Yesterday's post mentioned the concept of "cultural appropriation," surely one of the oddest racial grievances on the current menu of social complaints, since it's so obviously self-defeating for those who invoke it. A post at The American Conservative by Rod Dreher caused me to reflect a bit more on the implications of cultural appropriation for the contemporary phenomenon of transgenderism.
Dreher writes about a man who decided to have surgery to make himself look Korean like his favorite celebrity:
Oli London, a mentally disturbed young Englishman who has a bizarre obsession with the K-pop star Park Jimin, has had many plastic surgeries in an attempt to look like his idol. Now he has finished his surgeries (he says), and believes he looks Korean. Thus, he has announced that he is “transracial” — he is no longer an Englishman, but a Korean. A non-binary Korean.London claims in the video (at the link) that he's actually had 18 surgeries to make his physical appearance comport with his psychological self-identity. It's very sad, but he poses a pertinent question to his social media critics, one that leads to a chain of further questions. He asks, if people can be transsexual why can't they also be transracial, or trans anything, for that matter?
Good question. What's the significant difference? But here's the problem for our Identity Politics friends who might say that there's no difference and that no one should object to either. According to some of them it's "cultural appropriation" for white persons to, for example, wear their hair in dreadlocks, and cultural appropriation is labelled a form of racism according to the pyramid (about 2/3 of the way down the right side) in yesterday's post.
Moreover, as London asks, if it's okay, as it certainly is nowadays, for a man to try to make himself into a woman why is it not okay for a white Brit to try to make himself into an Asian? If it's okay to be transsexual, which is an extreme form of sexual appropriation, why is it wrong to be transracial?
Are some forms of appropriation okay and others not? Is it unacceptably racist for a white woman to adopt the black distinctive of hoop earrings, but totally acceptable to pass herself off as a complete black woman as did Rachel Dolezal a few years back? Why would the former be offensive but the latter not?
And if a white person trying to pass as black does constitute cultural appropriation and is therefore racist, why doesn't a man making himself into a woman constitute sexual appropriation and therefore be sexist? Why isn't the entire trans community being repudiated as a bunch of sexists?
No wonder those who adopt the pyramid reject appeals to logic and rational thinking. There certainly isn't much logical consistency in the concept of cultural appropriation nor Identity Politics in general.