘race’ and ‘(trans)gender’ is a largely Western phenomenon regardless, so it really won’t alter the context of the conversation to state this plainly.

Consider, now, what ‘social function’ race fulfills in the West, what the social consequences of race are in Western culture and society. One purpose is homogenizing—European settlers in what is now the US, all from various nations and regions, adopted ‘whiteness’ as a unifying social category, one that distinguished them both from the indigenous populations whose lands they were colonizing and the Africans upon whose commodified labor and bodies their settler-colony was eventually built. Similarly in the modern context, race blurs significant lines in order to cohere various groups into homogenous categories, usually reflecting the Western contextual understanding of or interest in those groups. In South Asia, for example, though religion and nationality are the significant social divides and carry a great degree of importance, an Indian, a Pakistani and a Bangladeshi would still all be considered ‘brown’ to the Western eye, despite the likelihood that those people would consider their identities and experiences as quite distinct from one another.

These broad categories are also reflective of a certain legal and social standing within Western culture. Whiteness is generally privileged while members of other races face worse socio-economic outcomes, reflecting a certain status within the West’s racial hierarchy. Historically this has been reflected in actual law and remains de facto true even now, despite many such laws being dismantled.

Race therefore codifies a certain relationship with Western citizenhood, whether one is considered a first-class citizen or not. It is a proxy, in some sense, of who may be a ‘true’ citizen of the implicitly-white ‘nation’. A non-white person may be an immigrant with legal, naturalized status, or someone whose family has been in the West for generations, but they can still be considered less of a citizen—regardless of their legal or social standing—due to their position in the racial hierarchy.

This social positionality is not merely extant, however, but historical, or ancestral. Racial status was itself something determined by an assumed relationship to specific historical events and forces, forming an association between a non-white person and certain histories of colonization, slavery, or genocide. Race then, implicitly becomes a way to encode these historical violences, in a way being mobilized to demarcate the imperialized from the citizens of empire, the colonizers from the colonized.

If this seems reductive, that’s partly because race is a reductive category. An East Asian person could be descended from a family that has lived in the United States since the 19th century, while a white person might be a naturalized immigrant from Canada or France. This possibility still does not stop ‘immigrant’ from being racialized in specific ways or from being deployed as a cudgel against certain populations. Racial status, in many regards, reduces the non-white individual to their position in the Western racial hierarchy, thereby treating them as the perpetual Other, the perpetual outsider unable to access true legitimacy under the national project. (“Citizenship” as a legitimizing social construct itself is predicated upon certain violences mobilized against those without access to such legitimacy, in ways that are invariably racialized too!)

Hilariously, if we were willing to stretch a metaphor, there is a ‘racial’ analogue to gender transition that we could make, one that bears surprising similarities to the social response to gender transition: changing citizenship. Think about it: You could ‘transition’ from ‘Indian’ or ‘Kenyan’ or ‘Indonesian’ to ‘US-American’ legally but still not be considered a legitimate Westerner due to essentialized biological characteristics, which perennially mark you as a member of your ‘birth race/nation’ and can be used to demean your equal standing!

This is a metaphor that is admittedly stretched to breaking point, but does show some interesting analogues between race and gender without collapsing the two, of which the primary common feature is a conservative desire to essentialize social categories in the realm of the biological. ‘Whiteness’ cannot simply connote a higher status under imperial logics, it must necessarily constitute racial superiority, must regard differences in socioeconomic outcomes as a natural consequence of greater capability in some races against others. Skin colors and certain features must be correlated to intelligence, competence, ability, proficiency, and must necessarily supersede centuries of historical ravaging and plunder and exploitation!

Which brings us to the final nail in the coffin for racial-gendered juxtaposition: History itself. An individual could perhaps alter their biological characteristics enough—or already be born with paler skin and more Eurocentric features than other members of their race—but they could never transition out of their lineage, or their historical positionality within the periphery or the West’s internal colonies, any more than they could alter the timeline itself. Race, in the final calculus, is a much more temporally-deterministic social category, one that ultimately doesn’t simply describe how you currently look and how you are currently treated within society, but that necessarily echoes through previous generations and their (mis)treatment, their exploitation, their impoverishment. You cannot transition to the Gregorian Calendar, to an economic class you don’t have the wealth for, or out of an existing history of subjugation. To do so would require uprooting the various class-supremacist ideologies that underpin our entire modern existence.

In contrast to this, gender is much more grounded in one’s present existence. The gendered binary constructed and upheld by patriarchy divides all people into two categories, marking one for domestic, sexual and reproductive exploitation by the other based on their respective presumed biodestinies. Binary gender encodes heterosexuality as a regime and is meant to enforce who one is permitted to partner with as well as the expected role one is meant to perform within that partnership, a social reality that is much easier to contravene, to betray, to walk away from in the here and now.

I hope this exploration of social constructs and the differing social meanings of race and gender was edifying in some way, and was at least easy to follow and understand. Transphobes in general really want to be able to ‘unveil’ gender transition as a ridiculous, impossible farce, a reactionary desire that is itself a result of a poor understanding of how gender is socially constructed and a denial of how trans people can and do materially alter their sex and gender positionality. Don’t be tricked into believing that we’re the ones ignoring the blatant truth in front of our eyes.