When Rachel DolezalFootnote 1 was “outed” as white during a local news television interview in 2015, an unfamiliar term exploded into mainstream popular culture and academic lexicons: transracial. Within hours of the now notorious interview airing, the hashtag “transracial” was trending on social media and in the days and weeks that followed, major newspapers and magazines in the United States of America and the United Kingdom took up the term in articles and opinion pieces covering the story. The flurry of public interest it caused has led some to cite this case as the birth of the contemporary debate on transracialism (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2016a), or what I have come to term the “post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse.” Rogers Brubaker, a sociologist of nation and ethnicity, was one early and vocal contributor to the academic discourse around post-Dolezalian transracialism,Footnote 2 identifying it as an “intellectual opportunity” to explore “the constitutive tensions in the micropolitics of sex/gender and racial/ethnic identity and difference” (Reference Brubaker2016a, 415). Brubaker argued the Dolezal transracialism scandal garnered so much attention because it was received in a cultural climate already buzzing with arguments about identity politics, the fluidity of identity categories, and the status of “trans” identities.Footnote 3 Contextualized thus, Brubaker treats the Dolezal transracialism scandal as an invitation to analyse “the micropolitics of sex/gender and racial/ethnic identity in an era of categorical flux” (Reference Brubaker2016a, 435) because he views it as “a new kind of ‘trans moment’” (Reference Brubaker2016a, 415); he understands it as the theoretical and metaphysical application of a trans grammar to racialized identities, and elevates it as empirically novel and interesting for this reason.
By identifying this “transracial” site as an initiatory meeting of “trans” and “race,” Brubaker is making a claim as to the conceptual history of “transness.” In this article I will be exploring the implications of this assumption, which I argue abounds in the very articulation of the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse. More specifically, I will interrogate the assumptions this framework produces about transness, Blackness, and the relationship there-between embedded in the framing of Dolezal as a “trans moment,” with particular attention to the implications this has for Black (and) trans feminists theorizing Blackness and transness.
The peculiar rendering of the relationship between theories (and ontologies) of gender and race—more particularly, of Blackness—espoused in the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse has already proved controversial. Most significantly for my purposes, it has drawn the ire of many Black feminist commentators, who critique this “transracialism” as a violent appropriation (Walters Reference Walters2015; White Reference White2016; Millner Reference Millner2017; Oluo Reference Oluo2017); it has drawn further criticism for failing to account for this ire, and for insufficiently engaging with theoretical work of women-of-color and trans women (Open Letter to Hypatia 2017; Dutta Reference Dutta2017). One of the most notable (if notorious) examples of interventions so critiqued is feminist philosopher Rebecca Tuvel’s (Reference Tuvel2017) article “In defense of transracialism,” the publication of which incited protest against the journal—this journal, Hypatia—via a public letter demanding a retraction and apology (Hypatia, Board of Directors 2017), ultimately resulting in the resignation of several members of the then editorial board (Flaherty Reference Flaherty2017). It has been argued that the discussion of race in the article “provoked a schism in Philosophy” itself (McKenzie et al. Reference McKenzie, Harris and Zamudio-Suarez2017) and its impact in the field is further attested by Philosophy Today’s “Special Symposium: Rebecca Tuvel and her interlocutors”, an issue dedicated to engagements with and responses to the article (Philosophy Today 2018). Despite these controversies, the ontological complexity of thinking identity at the theoretical space of post-Dolezalian transracialism has continued to attract interventions from critical-race theorists (Alim Reference Alim, Samy Alim, Rickford and Ball2016; Botts Reference Botts2018; Thompson Reference Thompson, Keller and Maureen2018; Cattien Reference Cattien2019; McDaneld Reference McDaneld2021; McKibbin Reference McKibbin2021) and feminist and trans theorists (Stryker Reference Stryker2015; Dutta Reference Dutta2017; Hom Reference Hom2018; Morrissey Reference Morrissey2021; Wiegman Reference Wiegman2023; Mortlock Reference Mortlock2025). This work demonstrates how the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse produces or reveals questions and problematics in ontologies and epistemologies of race and gender. Of most interest to me is the writing of scholars engaging Black trans theory to approach the subject, such as K. Marshall Green (Reference Green2015) and Marquis Bey (Reference Bey2020); these writers have argued for those invested in Black feminist and trans theory to step away from projects seeking to (in)authenticate Dolezal’s Blackness and, instead, to approach post-Dolezalian transracialism attentive to what is being done by the concept. I take up their project specifically to interrogate the “transness” of post-Dolezalian transracialism and, more specifically, how “trans” is put to work in the discourse to inflect and effect the theorization of Blackness.
This interest develops in my acute awareness of a dilemma facing those of us who work at the intersection of Black and gender studies, articulated by the editors of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly’s special issue on Blackness through the question “in what ways does transgender studies always already depend on an abstraction of the racialization of space as foundational to the production of gender and sexuality?” (Ellison et al. Reference Ellison, Green, Richardson and Riley Snorton2017, 163). The editors locate themselves within a trans philosophy distinct from “transgender studies,” one that develops through work on racialized gender and understands Black and trans conceptual/ontological space as fundamentally entangled (Ellison et al. Reference Ellison, Green, Richardson and Riley Snorton2017; Green and Bey Reference Bey2017). From this place, the question is voiced in response to what they note as the adoption and proliferation of work on transness in the academy that is made possible by the erasure of the Black subject; or, more precisely, a fear that academic engagement with the conceptual space of transness via “the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline functions as a scene of subjection for blackness” (Ellison et al. Reference Ellison, Green, Richardson and Riley Snorton2017, 162). The concern, then, is that the capture (or disciplining) of “transgender” as the object that facilitates increased academic engagement with transness is predicated on the violent erasure of Blackness from the subject, theory, and discipline of “trans.” My contention as I set out on this analysis is that the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse presents an illustration of how this process of abstracting Blackness from trans space works; that the articulation of “transracial” through a grammar that understands “trans” as always and only indexing a normative configuration of “transgender” erases Blackness from trans space.
This context, I believe, helps clarify my disquiet over post-Dolezalian transracialism given as a “new kind of trans moment”: while it is, of course, possible for novel interactions to emerge between concepts that are already intimately intertwined, the histories of theorizing that are attended to—and those that are neglected or erased—by the architects of a new conceptual dialect tell us something about what its concepts do. And this “transracial” discourse emerges into an already live struggle over the place of Blackness in the establishment of institutional lexicons of transness. If the trans grammar that structures the post-Dolezalian transracial discourse is reliant on the erasure of the kind of Black trans theory Ellison et al. (Reference Ellison, Green, Richardson and Riley Snorton2017) point to (by which I mean that the condition of its legibility is the exclusion of such theory from the trans lexicon) that is, I will argue, a problem of and for trans study.
