There was a time when people were similarly flabbergasted about the notion of transgender, and wondered how it worked, what it looked like, how they could ever make any kind of sense of it, etc...

>the other idea of being born in a race that isn't correct or
>wanting to change race i don't understand because i don't know
>what its based on
>is it a feeling that the person should have been born a
>different race and that person spends their life knowing they
>should have been asian/white/black/italian whatever?
>is there some inherent discomfort that plagues them that
>drives them to attempt to change their race?
>is there such thing as changing your race (i.e. racial
>reconstructive surgery)?
>i'm not trying to get anyone to prove or validate anything to
>me personally
>i'm just trying to understand the parallel of transgender and
>transracial
>if there is one

All valid questions - and a larger discussion should be had on this. Where we have traditionally encountered the concept of 'transrace' is with somebody like Tiger Woods, who chooses to identify with a certain percentage of his ethnic makeup moreso than other percentages. This is something that so called "interracial" people experience all of the time, and they often choose to identify with what's easiest and most accepted by general society.

But when they don't accept what's easiest and most accepted by general society, there is an immediate rush to judgment and an incredulous tone. However, what makes this discussion interesting is that we all (well, most of us) accept that race is an illusory construct, as such, it's a malleable concept that evolves as cultural norms do. The parallel is that we often refer to race as skin-tone as we do gender to sexual equipment/genitalia -- but just as that sexual equipment sometimes doesn't accurately reflect who the person feels like they are possessing that sexual equipment, a particular skin-tone (identified as 'race') may not accurately reflect who that particular person feels that they are. Why would people feel like this? Perhaps because the human lineage dates back thousands and thousands of years whereby our DNA is literally comprised of a myriad of ethnicities and "races" - such that the notion of identifying just as one becomes wholly limiting for some people.


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