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Becoming a Black Man

Jill

A must-read up at AlterNet and ColorLines. Daisy Hernandez details the ways in which transitioning between genders highlights how that racism is lived differently for men and women. It’s a fascinating and insightful piece, and I hope you’ll check it out.

3 thoughts on Becoming a Black Man

  1. I really enjoyed the way this piece was framed. These are generally difficult issues for society to discuss as we typically aren’t well equipped with the tools to navigate ambiguity and because we run the risk fo pitting one identity – or level of oppression – against another. Daisy does a nice job of presenting the complexity of how different identities intersect within different communities in a way that will be accessible to many people and not make people who are new to the conversation shut down in defensiveness. This is an important discussion to have, both for the direct goal of raising awareness and breaking down barriers for the Transgender community, and also for what it can teach all of us about the dynamic interactions of the multiple identities we all hold not just race, genders and sexualities.

  2. Thanks for posting this, Jill! I had been meaning to but didn’t get around to it. This article is a really amazing example of intersections between gender and race, and a few other things as well. Intersections between myriad experiences keep reminding us that we can’t make life, and we shouldn’t try to make ideology, as cut and dry as we might like it to be. Even just racism + sexism = complexity.

    Mitchell’s experience is far from unusual — I’ve heard similar experiences discussed by several black trans men.

    There was some interesting discussion at Alas, a Blog about this story too, although one of the questions that kept coming up was “maybe the testosterone made him drive differently?” Which seemed pretty silly, as I said in my own comment near the end.

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