We start, then, from an understanding of the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse as a generative case study for the implications of trans(gender) institutionalization and the abstraction of racialized space, precisely because of how “trans-”ness is discussed, deployed, and dissected with the explicit intention of commentating on the ontology of Blackness. I find this site to be particularly interesting because it can be used to study the entrenchment of a trans terminology both in popular and scholarly discourses, as a lay and technical term. For post-Dolezalian transracialism, the process of conceptualizing happens in newspapers and magazines, on social media and during television interviews, as much as in the academy and it happens most often outside the hands of Black trans (and) feminist theorists. It might be, then, that the institutionalization of this trans grammar is not only a possible site of subjection for Blackness in the academy. This trans grammar is affected and effected by commentators with various stakes and investments, instrumentalized to accomplish various things; to understand what these things might be, I question how the languages, figures, and imaginaries of “trans-” circulated in the discourse affect and effect the theorization of Blackness. This might be thought of as the “trans-”ing that occurs in the construction of post-Dolezalian transracialism, and the framing of this as a verb is important: my interest is in the discursive processes that have elaborated the Dolezal figure and event as a kind of “trans” in order to parse the “Blackness” held at stake. By focusing on this as a discursive process, I focus my analysis on the effects of the circulation of this “trans-” as put to work to inflect the meaning of Blackness.
My main argument is that the discourses’ dominant application of “trans-” to a space described as race rejects or ignores Black trans feminist theorizations of the relationship between Blackness and transness, and their conceptualization of both. This involves reflection on how the instrumentalization of “trans-” denies it carries its own conceptual history and salience, and also how trans-ing becomes a means by which to elide the specificity of the social construction of Blackness (preferring a more generalized, and so sanitized, vector of identity construction). My primary focus in making this argument, though, is to demonstrate that the discourse’s trans grammar relies on and effects the abstraction of Blackness and transness as overlapping and reciprocally sustaining ontological and conceptual space. This argument develops out of my analysis of the discourse’s trans- terminology and grammars, and how they have been applied to describe or define the Dolezalian figure and event. I first explore the emergence and use of the term “transracial,” in academic discourse via the work of Rogers Brubaker (Reference Brubaker2016a), and in journalistic accounts via the oft-cited Guardian interview with Dolezal by Chris McGreal (Reference McGreal2015). I then consider Rachel Dolezal’s own rejection of “transracial” in preference for “trans-Black.” Through these readings, I argue both terms rely on and reproduce fixed and depoliticized conceptualizations of both transness and Blackness. Ultimately, then, this article finds that the academic institutionalization and popular entrenchment of the trans grammar predominantly circulated in the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourses threatens the metaphysical and conceptual futures made possible by Black trans theory.
1. The lexicon
A shared understanding of some key vocabulary will be necessary for this grammar exercise, most urgently of “trans,” “Black,” and “grammar” itself. My use of all these terms aligns with a body of Black feminist literature emerging in the legacy of Hortense Spillers’s (Reference Spillers1987) vastly influential essay, “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book”. Spillers’s piece is a foundational work in Black feminist theories of racialized gender and Black ontology; in it she argues that the violence of chattel slavery “ungendered” Black enslaved people such that Black folks were and are still excommunicated from the social order. This excommunication can be understood as ontological in effect and discursive in procedure, and Spillers’s concern with the differential application of “the brush of discourse” (Reference Spillers1987, 67) in the production of white (free) bodies and Black (captive) flesh helps clarify her choice of term in “grammar,” which she uses to denote a “symbolic order” (Reference Spillers1987, 68). In its lay meaning, “grammar” describes the structural and systemic properties of a language; “a grammar” is the set of rules through which meaning is produced and shared in any given language. The “grammar” in which I am interested, then, can be understood as naming a set of rules that govern the production of meaning in a symbolic system, which I understand as impactful at both discursive and ontological registers. My naming of this as specifically the “trans grammar” of the transracialism discourses is intended to draw attention to how “transness” is mobilized as a set of commonsense notions and logics that underlie and make sense of the production of knowledge about Blackness in the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse.
It follows, then, that “Blackness” and “transness” as I will be discussing them in this article are conceptualized as emerging, moving, and operating in/via discursive and metaphysical registers: it is vital to establish that I do not treat “Black” and “trans” as a priori or material categories. My conceptualization at the register of discourse references primarily work on representation as a de/constructive site of Blackness (again taking up Spillers Reference Spillers1987, but also notably Stuart Hall Reference Hall1989, Reference Hall, Dines and Jean2003, Reference Hall, Hall, Evans and Nixon2013). This work clarifies my understanding and treatment of the social use and practice of language (as a representational system) as a key site in the production and inhabitation of subject positions and identity categories. I am using “metaphysics” as in the work of “Black metaphysics” to talk about the ontological radicality of Blackness, taking a Black optimist position as associated with Black studies scholars including Fred Moten (Reference Moten2007, Reference Moten2013) and J. Kameron Carter (Reference Carter2013), and Black trans theorists such as Treva Ellison (Reference Ellison2017), Dora Silva Santana (Reference Santana2017, Reference Santana2019), and Marquis Bey (Reference Bey2017, Reference Bey2022). This work identifies Blackness as the exteriority of white-supremacist conditions of being and identifies in this “outsideness” a fugitive potential to disrupt “the grain of the modern world’s ontotheological investment in pure being” (Carter Reference Carter2013, 590). This argument takes up another important tenet of Spillers’s work, in which the social excommunication of Black life creates the possibility of an “insurgent ground” of subjectivity (Reference Spillers1987, 80)—the possibility of an Other way of thinking about embodiment and identity that is not contingent on the hegemonic power structures of this world. For Black trans theorists in this tradition, this fugitivity or insurgency describes both Blackness and transness, which they understand as “differently inflected names for an anoriginal lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a besidedness to ontology” (Bey Reference Bey2017, 278). Following this work, my lexicon articulates both Blackness and transness as para-ontological forces characterized by fugitive movement that holds the potential to disrupt given regimes of being. This understanding of Blackness and transness as in movement supports and helps clarify a further commitment of my Black feminist project, to challenge the naturalness and stability of identity markers, particularly those that are gendered and racialized. Because of this commitment, I do not treat either “Black” or “trans” as fixed or knowable: as put by Black trans theorist C. Riley Snorton, I am more interested in “what insights are yielded in a reading of ‘black’ and ‘trans’ that do not regard these as social markers that are manifestly transparent” (Reference Snorton2017, 7).
The theoretical work on Blackness I use to discuss post-Dolezalian transracialism develops most significantly out of an Anglophone tradition of Black studies.Footnote 4 This is intentional: a grammar is specific to its language, and one cannot expect a grammatical system extracted from one language to translate unproblematically to another and produce statements of any meaning. The post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse emerges out of a specific context of racialization: Rachel Dolezal claimed Blackness in a small town in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America, the texts I analyze in this article are North American and British, and my analysis is inflected by my own social and cultural entanglement with Black Britishness. My discussion of trans grammar as mobilized to inflect the construction of Blackness is thus shaped to reflect this context, whilst recognizing there exist other traditions of critical theories of racialization that might understand the phenomenon and its implications differently.
