The transgender phenomenon exists because gender identity dysphoria can be diagnosed,
It can't be because there is no objective physical testing that can demonstrate subjective first-person mental states. Other people infer mental states in others, ultimately based on projection which isn't scientific (it has nothing to do with sensory observation, ultimately). If 'gender dysphoria' were an inter-subjectively observable brain disorder that wouldn't be the subjective feeling of an emotional dissatisfaction with the gender of one's body (whether it's rooted in a sense of it being out-of-place or someone else's body or just finding it unappealing or whatever) that neuroscientists could demonstrate any special authority in, at best it could be a symptom of that brain disorder that someone other than the person with the disorder could understand more about than the patient themselves. We could theoretically find that same brain disorder in a mindless philosophical zombie. If a person feels a persisting negative emotional response to or dissatisfaction with the gender of their body they cannot be mistaken about that, if their belief about whether or not they have that experience is rooted in experience itself; which is self-evident, and not subjective logic or theorizing. What's 'probable' for the therapist (in terms of the patient's mental state) can be conclusively supported or ruled out by the patient, if we're clear on what we mean by certain terms, so the very concept of psychiatric diagnosis is completely incoherent (it's crazy that people understand this when you straightforwardly ask them, 'What am I thinking about right now?' We generally understand, I would hope, that even 'body language analysis' is a probability thing, not a guarantee, but we can't connect the dots when it comes to psychiatric authority).
But until a psychologist diagnoses it, puts a label on it, in fact, it cannot be discussed as if this phenomenon actually exists.
The authority that we project on to psychologists is something that truly shocks me and if I were concerned about overusing that word, I don't think it would be overstated here. I often feel as though I'm living in the Twilight Zone (although I could say that in regard to many different conventional values and beliefs) because the argument against psychology is so straightforward and 'obvious,' to me. I find the idea that we can't discuss our own presumably unique experiences or those of others with them until some kind of input or acknowledgment from people whose only reference for the nature of any given emotional or mental state would have to be introspection completely absurd. At best, collecting data (about something people self-report) would be useful in terms of establishing how
common a problem is likely to be but not whether or not it does or could exist at all. It's the same thing with the effects of child-adult erotic/sexual intimacy, no study needs to confirm that
some children don't or might not suffer as a result of it for someone who has had positive or neutral sexual experiences with an adult as a child or if we assume that people who claim to aren't lying about their experience.
I also think that some kind of racial, ethnic or cultural dysphoria is common among immigrants and minorities and members of a dominant demographic in any given country as well. At some point when I was a child, pre-teen age, I was ashamed of being black/African. I remember hating my hair (at least because it was difficult to manage) and being embarrassed by my heritage (my family is from Zambia but we've lived in Canada since I was 3). That changed when I was 12 (I became interested in hip hop and African/African-American cultures, black studies, Malcolm X, etc.). In the 8th grade, I was really afraid of becoming 'whitewashed' and insecure about the idea that Africans aren't 'black' and division between people of African descent (e.g. Africans vs. African-Americans vs. Afro-Caribbean people). I still considered myself to be a pan-Africanist but I think I largely outgrew that insecurity by the 9th grade, although the 'Africans vs. black people' distinction still bothered me (it still rubs me the wrong way on some level but I'm not really 'passionate' about it. It's mostly semantics). I also know that many dark skinned people struggle with their complexion because the standard of beauty, especially for women, tends to be lighter skin (I remember watching a documentary about Sudanese refugees in the U.S and one of the young men said that he felt so self-conscious when he was on the bus because he was so dark skinned; South Sudanese people are known to be very dark, and it broke my heart).
I can remember being in the hospital and this presumably Indian-Canadian nurse seemed impressed when I told her my middle name, like "wow, congratulations, at least you have a normal/English middle name." I remember my friend telling me about an Indian guy in high school who used to disrespect Indian people, I could probably think of a million little anecdotes. It can go in the other direction as well, though. I'm sure there are some 'wiggers' who wish they were black, not necessarily because they want to be racially black but because they identify with hip hop or black American culture ad they want to be able to claim it as their own but they know that they're viewed as an outsider because they're white (Rachel Dolezal is probably one example although she seems to feel more connected to black American culture on a whole and not just hip hop. In high school, it used to irritate me that the 'wiggers' were into what I saw as the most basic shallow surface of hip hop culture but didn't really care about jazz, soul, the Harlem Renaissance, the Garvey movement, etc. Not that I wanted them to, it just seemed to me that they had a really shallow understanding of the culture that they were trying to emulate and I generally thought that they were arrogant posers; I've often thought in retrospect that if they were more interested in, say, jazz or soul or Langston Hughes than in hip hop culture they might have come off as less obnoxious to me, as threatening as I might still have found them, because so much of hip hop culture is built on machismo and egoism and those traits were all the more unlikeable to me when presented by people who didn't even do a credible job in mimicking a culture that they; I assumed, knew nothing about, they were corny to me and I guess I wanted credit for my superiority. They weren't interested in movies like A Lesson Before Dying or black history or Molefi Kete Asante, etc. It used to bother me when I heard some of them say the most vicious anti-African things because I took offense to their attitude that they, as white North Americans, had more in common with black Americans, or blacks from other parts of the diaspora, than I did; and again, they might have thought that I was the nerd but they were corny and try-hard to me, but I'm not bothered by the idea that white Americans have more in common with black Americans than Africans do anymore and I doubt I really have been since I was 17 or so). I wouldn't be surprised if a white Jamaican felt a little self-conscious about being a white person raised in a black culture (s/he might be proud to be West Indian but most people are going to assume all West Indians are black, so the attitude from some people might be that their culture isn't really their culture. By a 'black culture' I mean a culture developed by people of sub-saharan African descent. This plays into my next point, I had forgotten that I wanted to make it).
I think there's the same problem with a trans-racial identity that there is with a trans-gendered or even a trans-age identity. With some people, it's not so much that they would prefer different bodies (although I'm sure that's often the case) but that they feel connected to a
culture that is associated with a different racial group. Culture isn't static and when human beings are exposed to each other they influence one another. Blacks can be culturally French, Italian, Japanese, etc. Whites can be culturally Jamaican, sub-saharan African, Foundational African-American, Native American, etc. If you stop restricting people and accept natural free expression or human exchange there might be less of a need to alter someone's appearance or deny objective facts about their ancestry if we differentiate between race or ethnicity and culture in the way that I think we should between gender and stereotypes that we associate with gender. This last point is kind of rushed.
at some point one would need to draw a line and assert that individual problems should not involve the public.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this. I have some idea, maybe you're talking about government policy that affects large numbers of people, but individuals should consider other people's problems when it comes to their interactions with them and how widespread a problem is doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether or not accommodating them in some way is too inconvenient or comes at too high of a cost to one's self. I forgot what I planned to say. In this case, it seems like the solution is to reject exclusion or to entertain someone's misguided beliefs about the nature of identity, the former shouldn't be problem if you want what's best for everyone (so there's no territorialism about one's culture and only wanting one group to practice it) and even if the latter isn't the wisest long-term solution I don't think it's a question of asking people to consider someone else at unnecessary/too high of a cost to themselves.
InuYasha,
I don't really agree with the idea of race as a social construct. It's ultimately an arbitrary concept but so is species. That said, if race is a 'biologically meaningful' concept I don't think it matches entirely with our common sense racial classifications based on observable phenotype.