In 2015, Rachel Dolezal was infamously “outed” as a white woman masquerading as Black; in the same year, Caitlyn Jenner came out publicly as a trans woman. Perhaps because of the timing of these two events, public discourse on identity became confused, with many asking why, if someone can “choose” to “change” their gender, it is wrong that someone might change their race as well. In June 2021, Oli London came out as nonbinary and “TransKorean” [sic] on Twitter, forcing this question to the forefront of public discourse once again.

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Gender and Race

To begin answering this question, we first have to ask whether race and gender can, in fact, be treated as functionally equivalent. 

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“Gender” refers to the socially and culturally determined differences between women and men. This binary understanding of gender is highly influenced by Western imperialism and colonialism; many Indigenous cultures across the world hold a more expansive view of gender. Despite the colonial history of the gender binary, individuals of all cultures and backgrounds have unique and personal interactions with gender, such that each person has an innate understanding of their own gender (called gender identity), which they can choose to express in a number of ways (gender expression). We know that gender identity is an innate quality, because any physical or external trait used to define gender is inevitably proven inadequate by the diversity of human biology. 

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“Race” refers to a socially constructed group of people who share a set of (typically physical) characteristics. The concept of race was invented in the 1700s to justify the enslavement of Black bodies and advance white colonialism and imperialism. Blackness, which was previously devoid of any social or moral meaning, was marked by white people as being inferior to whiteness. This racialization project was strengthened in the 1800s by the eugenics movement, which used faulty science to “prove” that racial differences were the result of the genetic superiority of white people’s genes. Today, we know that race is purely a social construct with no basis in biology or genetics: the physical differences (phenotypes) by which racial categories are assigned are controlled by ~0.01% of our genetic material. 

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In other words, no one is born “feeling like” or genetically programmed to be a certain race, because race was specifically created by and for white people to categorize and stigmatize racialized others. For example, most South Koreans do not think of themselves as “Asian”—this racialized identifier only becomes salient to South Koreans living in or visiting Western countries like the United States.

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Gender vs. Race

Taking the unique and distinct histories of race and gender into consideration, it becomes clear that, although both are social constructs, each one is socially constructed in different ways, and therefore each function in different ways: 

Internal vs External

While the gender binary is enforced via ongoing colonial legacies of the West, individuals continue to have rich and expansive personal experiences with gender, because gender is an identity that is innate to each individual. In other words, gender is something a person discovers about themselves. 

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While racialized individuals can have deep and unique personal relationships to their own racial, ethnic, and national identities, race itself is an identifier whose meaning and social significance is defined externally by the dominant group. In other words, race is something a person discovers about the world around them. 

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Inheritance

Gender is not determined by ancestry or inheritance, as demonstrated by the fact that most families are multi-gendered across all generations. Accordingly, gender inequality does not primarily build up intergenerationally over time. Of course, gender inequality is still significantly impacted by history: misogyny and sexism continues to be passed down through the legacies of patriarchal laws and policies. Yet the burden of historical misogyny is the burden of all women, including trans and other women, regardless of whether or not their parents were/are women themselves.

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Race is socially determined by ancestry and cultural history (though it’s important to reiterate that race has no basis in biology). Racial inequality does build up intergenerationally over time, such that the racial discrimination faced by previous generations have a profound and significant impact on the next generation’s life chances. In other words, the burden of historical racism is passed down from parents to their children, who all share the same racial identifier. (Because of this, racial classification needs to be defined in a way that encompasses the intergenerational inequalities faced by members of a race, past and present.)

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Transgender vs “Trans-racial”

Transgender people changing their appearance to match their gender does not change their gender identity: a transgender woman who undergoes gender-affirming surgery always was a woman, even before her surgery.

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“Trans-racial”* people changing their appearance to look like a certain race is about changing from their “previous” race to their chosen one: Rachel Dolezal admits that she was “born to white parents” but changed her appearance to “look Black”; similarly, Oli London was born to white parents but regularly undergoes various surgeries to appear “more Korean.”

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* “Transracial” is an academic term referring to adoptees who were adopted into families who do not match the race of the adoptee. Here, we use “trans-racial” to mean people who claim they were born one race but now identify as another.

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Oli London

These differences between gender and race makes it easier to understand why Oli London’s tweets raised so much controversy: while gender identity is something that London can discover about themself and share with the world (coming out as nonbinary), race is not something that London can determine for themself. 

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Of course, one could argue that London is not technically claiming to be “trans-racial”, since Korean is an ethnicity or nationality, and not a race. However, although plenty of people are born one nationality and later change it for various reasons, changing one’s nationality requires a legal process, not the social and medical processes London is pursuing. In fact, London’s attitudes towards Korean men (fetishizing Jimin from BTS as the height of beauty) and their claims that the surgeries they received to get “slant eyes” (a racialized feature associated with East Asians) makes them Korean suggests that their understanding of Korean culture and people is highly racialized, and that they are approaching this new “identity” from a racial lens.

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London’s coming out as a nonbinary person can and should be celebrated as an act of resilience in the face of colonial notions of binary gender. Their and others’ claims to “trans-racial identity”, however, can only be read as harmful acts of cultural appropriation which further entrench colonial notions of race and reinforce the white gaze.

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