2. Excavating black trans feminism
In their introduction to 2017 TSQ special issue on Blackness, the editors express a fear that the “commonsense intellectual and political genealogies” (Ellison et al. Reference Ellison, Green, Richardson and Riley Snorton2017, 163) of an institutionalized “trans” discourse will erase the work and presence of Black trans (and) feminist authors. This erasure is read as an active marginalization of Black women’s intellectual labor because, Ellison and their colleagues argue, a Black trans project reveals “transness as always and already theorized and theorizable from the literature on ‘racialized gender’” (Reference Ellison2017, 165). While this history of work is often cited in Black gender and Black trans studies, and despite the influence of this Black feminist tradition on contemporary trans studies, as Black trans theorist Amira Lundy-Harris says, this genealogy “isn’t often characterized as foundational to the field of trans studies” (Reference Lundy-Harris2022, 86). Ellison and colleagues argue this epistemological exclusion reflects a widespread problem in the theorizing of the human and the Anthropocene, fields dominated by “hegemonic imaginaries that position Black people and Black life as ‘ungeographic’ and untimely” (Reference Ellison2017, 164), which is to say as always out-of-place and late to the party (or faculty meeting, if you prefer); more specifically, in the process of trans institutionalization, such imaginaries “[promote] a way of viewing blackness as a belated arrival or addendum to trans studies” (Reference Ellison2017, 164). In addition to naming the problem, the TSQ special issue on Blackness also offers direction as to what it might look like to generatively challenge this epistemological marginalization. Ellison and colleagues are adamant that Black trans studies is not a nascent or derivative theoretical pursuit, its “ever-there-ness” in critical traditions of Black feminist theories of subjectivity is precisely the point. Further still, they stress the importance of excavating “repressed genealogies” (Ellison et al. Reference Ellison, Green, Richardson and Riley Snorton2017, 164) as a Black trans pursuit. The impetus, then, is to draw attention to the Blackness that has always been in trans studies, and vice versa, and the discursive tactics by which this is veiled; failure to do so, we are warned, reproduces the (trans)gendered alienation of Black folk.
To understand why this project of genealogical excavation is so important, it is perhaps necessary to understand what theories of racialized gender have done for Black trans (and) feminist theoretical thought;Footnote 5 the ways in which Black (and) trans liberatory politics have relied on the (discursive and ontological) grammars produced through this work. I spoke above as to the influence of Hortense Spillers’s work on the ontological “distinction … between the body and the flesh” (Reference Spillers1987, 67) as explaining the social excommunication of Black folk from (and via) the gender order. The implications of this argument have been far-reaching and world-breaking. Black non-binary critical theorist Che Gosset has argued that Black trans work engaging with Spillers’s (Reference Spillers1987) concepts of Black flesh and ungendering “critiques the operative terms, categories, and grammar of feminism itself” (Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Brown, Cotten, Gosset, Ridley and Riley Snorton2022, 812). Similarly, Black trans scholar and artist æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil uses Christina Sharpe’s conceptualization of “anagrammatical blackness” (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016, 76) to argue that, when Black and trans meet, “dominant conceptions of transness are then called into question by necessity” in a way that “[requires] us to collectively move some of the dusty furniture and tropes around in (white) trans and Black (cis) studies” (Zhang et al. Reference Zhang, Glover, Kim, Kimoto, Moore, o’neil and Ridley2023, 342).Footnote 6 These writings help clarify that Black feminist work that destabilizes given ontological grammars both allows and necessitates a refiguring of theories of gender and identity that fundamentally shapes what Black trans theory does.
One central implication of these new ontological grammars is a change in orientation to (a re- or disorientation away from) gendered identity categories. Black trans theorists K. Marshall Green and Marquis Bey argue Black feminist work in this tradition views its historical project as challenging “the limitations of the gender binary and [making] us think about how Black cisgender women in particular have always already functioned in excess of that category” (Reference Bey2017, 439). Green and Bey argue Black feminist work in racialised gender “illuminate[s] a major problem with the category ‘woman’” (Reference Bey2017, 439), a project they understand as co-constitutive of “the ways that transgender women force us to consider again how ‘woman’ as a category is a failure” (Reference Bey2017, 441). This is a controversial claim, and with it we are entering contested political waters: transgender theorists such as Talia Bettcher (Reference Bettcher2014), Vivian Namaste (Reference Namaste2000), and Jay Prosser (Reference Prosser1998) have emphatically argued against theories of transness that, in their view, “[locate] transgressive value in that which makes the subject’s real life most unsafe” (Prosser Reference Prosser1998, 275).Footnote 7 More recently, Matthew Cull has critiqued Marquis Bey’s work to argue this kind of trans grammar is a return to “idealist queer theory” (Reference Cull, Hilkje and Johanna2025, 256) that abstracts trans theory from the lives of trans people.
But I would rejoin that to claim the category “woman” fails in myriad ways is not particularly controversial within Black feminism, less so in Black trans feminism, and return with another question: which “trans lives” are we talking about? Speaking in the same roundtable on trans femme of color theory as hollis o’neil (quoted above), Julian Kevon Glover uses Spillers to argue that “Black gender lacks any foundational ‘symbolic integrity’ at all … in ways that still haunt Black gender and its lack of coherence today” (Spillers Reference Spillers1987, 66, quoted in Zhang et al. Reference Zhang, Glover, Kim, Kimoto, Moore, o’neil and Ridley2023, 330). Because the gender order cannot sustain—is built on the exclusion of—Black subjecthood, Glover finds that “investment in protective strategies like gender normativity and respectability” (Zhang et al. Reference Zhang, Glover, Kim, Kimoto, Moore, o’neil and Ridley2023, 330) does not offer safety to Black people. What we need, then, is a counter strategy. Glover (and this body of Black trans work) finds theirs by investing in the fungibility of Black gender, which they argue “might enable Black trans people—specifically Black nonbinary femmes—to evade the cage of identity” (Reference Zhang, Glover, Kim, Kimoto, Moore, o’neil and Ridley2023, 330). Getting out of the cage is the point, and Glover locates this potential of evasion in nonbinary femmeness, also, arguing that “nonbinary femininity’s lack of ontological reality [here drawing on Gill-Peterson and Kadji Reference Gill-Peterson and Kadji2021] accepts that allegiance to gender normativity—and investment in further defining genders—is a fruitless endeavour” (Reference Wiegman2023, 330). Because of this, Glover argues against a trans femme of color theory that seeks to “delineate all the possible manifestations of nonbinary femininity [because] doing so will not guarantee its practitioners a sense of safety”; instead, they argue for practices of being that “[imbue] people with a way to invest in ourselves without appealing to the cage of identity” (Reference Wiegman2023, 330).
