God wants you to build your identity on the essentials of his identity and his Word. If you try to use your experience to start digging up that foundation, you’ll be destroying your identity, not building it. When you begin to see certain essentials (such as your sex, gender, ethnicity, and dependence on God) as fixed instead of always wondering whether they’re real, you can start experiencing the journey of understanding and enjoying those essentials.

Transracialism is what it sounds like (a white person identifying as black). And it’s as bad as it sounds (dumb, disrespectful, and confusing to both black and white people). But given our current cultural defense of the primacy of internal feelings (I’m a woman because I feel like a woman) or what I call experientialism, I’ve been mystified over the past decade why racial identity blurring has remained unacceptable to mainstream liberals.

The most apt defense for accepting transgenderism but denying transracialism came in a 2020 article in the Boston Review (it’s well worth the read) by two philosophy professors, Robin Dembroff (Yale) and Dee Payton (UVA). They compare two headline case studies: Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal’s transition to Nkechi Amare Diallo (born white then transitioned to identifying as black). Dolezal was serving as president of the Spokane NAACP in 2015 when her transracial identity was exposed and came under fire.

Dembroff and Payton lay out their argument for why they believe it is in society’s best interest to recognize and affirm Caitlyn Jenner’s transition, but not Dolezal’s. Their paper leans on a fascinating interweaving of utilitarianism and selective experientialism. What I mean by utilitarianism is that they base their conclusion of whether to recognize transracial or transgender identities as legitimate on their evaluation of that identity’s utility to the greater good of society:

“Put simply, then, we think that transracial-inclusive race classification would undermine our ability to track racial inequality, and for reasons that are irrelevant in the case of transgender-inclusive gender classification.”

You can see their chief moral end in view is one’s ability to track inequality over generations. Once they have established that as the highest moral good, then they weigh the good of identity recognition by its utility in reaching that goal.

In a sense, this is an inevitable byproduct of their second tenet, which it turns out, is really the theme of the whole paper: a repudiation of the philosophy of essentialism in favor of selective experientialism. Here’s their conclusion all the way at the bottom:

“Of course, there is room for debate. But we hope to have convinced you that essentialism will not settle it.”

Their rejection of essentialism is the heart of my critique.

The Real Argument Is About Essentialism

Let’s back up the train. What is essentialism? Essentialism, which is the opposite of selective experientialism, is the worldview that believes there are certain essential, permanent and unalterable realities, (most relevantly in human beings), that we can discover and describe, but never change. Practically speaking, it is the silly notion held by small-minded folks that someone born as a Vietnamese female human being is in fact a Vietnamese female human being. And that no amount of internal felt experience can ever make this person Scandinavian, or a male, or a cat.

Selective experientialism is a continuation of the existentialism popularized by Sartre and Camus, who contended that existence precedes essence. The Bible teaches that essence precedes existence, because we are designed (Genesis 2, Psalm 139). In other words, human beings are similar to computers, watches, and bicycles. You can certainly use a watch as a hammer, but that doesn’t change the nature of what the watch is and what it’s made for (i.e. that won’t go well).

Dembroff and Payton dismiss essentialism with a wave of a hand. It’s old-fashioned ignorance. After all, .2% of people are born with some chromosomal abnormality (intersex) so—poof! Gender as biology is silly. And of course we all know gender is complex and cultural, therefore it must be relative and experiential.

To their credit, Dembroff and Payton recognize race has had just as much if not more malleability. For example, they mention a racist-motivated 1890s US census had a category for mulattos and even “octoroons” (someone with one-eighth black blood). But then their utilitarian cards come back out when it comes why we should permit someone to cross-identify in gender but not in race. Why can gender be experiential, but race must be essential? Their answer: to protect someone’s relative experience of oppression. In other words, the legitimacy of identity categories depends on the utilitarian value of recognizing and honoring victimhood.

Defending victims and marginalized people is a good objective (more on that later), but placing victim experience as your standard for legitimizing identity will not hold the line against transracialism. Let’s think about why.

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