Subject: Re: Race fluidity
Why is a white man self identifying as a black man self evidently absurd, but a penis person self identifying as a woman is reasonable?

Because the question has nothing to do with whether one is absurd and one is reasonable. The question is whether these things exist or not. "Penis people" whose mental conception of gender is convinced that they are "really" a woman do exist - there have been thousands and thousands and thousands of patients who have reported that condition and experienced pain and trauma because of it. In nearly every culture, country, and time frame. The same is not true of white men self-identifying as black. You don't have a lengthy empirical observation of hundreds of thousands of people showing up dealing with the anguish of being "born in the wrong color skin."

For an illustrative analogy, consider the condition of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). You might have heard of it - it's like the inverse of phantom limb syndrome. People with BIID are absolutely, 100% convinced that a part of their body which is still there....shouldn't be there. That it's wrong for it to be there. That they don't really have, say, a left arm - that their internal sense of what their body should look like doesn't have a left arm, that can't be their left arm. And it needs to go. Patients will report extreme distress and trauma surrounding their existing limb, and will sometimes self mutilate in order to get rid of it. Psychologists believe that this might be related to a disorder in the sensorimotor cortex - the part of the brain that lets you know where all your limbs are even if your eyes are closed - that leads the person to have an internal "model" of their body that excludes the limb, even though it's still there.

But while people will report that they should have one limb instead of two - with all sincerity (to the point of hacking off their own limbs) - no one ever reports that they should have three limbs instead of two. There's no "Extra Limb Syndrome." They're not trying to get physicians to graft on an extra arm in order to ease their distress.

We don't ask whether it's "reasonable" for someone tbelieve they have one arm instead of two, but self-evidently absurd for someone to think they have three arms instead of two. It's just that the former is an actual psychological phenomenon that doctors have observed in patients, and the latter simply isn't.

Gay people exist. They always have, and we have records of millions and millions of them - even in societies that have imposed harsh legal and social punishments. Trans people exist. They always have, and we have records of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them - even in societies that have imposed harsh legal and social punishments. "Wrong-race" people? There's no indication that such people exist. If they existed, we would would have to confront how we (as a society) would have to treat them. But right now, there's no real indication that that's really a condition that people have.