Glover’s evocation of captivity and safety returns us to the material conditions of (particularly Black and brown) trans people, and with it I am brought to my strong disagreement with Cull’s (Reference Cull, Hilkje and Johanna2025) assertion that this theory detaches itself from the lives of trans people. Black transfemme scholar Nathan Moore finds through this “trans” dis-orientation from “gender” an understanding of “Black trans-femininity as a space of rupturing, an opening and a pulling apart of the social fabric” (Zhang et al. Reference Zhang, Glover, Kim, Kimoto, Moore, o’neil and Ridley2023, 332) and argues that “working with and through rupture can allow us to begin to name the harm that Black transfeminine subjects face” (Reference Zhang, Glover, Kim, Kimoto, Moore, o’neil and Ridley2023, 333). Working with gender cannot name this harm; the power of a Black trans feminism that “pulls apart the social fabric” and demands a new social order is that it not only speaks of this harm but offers a way to “get outside” it (Bey Reference Bey2020). This “outside” is the target of Glover’s “evasion,” a relationship further clarified by LaVelle Ridley’s Black trans feminist praxis of “imagining otherly” that leaves space for “the possibility of escape to some imagined elsewhere … instead of reveling in the supposed arrival of equality and change” (Reference Ridley2019, 483). This is the space of Black trans feminist hope because, as C. Riley Snorton poetically reminds us, “there are so many forms of collective, political, and life-affirming work that have happened in that seemingly unimaginable place” on the outside of gender (Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Brown, Cotten, Gosset, Ridley and Riley Snorton2022, 816).
So, then, for theorists of this tradition, the asociality of Black/trans “appositional flesh” (Green and Bey Reference Bey2017; Snorton Reference Snorton2017) empowers us to challenge the imposition of all ontological taxonomies through the “refusal of racialized sexism, transantagonism, anti-Blackness, the gender binary, and a range of other identificatory and sociohistorical vectors tied to hierarchical and fatal hegemonic regimes” (Green and Bey Reference Bey2017, 438). This Black (and) trans feminism is interested in the destabilization of all identity categories in pursuit of the possibility of a subjectivity outside of normalizing power structures. I have been persuaded by this project: for me, this genealogy of theorizing Black (and) trans space has become essential for understanding the specifically gendered oppression of Black folks, and also for how it reveals the multiple ways given taxonomies of the human (racialized and gendered) fail. Not only does it illuminate the multiple insufficiencies of the category “woman,” but it brings into relation differently articulated struggles against this category (and the discursive/metaphysical regimes that produce it) and suggests a way forward. Thus committed to this understanding of trans theory as the unraveling of categorical systems, I find this trans grammar to be a highly effective analytical and political tool.
So, setting out on my analysis of the trans grammars that circulate in and make sense of this post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse, I am taking up this refusal of the genealogical exclusion of Black trans (and) feminist theoretical work from the canon of “trans studies.” We will see, though, that it is not much of an excavation; upon starting to dig, we find our ancestral treasures have been removed, the empty space left behind proving a treacherous foundation for the theory built upon it.
3. Transracial
It was neither inevitable nor embedded in the object that the term “transracial” would become so associated with the identity-claim made by Rachel Dolezal. That it did tells us something about how the series of events that unfolded were parsed; it speaks to the logics and principles that structure the symbolic order into and out of which this object emerged. As a term, “transracial” presents a site to think about how the symbol “trans” is put to work in this discourse and what this says about the understanding of transness and Blackness that circulates therein. To approach answers to these questions requires an understanding of how the term as used in the discourse came to prominence, what it is understood to imply, and what that reveals about the object solidifying through this discourse.
3.1 Migrating “trans-”
Rogers Brubaker, whom I introduced above as an early and vocal commentator on post-Dolezalian transracialism, starts his article on “The Dolezal affair” by introducing the most commonly repeated genealogy of the term as used in the post-Dolezalian debates. He says:
The term was deployed largely as a political provocation on the cultural right, intended to embarrass the cultural left for embracing [Caitlyn] Jenner while censuring Dolezal. And it was taken as a provocation by the cultural left, which categorically rejected the “if Jenner, then Dolezal” syllogism and proclaimed that transracial was “not a thing.” (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2016a, 415).
In this account, framing the event through the term “transracial” is already a highly politicized discursive move, drawing on existing assumptions about cultural postures toward identity politics to generate interest and moral outrage. The context for understanding what the term is meant to communicate thus becomes the existence of an ongoing cultural discourse about the validity of transgender identities in which “transracial” is significant as a new talking point, one that is fundamentally entangled with transantagonism. It is, in fact, so reliant on these existing discourses that opinions about “transgender” and “transracial” are assumed to be related, if not indicative, and deviation from projected coherence can be read as hypocrisy. Said otherwise, the grammatical “trans-ing” of the Dolezal incident—the construction of the event as legible through a discursive structure described as transness—in this way inserts it into an existing conceptual and cultural discourse that directs interlocutors on what attachments they might or should form toward it. This context of emergence might explain why a new term so quickly came to prominence in place of something like “racial passing”: “transracial” is a talking point, not simply a description. Understood as such, the term seems to be a direct consequence of, and thus inseparable from, a cultural context in which “trans” identities are highly contentious, overly policed, and, thus, vulnerabilized.
Despite acknowledgment of this inauspicious emergence, Brubaker invests in “transracialism” as the most appropriate term to describe the identity-claim at the centre of the Dolezal affair. This is of note because he does so not solely in acknowledgment of “transracial” as the term that became most associated with Dolezal; Brubaker accepts the symbolic weight of this concept as conditioned by an ongoing cultural discourse plagued by transantagonism precisely because, as I began to explain in the introduction, he understands “the Dolezal affair” as “a new kind of trans moment” (Reference Brubaker2016a, 415). Indeed, a central argument of his paper is for more engagement with the conceptual object of transracialism in this context because he considers it to present a more socially progressive and trans-positive position within this ongoing discourse; he argues “the Dolezal affair” “provides for a more nuanced and reflexive comparative analysis” (Reference Brubaker2016a, 434–35) of gender and race that more effectively challenges hegemonic (violent) taxonomies of embodied identities. In explaining how this happens, Brubaker says that “the Dolezal affair … prompted people to think with trans, not just about trans” (Reference Brubaker2016a, 436). By this, Brubaker means that the construction of “the transgender/transracial analogy” (Reference Brubaker2016a, 438) does something with transness: applying “transgender” as a discursive logic to the theorizing of the Dolezal affair uses transness to produce new knowledge about racial identities, also expanding the conceptual utility of transness. This is more neatly summarized by Brubaker when he says “the Dolezal affair … marked the migration of ‘trans’ from the domain of sex and gender to a much broader domain of public social thought and commentary” (Reference Brubaker2016a, 415).
To be clear, then, Brubaker uses “transracial” in order to create a discursive space in which the same “trans-” of “transgender” is held in play, transported from (in his telling) one limited arena of relevance to a “broader” consideration. It is taken as given in Brubaker’s article that this “trans-” can be cleanly relocated to a discourse about racial identity because of an embedded assumption that it is a contained (meaning with knowable and secure borders) object that can be lifted out of its native environment—“sex/gender”—and settled into a new, analogous environment. This assumption reveals some significant tenets of the trans grammar structuring and making sense of Brubaker’s argument: (1) “trans-” belongs to the domain of “sex/gender”; (2) sex/gender and “race” are analogous environments; (3) “race” is a new environment for transness, which is to say “trans-” does not have existing entanglements with it; and (4) “sex/gender” and “race” are one type of grammatical (discursive or existential) entity, and that “trans-” is something different. Analysed through the genealogy of Black trans feminist scholarship in which I am invested, these assumptions embedded in Brubaker’s trans grammar reveal some troubling implications.
