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Is it really possible to be 'transethnic'?

Is it really possible to be 'transethnic'?

We’ve always been a self-centered bunch. How could we not be? After all, there’s nothing more egotistical than being human, tethered to your own mind with only guesses at what others may actually be thinking.

Social media has bolstered this view of the world, made it easier to justify this self-centricity, to curate our identities and present ourselves to the world in the way we want to be seen. That used to be a privilege reserved for public figures and celebrities, now we can make ourselves whoever we would like to be.

Unfortunately, the are limits to the identities we curate, especially if we build them on lies as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, a former chapter leader at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who was outed for being white.

Dr. Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar, associate professor of sociology and academic coordinator of Caribbean Studies at Ryerson University likens Dolezal’s case to Grey Owl, a British-born Canadian immigrant who adopted a First Nations identity and became embroiled in conservationist causes.

“They changed their appearance to suit the ‘roles’ they had taken on,” she told Yahoo Canada. “Both are white people who took on racialized personas in order to profit from these identities.”

After being outed publicly, Dolezal brought her case to the court of public opinion, saying she is transethnic and drawing parallels between her and Caitlyn Jenner’s transgenderism.

But Hernandez-Ramdwar says being transethnic and being transgender is not the same thing.

“They do not choose to be transgender – they just are,” she says pointing out that transgender people are often dealing with actual physical, chromosomal, genetic identity elements. “On the other hand, if someone claims that they are ‘transracial’, in my opinion, they are choosing to ‘perform’ what they assume to be an ethnicity that is attached to a certain race in a certain context.”

Which is why a line needs to be drawn between race and ethnicity.

“Race is a social construction based entirely on appearance; it changes according to time and place,” she says. “Ethnicity is about culture, practice, behaviour, sense of belonging – it may or may not coincide with how a person looks, but generally speaking we cannot tell someone’s ethnicity by looking at them.”

So is there such a thing as transethnicity?

“I suppose so, someone who was raised Catholic and converts to Judaism is ‘transethnic’, someone who moves to another country and takes another citizenship is ‘transethnic’ and someone who learns another language and then makes that their primary language is ‘transethnic,’” she says. “In a nutshell, we can choose our ethnicity and ties but we cannot, however choose our race as it is something based on how we are perceived by others.”

When it comes to mixed race individuals, on the other hand, the politics of identity can be a little more malleable but not always.

“I am mixed race and can attest to this – depending where I am in the world I can fit into any number of racial and ethnic categories,” says Hernandez-Ramdwar. “Other mixed race individuals are not seen as such, and are categorized according to the dominant racial physical characteristics they display, you cannot tell if someone is mixed race by looking at them.”

But Dolezal’s relation to Jenner’s public coming out isn’t entirely left field. Both gender and race have complicated histories, this true. And while they don’t necessarily intersect, they are both built on the foundation of what you look like, says Dr. Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality and a professor at the University of Alberta.

“That’s the place where race and sex come together,” says Heyes. “One of the reasons Caitlyn Jenner has been taken seriously in the mainstream press is because she’s been made to look very conventionally feminine, she’s hot, she’s what a woman is supposed to be so people will buy it.”

The reality, explains Heyes, is for every Caitlyn Jenner there are dozens more who are trans-ambiguous, people who can’t be readily labeled as masculine or feminine.

“And they have a much harder time, people don’t think that that’s okay,” says Heyes. “Something similar is happening with interracial.”

She points to a student she has who has a black father and white mother.

“Like Barack Obama she’s not more black than she is white but because of the way race works in Canada, as well in the States, she has to be black because that’s how other people perceive her,” says Heyes. “She identifies that way partly because that’s how the world treats her – you have some degree of choice as to how you present yourself but it’s not all up to you.”

The door Dolezal seems to have opened with the transethnic identity debate has neatly fit into the treads of race and sex, the physical representations we ascribe to identity. But Heyes says the conversation would be more constructive looking at how those identities supplement the things we do and create.

“To me, those are the interesting questions, like what kind of politics are you engaging in when you present yourself in a particular way, not are you real or are you fake,” says Heyes. “But we get really trapped by that language, who’s really black and who’s really a woman.”