Proud to be a Remix, Part 5: Confessions of a $5 Dane

Proud to be a Remix is an extended discussion of my ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural background

Since terfing on main for the first time, I have observed that genderists reach for racial thinking instinctively because to them, gender - their term for when you take the sex-age-species category label and strip it of definition - is a kind of race, a human constructed caste system imposed and enforced via the proxy of appearance. Racial thinking was initially applied to Natives to explain why mixed Natives were not abandoning our cultural practices, attitudes, and beliefs. Over time, as “white” stopped being a legally defined category explicitly related to ancestry, as well as the enslaved status of the mother specifically, the understanding of race has evolved such that for many, a person’s racial identity is synonymous with their ‘phenotype.’

This is a reboot of race, a reification of the concept of race as a natural category system to which all objectively belong. However, an albino Black person is not white, regardless of color. What racial ‘phenotype’ a person is will never be objectively, simplistically categorical, because we all share a common ancestor with each other, and therefore there is no true independence of lineage. Nor is phenotype a strict function of descent. There are dominant and recessive genes, and more and more people these days are becoming aware of complex multi-gene interactions that can produce a condition called atavism, where a dormant phenotype re-emerges in someone of a lineage that is not considered to have been that “race.”