In the first instance, the assertion that the post-Dolezalian transracialism event marks the “migration” of transness to the discursive space of race indicates Brubaker is unfamiliar with—or willfully disengaged from—the rich tradition of Black trans (and) feminist work that theorizes the complexly entwined relationships of Blackness, gender, and transness. In much this vein, Brubaker disregards and speaks over this history of racialized scholarship of trans space (or trans scholarship of racialized space), which is to say a history of Black (predominantly) women and femmes writing about precisely a space (trans/race) that he claims to enter as a pioneer. Brubaker’s trans grammar thus develops through and (re)produces genealogical and epistemological exclusions that participate in and further the invisibilizing of Black trans (and) feminist theorists and theories in the academic institutionalization of “trans” study; it is a literal and unequivocal manifestation of the fear expressed by Ellison et al. (Reference Ellison, Green, Richardson and Riley Snorton2017) as to the curation of a trans(gender) studies canon that erases Black trans (and) feminist history. Given this genealogical myopia, it is perhaps unsurprising that a trans grammar that understands its own coming-together with “race” as novel produces deep conceptual conflict with Black trans definitions of the relationship between transness, race, and Blackness.
Trans scholarship that develops through Black feminist theories of racialized gender has demonstrated “trans-” is already and has always been interested in more than sex and gender, and is explicitly wound up in the processes of racialization (Snorton Reference Snorton2009, Reference Snorton2017; Ellison et al. Reference Ellison, Green, Richardson and Riley Snorton2017; Bey Reference Bey2017, Reference Bey2022; Green and Bey Reference Bey2017; Santana Reference Santana2017, Reference Santana2019; Chaudhry Reference Chaudhry2019; Aiken et al. Reference Aiken, Modi and Polk2020; Lundy-Harris Reference Lundy-Harris2022; Richardson et al. Reference Richardson, Brown, Cotten, Gosset, Ridley and Riley Snorton2022; Zhang et al. Reference Zhang, Glover, Kim, Kimoto, Moore, o’neil and Ridley2023). Indeed, much of this work stresses that “race,” “gender,” and “trans” are fundamentally (ontologically and discursively) entangled: because the production of gender is always racialized and the production of race is always gendered, and because “racialised gender exceeds the boundaries of normativity” (Lundy-Harris Reference Lundy-Harris2022, 87–88), they are already overlapping and blending. To imagine (as Brubaker does) that “trans-” can be moved “from” gender “to” race thus becomes illogical because we understand them as indissociable. Moreover, Brubaker’s assignation of the concepts to different grammatical cases (“trans” to the accusative, “gender” and “race” to the locative) is also imparseable in a Black trans grammar. To be clear, this is not because the three are understood to be the same thing, but rather because they are mapped as traversing the same space. This becomes more starkly true when we turn with intention toward Blackness: Marquis Bey has argued that “Blackness cannot meet trans*-ness; trans*-ness cannot meet blackness … because blackness and trans*-ness [are] different yet intimate primordial kin … they perennially speak with, through, alongside, and back to (or, alternatively, black to) one another” (Reference Bey2017, 276–78). For Bey, both Blackness and transness describe “the outskirts of the order of purity” (Reference Bey2017, 278), which is to say they are both simultaneously the excess of racial and gendered normativity. Then, this history of theoretical work produces an understanding of transness and Blackness as related in ways that exceed normalizing practices of categorization (the implementation of gender and race as ontological orders). A Black trans feminist frame thus cannot parse Brubaker’s trans grammar, in which “trans” is an object native to the domain of “gender” and its relationship to Blackness is mediated by the analogous domain of “race.”
Further still, Brubaker’s trans grammar requires conceptualization of “Blackness”, “gender” and “trans-” as settled categories that move and re/act in predictable ways: “trans-” is a signifier within gender (the boundaries of which do not overlap with race), that can be extracted, relocated, and expected to behave in exactly the same way in its new environment. In stark contrast, the school of Black trans feminist thought in which I am interested insists on an understanding of all three as unsettled, or as in process. How this is in conflict with Brubaker’s grammatical paradigm can be understood through the work of Dora Silva Santana (Reference Santana2017, Reference Santana2019), who uses Black feminist theorizations of racialized gender to think through “how we reassemble the ways we understand racialization of black bodies as gendered, with as many genders as we encounter, but at the same time that blackness also ungenders and is trans-ing bodies” (Reference Santana2019, 218). Santana’s intervention here engages with the complexity of the relationship between Black and (un)gendered embodiment; racialization must always be understood as gendered and occurring constitutively with processes of gendering, but Blackness’s relation to these processes is their unravelling. In this way, the effect of Blackness in processes of gendering, she argues, is already a movement of transing: Santana’s Blackness does ungendering (which might be otherwise translated as undoes gendering),Footnote 8 which is the process of transing. Thus Blackness is not separable from gender, and its (ungendering) effects must always be understood as effecting gendered embodiment as well, which embeds the transing (or transness) of Blackness in the construction of gender and race. The grammatical play in her statement is fun and also on topic: Blackness is the grammatical subject of trans-(ing) and gender (given as verbs, indicating motion, which is to say in process), and the object is the body. We can think, then, of Blackness as the metaphysical actor—not a being, but more like a force—that, when brought into contact with bodies, acts on them by undoing gender—the understanding of this as a force that acts, rather than a property that attaches, also brings attention to the unsettled nature of this Black concept. In some ways, then, all the substantive components of this statement—Blackness, trans, gender, and bodies—are associated with action, movement, and process. This conceptual work again underlines that Black trans feminist theory rejects the objectification of capture of transness and Blackness.
The way Brubaker’s trans grammar conflicts with this trans genealogy reveals a paradox (or contradiction) in his stated theoretical and political commitments: his grammatical structure reveals an assumption as to the fixity and reliability (which is, essentially, the realness) of “gender” and “race,” by which reference points he objectifies transness and Blackness. Thus, though arguing that his work calls for a less rigidly categorized approach to identity politics and a more expansive meaning of trans, he is in fact reifying the boundaries of identities that Black trans feminist work has debunked as natural or neutral. Brubaker’s use of the term, then, can be understood as mobilizing a trans grammar to political effect, with little acknowledgment of or consideration of the implications for Black trans theories and communities.
