Plot Armor in Clown World

Race and Gender are totally obviously different things, clearly. Obviously.

Jesse Signal recently posted a short consideration of an NBC News article entitled, “Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race.” The article itself is a prime example of a recent phenomenon that I like to call “articles that should never have been written on thoughts that should have never been had on subjects that should have never been considered by people who should have never been interviewed.” It’s the sort of thing that gets noticed in this carnival of absurdity we find ourselves in right now, in which an internet full of outrageous things requires not so much reporting on but a mere collation of its strangeness.

I Have To Admit I Still Don't Fully Understand Why You Can't Change Your Race

The behaviors of the subjects of this article are indeed strange, some of whom listen to subliminal recordings as they sleep that promise to make them more Korean by the time they awake (not just in sensibility but in skin tone, hair color, and eye shape as well). Yet I must say I am somehow not as surprised to hear this as I would have been about eight years ago, which is the last time I remember the world not treating the stupid thoughts and social stratagems of 15 year olds as something that was newsworthy, but rather as something that should be rightly waited out until said 15 year old goes to college and receives the appropriate course correction from their peers on their weird habits until they finally relent and tuck them away, never to be spoken of again.

But Signal points out the meta-strangeness of this article, or what should be considered strangeness outside of the intellectual regime we’re currently living in, in which the logical framework presented as to why this sort of thing (changing your race) is bizarre, while a nearly identical logical framework (changing your gender) is treated as a matter so self-evidently obvious that it is a matter of anguishing tedium to even drag out the “experts” needed to explain it. But the logic doesn’t work, and it never does.

I remember a conversation on this topic I had about four years ago with my friend group of casual “RBG is a living saint” liberal sensibilities, and was shocked at their responses. Because I love social torture, I speculated out loud about the fact that there must be some pained reckoning on the horizon regarding race, as the “rules of engagement” for gender mutability were perfectly setting the stage for the same standards to be applied to race. By that time, Rachel Dolezal was a household name, and I mused that - despite her being widely mocked and even reviled - I could not readily see anything that she had done that was out of bounds regarding gender.

I suspected these friends would be more open to at least discussing the nuance of this “inconsistency” with me, but because it was four years ago I did not yet fully understand that the power of their anxiety to ideologically conform was strong enough to extend beyond their workplaces, and that they would tow the party line with me as if HR was remotely monitoring them (this since has been a source of great sadness for me, as many of my friends - even libs - who used to be more playful and adventurous with ideas have since receded into shells of rigidity for fear of falling out of step and being branded a heretic, even if their heretical thoughts were aired to me, alone, in their living room).

Their initial rebuke was as dismissive as it was mocking, and they almost laugh at how I could possibly compare the two. Did I not see how those things were so “completely” different?? No, I could not. On almost every parameter, I could not. Any arguments listed as to why these two things are different can be rejected out of hand. You could, for example, say that gender is “performative,” and that race is based in biology. This is obviously absurd, as the biological differences between gender dwarf the near-negligible differences between races of people. You could concoct something about power, how “becoming black” would be co-opting or fetishizing a disempowered group. But by this standard, is this not happening with men transitioning into womanhood? And if we’re going to talk “fetishization,” wouldn’t that accusation be far more readily applied into a transformation that involves our no-no parts?

Go down the line and it is hard to see how transitioning one’s race is in almost every way parallel to transitioning one’s gender, except that perhaps the argument for racial fluidity is much stronger considering the extremely clear spectrum of race that has existed since the settlements of the many historical diasporas began firming up into “peoples.” This is the real, actual, empirically observable stuff that made the many campaigns of my life to end racism so damn meaningful. Because you could see with your own eyes how Russian + Chinese = Mongolian. You could very easily see how arbitrary circumstances lead to arbitrary outcomes of growth and development between peoples of different areas, and for them to be punished was ridiculous and mean and unreasonable and often horrifying. It has always been clear to me how the only people who actually justified racism, sexism, or any of the -isms was clouded by hate, prejudice, or money.

But now we are all asked to see what we cannot see, to understand what is not so readily sensible to our sensibilities. I’m not saying that our understanding of human nature cannot evolve, nor do I wish to live in a world in which people cannot change their values and paradigms to match the logical constraints of the reality we find ourselves within. That is the heart of progress. But logical constraints have always been the heart of the progress I sought, and so it is harder for me to believe in a version of progress when the only constraint is a sort of emotional contagion.

I decided to go for broke in that conversation with my friends, dig into them so long and hard that I didn’t get invited to the next birthday party. And as I dug further and further down into the reasons why changing your race is not the same as your gender is a rationale I am hearing far too often these days:

“No.”

It’s not exactly that simple, of course, but at the root of their objections was essentially this. A negation. A refusal to deal with my thought-experiment. An objection to me not because what I was saying was wrong, but because it simply “smelled” wrong. It is not that they could not apply the simple logic I was applying, but that they had already applied their logic to another thought experiment, which is “what happens if I don’t treat race as a sacred cow?” The answer to that was too fear-inducing for them to find out. And so, they simply say no.

They have continued to say no, though now with more fervor and more faith. More dismissal of anyone who might think differently. Why is this? Because they know they have plot armor. The volleys of rhetorical shots levied against their beliefs find no purchase, like bullets against the protagonist of an 80s action movie. Or any movie, really. Even Barbie has plot armor, I’m sure. Speaking of - isn’t it strange that Barbie is still Barbie when she is a different color, but when she is a different gender she is named Ken? Makes you think. Or actually, it makes you not think.

It is scary when a regime can twist the thoughts of a people. It is even scarier when a regime can turn off thoughts altogether.

Free Rachel Dolezal.

Clown in Cubist Costume, Sergey Chekhonin