I wish trans people well as they go through their difficult journey of self discovery. This journey is very new, so not surprisingly they are having trouble making sense out of who they are. In this sense, they are very different from other marginalized people, such as African-Americans and women, who have had cultural identities for centuries. But we do transpeople no favors if we refuse to acknowledge the incoherencies and contradictions in the self-descriptions they are currently considering.

It makes no sense to say that sex is very different from gender, and then turn around and accuse anyone who makes the distinction a “transmedicalist”. You can’t say that there should be such a thing as women’s sports, and also say that any man can be a woman just because he says he is. And you can’t say that gender is a social construct, and race is not. Both are obviously social constructs, and if it’s OK to be transgender, you have to accept that it is equally OK to be transracial. There is no rational reason for rejecting one and accepting the other. The only difference is the vast majority of Black people hate the idea of transracialism, and the women who hate transgenderism are a small enough number that they can be dismissed as TERFs. It has nothing to do with rationality or empirical fact. It is purely a matter of naked social power.