Brubaker’s article is interesting because he uses “the Dolezal affair” to explicitly and actively produce a “trans-” theoretical intervention—he deliberately engages with questions of trans onto-epistemology and meaning-making; for this reason, it is valuable in thinking about how the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse affects (or effects) the institutionalization of trans theory and study. The article demonstrates that, for some academics interested in theories of identity but otherwise (or to this point) unconcerned with trans theories or politics, the post-Dolezalian transracial concept became an invitation to participate in doing scholarly trans studies; importantly, the stated “newness” of a trans/race space both requires and reproduces the denial of histories of Black trans theorizing, with epistemologically violent implications for the trans grammar produced. But I am interested, also, in the cultural effects of the popular discussion of post-Dolezalian transracialism for lay definitions of transness—to understand this, I turn now to consider how media coverage of the Dolezal affair can be seen to reflect and effect prominently circulating trans grammars of identity in non-academic discourses.
3.2 Trans kinematics
In December 2015, major UK newspaper The Guardian published an extended interview with Rachel Dolezal conducted by journalist Chris McGreal. The article is notable amongst media coverage of the case at the time in that it approaches the question of Dolezal’s identity claim with curiosity, staking no particular investment in the veracity or political effects of her “transracialism”: this is important because McGreal’s commentary can be seen as trying to understand (or produce an understanding of) this “transracial” event.Footnote 9 It is of further interest because it shares a framework for parsing “transracialism” that circulates prominently in the popular media discourse of transracialism.
In explaining the context of the Dolezal case, McGreal identifies the same genealogy of the term “transracial” as Brubaker: “Some drew parallels with those who have changed sexual identity, such as Caitlyn Jenner. Dolezal doesn’t see it—she rejects the idea that she is a black person in a white person’s body—and spurns the concept of ‘transracial’.” (McGreal Reference McGreal2015). McGreal does not say transgender here (although he does several paragraphs later), however the invocation of Caitlyn Jenner makes apparent that to which he is alluding. It is important to name that McGreal’s referent is “transgender” because embedded in his descriptive phrase is a definition: his statement produces a definition of “transgender” as meaning “changing sexual identity”, which is at best confusing but more likely just inaccurate.Footnote 10 Of further interest, this definition is not given as an intervention, but rather as a kind of commonsense knowledge—an unremarkable fact—so uncontentious that it can be relied on as the basis of new knowledge. More specifically, McGreal’s offered “understanding” of what transgender means is deployed to clarify and support the meaning (or conceptualization) of “transracial” with which McGreal is operating: McGreal says “those who have changed sexual identity” to describe transgender people, and then offers some further clarification by immediately following this saying Dolezal “rejects the idea that she is a black person in a white person’s body.” From this, I deduce that McGreal’s understanding of “transgender” is that it describes a person stuck in the wrong “sexual” body—meaning a female/male person in a male/female person’s body—who then changes their identity to align with the body in which they believe they ought to be. It is unclear whether changing the body is also necessary for changing identity.
Immediately, the naturalized assumptions about transness embedded in McGreal’s statement provoke two points of concern for Black (and) trans feminist scholars. First, we see McGreal’s ascription to the “wrong-body” narrative of transness, which has been criticized by some trans theorists as constructing transness still through the gender binary (further supported by McGreal’s slippage between sex and gender), simultaneously reaffirming the binary and resultantly framing transness as always pathological and maladaptive (Bettcher Reference Bettcher2014).Footnote 11 Similarly, McGreal’s invocation of “a Black person in a white person’s body” demonstrates a conceptualization of racial identities as binary, performing a revisionist reading of racially ambivalent bodies that refuses their disruptive potential, rather reasserting the sufficiency of existing systems of racial categorization (Ahmed Reference Ahmed and Heidi1997, Reference Ahmed1999). Secondly, McGreal creates an equivalence between race and sex—not gender, but explicitly sex and, at the very least, a misnamed conceptualization of gender that is tied to sexFootnote 12 —through a suggestion of what it might mean to “trans” them. As such, the accepted transportability of “trans-” here actually becomes the vehicle through which to make assumptions about the nature of and relationship between embodied identities, explicitly sex/gender and “race”; they are naturalized as separate, knowable, and stable bodily properties, their susceptibility to being similarly “trans-”ed reifying their alikeness and discreteness. Much like Brubaker’s mobilization, then, McGreal’s use of the term can be understood as a grammatical co-optation of “trans-” that effects and embeds related and codified systems of social and embodied categorizations, specifically of Blackness and (trans)gender.
The conceptual implications of a trans grammar that reinvests in the facticity of existing gendered and racial categorizations (only altering the mode of application, without demanding new paradigms of subjecthood) for the possibilities of trans (theoretical) futures are demonstrated even within McGreal’s article. They are seen perhaps most clearly in the kinematics (the geometry of motion) of “trans-” in this imaginary. McGreal notes that Rachel Dolezal has “spurned the concept of transracialism” and it is certainly true that, in the months following her “outing,” Dolezal explicitly and repeatedly stated in interviews that she rejected the term. Dolezal has given a number of reasons why she does not like “transracial” (as I will explore in more detail in the next section), but in the article McGreal takes particular exception to her explanation that “‘I don’t like it because I don’t believe in race. To say “transracial” further entrenches that idea,’ she [Dolezal] says” (McGreal Reference McGreal2015). Dolezal’s declaration that she “doesn’t believe in race” causes a point of conceptual dissonance for McGreal, who retorts that “race was real enough for her to call herself black” (Reference McGreal2015). In McGreal’s framework, for Dolezal to claim a Black identity while denying the reality of “race” as a category is an inconsistency, perhaps even a hypocrisy. His cynicism is, I believe, because the trans- grammar (or kinematics) he employs is unable to parse this statement (or track this movement), and this limitation can be unpicked to reveal some wider conceptual implications of the commonsense definition of transness circulating here.
I argued above that McGreal presents an understanding of transgender as indicating a linear change from one “sexual” identity to another, which is then commuted to his articulation of “transracial” as a Black person stuck in a white person’s body. In this rubric, “trans-” indicates a monoplanar, discrete movement that is determined and contained by the normative boundaries of the given categories of Gender and (enter Dolezal) Race. This theorization of trans kinematics severely curtails the possible paths of trans-motion; it continues to rely on and reproduce understandings of racial identities as limited and discrete and confines “transness” to a journey between them like a train on tracks, thus leaving the category of Race (and structures of racial subjectivation) untroubled. McGreal rejects Dolezal’s rejection of “transracial” because, within the limitations of his framework, Dolezal must be invested in Race to do what she has done, which is “change racial identity” wherein the possibilities of “change” are contained to “swap.”
The problematics that arise from a monoplanar kinematics of trans- are explored in the work of Black trans feminists who have campaigned for a conceptualization of trans- movement that is far more unruly and expansive. In exploring her own definition of trans-, Dora Silva Santana has said that “the trans- that best suits me is the one from transatlantic, a travessia, the crossing” (Reference Santana2017, 183); this invocation of “transatlantic crossing” comes from Black lesbian scholar M. Jacqui Alexander, for whom it “evokes/invokes crossroads, the space of convergence and endless possibility” (Reference Alexander2005, 8). Santana claims her “trans-” in response to Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa J. Moore’s (Reference Stryker, Currah and Jean Moore2008) invitation for “trans” subjects to identify with whatever kind of “trans” they feel most comfortable in; this is a move to deconstruct some of the rigid categorical boundaries that have grown up around trans. Following the work of Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2006) on orientation, the call encourages a differently organized, multiplanar spatiality of “trans” that confounds horizontal containment. We can understand the meaning of “horizontal” here through Santana’s explanation that “trans- as crossing becomes a space of simultaneities, whose orientation is other than just horizontal … the illusion of horizontality contrasts with the shape-shifting, leaking, bleeding, in-corpo-rating” (Reference Santana2017, 183) that is both Black and trans embodiment. Santana’s investment is in movement, and this movement creates the circumstances of possibility for simultaneity; for being both one thing and another, which might also be thought of as being otherwise to those who easily occupy the horizontal delineations. Then, this anti-horizontality indicates an escape from the confinement of normative categorization, making possible an entirely different relation to ontological space. It is precisely by escaping the limitations of horizontality that transness exceeds—and so shatters—the illusion of categorical salience; transness as erratic, multiplanar movement is that which disrupts the given boundaries of Gender and Race and finds otherwise possibilities. Confined by horizontality, McGreal’s construction of trans- relies on the reification of Race and Gender because it is structured by them, thus transness must remain within their boundaries.
My study of both Brubaker and McGreal demonstrates that this “transracial” terminology is invested in and defined by a conceptualization of transness that has been abstracted from its relation to Blackness. I find this “trans-” imaginary to be, as a direct result of this, tied to hegemonic and static definitions of gender and race, and incapable of imagining a different relation to ontology, which is to say inhospitable to the possibility of Black (and) trans becoming.
4. Or, trans-black
I want to return to Dolezal’s explanation for her dislike of the term “transracial”; specifically, her claim that “transracial further entrenches the idea of race.” The intention here is to explain her own understanding of, and identification within, discourses of race, but, in doing so, Dolezal (perhaps inadvertently) invokes a certain “trans-” grammar to produce sense in her statement. Specifically, Dolezal seems to be arguing that one cannot “trans” something to disrupt the category; in some ways, then, “trans-ing” a category must make it more real. I would argue this is because Dolezal understands trans- as a function of, or a location in, that which comes after it; as a subtype of that which it prefixes. My reading is supported by Dolezal’s own articulation of how she might label her identity, discussed mostly in interviews from 2017 whilst doing press for her ghost-written autobiography (Dolezal and Reback Reference Dolezal and Reback2017). In one such interview, conducted by journalist Decca Aitkenhead and published in The Guardian, Dolezal explains.
I feel like the idea of being trans-black would be much more accurate than “I’m white”. Because you know, I’m not white. There is a black side and a white side on all kinds of issues, whether it’s political, social, cultural. There’s a perspective, there’s a mentality, there’s a culture. To say that I’m black is to say, this is how I see the world, this is the philosophy, the history, this is what I love and what I honour. Calling myself black feels more accurate than saying I’m white. (Rachel Dolezal, quoted in Aitkenhead Reference Aitkenhead2017).
We see here that Dolezal embraces “trans-” grammar when applied to Black rather than racial/race, suggesting for her there is a crucial difference between the effect of trans-ing Blackness and trans-ing race. This difference is clarified by her explanation for why she can embrace “trans-black”; for her, “trans-black” she means that she inhabits “a perspective, a mentality, a culture” that she identifies as the “Black side” to “political, social, and cultural” issues. What Dolezal really offers here is a fixed and reductive definition of Black identity, and the effect of her trans-ing is that it locates her in that Blackness: she is on the Black side because she is “trans-black.” The conceptualization she gives reduces Blackness to a set of opinions and cultural norms, a kind of stereotyping that Black feminist, queer, and trans scholars have argued limits Black imaginaries, homogenizes Black people, and excludes marginalized Black identities (Johnson Reference Johnson2003; Wright Reference Wright2015; Snorton Reference Snorton2017). If she views, as I have suggested she does, “trans-” as a location within given identity categories, her explanation of why she is “trans-black” requires a knowable, normalizing, and policeable conceptualization of Blackness: it participates in the fixing of Blackness.Footnote 13
This fixing is further enacted through Dolezal not addressing the meaning or effect of “trans-” in this identity. She leaves it as a contentless qualifier to the Blackness she seeks to claim, in which way it becomes an adjunct to her Blackness, which she has already described (as a side, perspective, mentality, culture); with no implication of its own, the only effect of this trans-ing is to facilitate her claim to the given identity position of “black.” This is starkly different to the Black trans feminist conceptualization of transness as a fugitive force that deconstructs and disrupts ontology (Ellison Reference Ellison2017; Green and Bey Reference Bey2017; Santana Reference Santana2017; Bey Reference Bey2022). The “trans” of Dolezal’s trans-black is not an identity, a force, and certainly is not a disruption of our given orders of ontology; it is barely afforded the status of a concept. It is perhaps best thought of as a door that has provided Dolezal access to “Blackness.” This conceptualization of “trans-” as an entry point to an identity actually supports the imagination of both transness and Blackness seen in the McGreal article above; it is arguably more restrictive, as Dolezal does not conceptualize “trans-” as indicating a change (and thus as a thing in movement), but simply gives it as the qualifier that makes her claim to Blackness acceptable. Further, Blackness itself is rendered motionless; for Dolezal’s “trans-black” to be coherent, there must be a location of Blackness that the doorway of “trans” can let her into. This spatial analogy of Dolezal’s trans- grammar can be contrasted with that offered by Dora Silva Santana; returning to her conceptualization of “trans-” (as discussed above), she has said this is of “transitioning instead of transition because I want to convey the continuum motion of resisting systematic oppression through embodied knowledge” (Reference Dolezal and Reback2017, 183). She clarifies that these terms are not oppositional because “‘I’ve transitioned’ may consist of a chosen point of departure within the continuum of ‘I’m transitioning’” (Reference Dolezal and Reback2017, 183). This grammatical wordplay further emphasizes the non-linear, evasive, and creative nature of such a mode of being. Santana’s conceptualization is fundamentally concerned with flux and instability, which is in itself a mode of resistance against power structures that are built on Black and trans captivity. To imagine Blackness as static, and spatially fix trans- as a point within in it, is to suffocate resistance in both by subjecting them to the laws of the power that terrorizes them.
In this way, directly conflicting with Black trans feminist conceptual interventions in ontological stability, Dolezal’s “trans-” effectively sidesteps the need to query what transness does, and what Blackness is (or is doing), and where either might be, because both are fixed in their relation to the other, coalescing at her identification as Black. And this is, I believe, exactly the point. In the below, taken from another of Dolezal’s 2017 interviews, she further elaborates her preference for “trans-black”:
Int: I know last time, I think the term transracial, trans-Black was discussed. How do you define—do those terms come into the way you define yourself?
RD: Absolutely, I think there are too few people—we don’t have the vocabulary to express racial fluidity. But I do like the term trans-Black that Melissa Harris Perry suggested because it does kinda cover the “I wasn’t born this way but this is who I really am” component. But “transracial” it almost sounds like I’m neutral, and I’m not neutral on political and social issues. (Payne Reference Payne2017).
In this description, trans-ing is a means by which to reify her attachment to Blackness, making it possible to articulate “who she really is.” With this definition of trans-, it would make little sense to claim to be “transracial” as one cannot “really be” race. That she believes “transracial” sounds neutral is further explicatory: She seems to understand “race” as inviting a question mark as to what she is but, more importantly, what she might think. And she knows what she thinks; she is on the “Black side,” which is what makes her “trans-black.” I suggest Dolezal claims “trans-black” precisely because “transracial” raises this moment of uncertainty, this space of doubt, which requires a more explicit confrontation with the questions of what it means to inhabit an identity, and what it means to navigate racialized space. And I would argue this is not neutral—not politically, and certainly not conceptually—because here is the space in which something might move. If “trans-black” conveys “this is who I really am,” to Dolezal “transracial” conveys “I am wandering around racialized space”; this “transracial” is not an arrival but rather announces a journey, and Dolezal’s “trans-” is not interested in moving, or in plotting a course. Rachel Dolezal has seen what she thinks “Blackness” is, and she wants to locate herself in it. For this reason, she is not concerned with—is, perhaps, actively threatened by—what troubles racial binaries and fundamentally questions the assumptions on which racial categorizations are built. This does not require a theorization of race, though it does house a conceptualization of Blackness (a deeply uncritical one). Again, this is further supported by her defining “trans-Black” as follows:
Int: So trans-Black would be one way to describe—
RD: Right, if I was allowed a more complex term, I would say I’m a pan-African, pro-Black, bisexual, mother, activist, artist, you know that’s like too long. So trans-Black is quicker. (Payne Reference Payne2017).
Here, it is made most explicit that for Dolezal, trans-black is simply a shorthand. Her wish is that it conveys “I am Black,” and to more quickly shut down the conversation that asks what that means. As argued through the theoretical work of this section, I believe the function of this reduction and appropriation of trans- grammar is to limit and fix Blackness, with the conceptual status of transness sacrificed as collateral damage.
5. Black trans feminism, trans grammars, and the abstraction of blackness
This article is about grammars, meaning my site of analysis has been the logics, structures, and formations that hold together the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse. More specifically, I have been interested in trans- grammars, which I offer as a framing to think through the ways in which this discourse uses “trans-” to parse post-Dolezalian transracialism and its identity implications. Fundamentally, then, the analytical work approaches an understanding of the meaning of “trans-” at work in the construction of the figure and event of post-Dolezalian transracialism, and specifically how this transness understands its (conceptual and ontological) relationship to Blackness. I have suggested that these trans grammars can and should be understood as part of the institutionalization (which is to say the academic and cultural capture) of “transgender”, a process that Black trans feminists have argued is effecting the abstraction of racialization as foundational to the production of gender. It was with the intention of demonstrating how this happens and what the implications of its happening are that I have interrogated the emergence, negotiation, and sedimentation of “trans-” terminology in the post-Dolezalian transracialism debates. Ultimately, I built an argument that the dominant trans grammars end up articulating a conceptualization of Blackness and transness that is unrecognizable to Black trans (and) feminist theoretical work.
Of my chosen sites of analysis, the scholarly work of Rogers Brubaker is perhaps more readily identifiable as participating in the circulation of these critiqued assumptions about the relationship between transness and Blackness. Brubaker explicitly claims to be “migrating” transness to new theoretical grounds in his scholarly engagement with transracialism, which, reflecting on the Black trans (and) feminist theories of racialized gender that I introduced to contextualize the analysis, we can understand in a rather straightforward way as genealogical exclusion and epistemological erasure. But I have argued, too, that it is important to understand the lay theorizing of McGreal and Dolezal herself (as illustrative examples of the trans grammars circulating in Anglo-American popular discourses of Black and trans identities) as also reflecting—produced by and reproducing of—the normalization of a trans grammar that denies its relation to the Blackness of (un)gendered space. Further still, the ease with which such grammars are put to use as commonsense knowledges within the popular post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse suggests (Black) trans study needs to approach the site as in need of urgent critique, toward disturbing further their naturalization.
By analysing these sites, I found that the emergence of the term “transracial” is marred by associations with trans-antagonism, and that its common usage exposes a biological and binaristic understanding of gender, which in turn is used to frame a similarly biological and discrete understanding of race. By exploring Dolezal’s own rejection of the term in favor of “trans-black”, I argued she too participates in the conceptual and political emptying of “trans-” in order to effect a fixed definition of Blackness. Through and across these analyses, I have argued that the understandings of Blackness and transness these dominant trans grammars construct sit in direct conflict with the trans grammar of Black trans theory. I have used these analyses to explore how rejection of and inattention to Black trans (and) feminist theorizations of trans space in the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse’s dominant trans grammars directly results in the reproduction of deficient conceptualizations of both Blackness and transness, which produce understandings of trans and Black identities as a priori and immutable; this I have contrasted with the emphasis put on anti-stasis and unknowability in Black trans theory as a way of articulating routes by which Black (and) trans folk might escape the tyrannies of metaphysical capture. Most importantly, then, my analysis uses the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse as a case study that illustrates how the sedimentation and institutionalization of a “trans” theory, concept, and grammar in our academic and popular discourses that is not explicitly and substantively informed by Black trans (and) feminist theory threatens to produce “trans-” theory as a site of subjection for Blackness, and most specifically Black gender non-conforming folk (which is, I might argue, to say all Black folk).
Finally, then, I suggest that the predominant trans grammar of the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse participates in the deradicalization of both Blackness and transness, and the erasure of Black (and) trans subjects from these locations. This case offers an important opportunity to think about the kinds of trans philosophies entering popular and academic discourses in the process of trans(gender) institutionalization. If Black, feminist, and trans scholars are to engage more with the object of transracialism (as I have argued elsewhere we should: Mortlock Reference Mortlock2025), then this study stresses the importance of critical mixed-race theorist Molly Littlewood McKibbin’s call “to think critically about how we are talking about transrace and how we might best theorize it going forward” (Reference McKibbin2021, 3). If not, “transracial” entering trans conceptual space may prove to be reliant on the ejection of Blackness.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to my mentors and friends Marquis Bey and Aisha Phoenix for their support and advice in the preparation of this article; both gave rigorous feedback and patient reassurance, without which I could have (might have) lost faith in its value. Thank you to the reviewers and Hypatia editors whose labor has enabled the development of this article. I also want to thank to the editors of the APA Studies on Feminism and Philosophy special issue on “Trans Philosophy” for their encouragement on an earlier iteration of this piece.
Alanah E. Mortlock is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London. She completed her ESRC-funded PhD at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Sciences. Her research interests include Black (and) trans feminisms; theories and critiques of identity; Black metaphysics; and feminist epistemologies and methodologies.
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