When I was still in school, we had a politically incorrect slang for white kids who acted black. The word was 'wigger.' I'll let you figure out its etymology. I'm not sure if the term is still popular with the kids today or not.

Wiggers were attracted to aspects of the overwhelmingly black hip-hop and rap subcultures. Like teenagers do, they emulated their heroes obsessively, down to the finest detail available to them. They talked the talk. They smoked the ganja. They drank malt liquor. They wore clothes designed for fat people. They chilled and kept it real and were as ghetto fabulous as you can be—in the clean, virtually crime free, air-conditioned food court of an upscale suburban shopping mall.

I think there are still kids like this. Or at least I still see skinny pimply faced white kids hobbling across the street because they can't keep their XXL pants up.

These kids identified with black people and emulated black people. But they had no idea what it meant to be black.

Do corn rows make you black?

How about a gold tooth? Or does it take a full “grille?”

Are you black if black people let you hang out with them and seem to accept you as “one of their own?”

Of course not.

Wiggers were almost universally regarded as ridiculous posers.

No matter what they did—no matter how many rap lyrics they memorized, no matter how many black “homies” they had, no matter how often they vandalized property (see “tagging” or “graffiti”), no matter how many Newports they smoked or how much ball they played—these white kids were never really going to be black or really even have any idea about what it meant to be black.

Their perception of “blackness” was caricatured, clownish, fetishistic, even offensive.

But even if they had been able to medically change their skin color and get extensive plastic surgery, would they ever really be black?

No. They'd be suburban white kids who were so self-loathing, who became so obsessed with the idea of being black, that they mutilated their bodies in a futile effort to become black. As a society, we collectively write off the “blackness” and “ghetto fabulousness” of white kids as goofy misguided posery and hope they'll grow out of it.

As a white guy, I can tell you I don't know a damn thing about what it means to be a black man. Because I can never really have that total life experience. If we accept that a progression of life experiences and perceptions have a meaningful and cumulative impact on adult psychology beginning at a very early age, which is both logical and obvious, how could we rationally overlook that and reduce something as meaningful as race—or sex—to something that anyone can simply “choose” at any moment with the assistance of surgery and designer drugs?

Isn't that kind of crass?

Doesn't that devalue the black experience—doesn't it reduce “blackness” to little more than a fashion choice?

Why shouldn't black people find that both patronizing and offensive?

There's a difference between wanting to be something because it appeals to you, and being that thing without having been offered a choice.

There are physical components to race beyond the deceptively simple identifier of "skin pigment," some of which may, in and of themselves, have some impact on what it really means to be of a particular race. This is a taboo discussion, and something I'd like to see explored honestly and openly, but not a discussion I know enough about personally to weigh in on. I'm inclined to think that where racial differences exist they are slight but perhaps significant when speaking generally on a very broad scale.

That said, it is clear that sex actually has a far more profound effect on human psychology. There are hormonal differences between men and women that affect the way individuals see the world not simply at a given time, but throughout their lives. There are experiences directly connected to very significant differences in biology. There is some evidence to suggest that mens and women's brains functions differently. All of that plays into the experience of being male or female, in addition to the experiences humans have relating to one another in their male and female bodies.

I can't seem to log on to the Internet or pass a TV these days without hearing about the latest sideshow – “The Pregnant Man.”

I am referring, in case you've been held hostage with a black bag over your head for the past few weeks, to the case of Thomas Beattie, “transgendered male.”⁽¹⁾

“Pregnant Man” is a sci-fi headline, but the reality is far less fantastic.

In actuality, the "pregnant man" is something old school carnival barker would recognize as a knocked up “bearded lady.” What we have is woman who took some hormones and cut off her breasts for effect, and then decided to go to a sperm bank and get pregnant. This completely delusional and self-involved woman then wrote a letter to a gay magazine complaining that people looked at her funny and made fun of her, and crying “discrimination!” because some health care professionals had ethical issues with the situation and refused to assist her. But someone finally did help her.

I'm admittedly not a fan of same-sex parenting or adoption, except in rare next-of-kin situations. But that's a complex issue which is outside the scope of this essay.

What I take issue with, in this case, is not so much the pregnancy itself, but this woman's claim that she is a man--even as she exposes herself as a typical lesbian who employs typical feminist jargon. She is a woman who decided to pass herself off as a man, but who kept her “reproductive rights” as a woman. What man has the “reproductive right” to give birth to a child?

Not a one.

Definitions are by nature discriminatory. The ability to carry a child is one of the defining qualities of womanhood, and one of the things men can never experience. The fact that some women can't carry a child is irrelevant. That's like saying red ants aren't really red ants because some are albino. Part of being a man is never really being able to fully comprehend that aspect of human existence in the first person, and experiencing life as someone who will never give birth. There's a great scene in the film The Witches of Eastwick where Jack Nicholson marvels over women's ability to give birth, because even though, as the Devil, he can do almost anything--he can't do that. Childbirth is an aspect of womanhood that is mysterious and alien to men. Just as I know absolutely nothing about what it really means to be a black man, I know even less about what it means to be a pregnant woman, or to be a woman who could conceivably get pregnant. I know nothing of the social or medical concerns that come with the ownership and maintenance of a functioning female reproductive system.

And frankly, I don't ever want to know.

I was born male. I grew up male. I've been male my whole life. Being male is an essential part of who I am and I have never once seriously entertained a desire to be female or to know what it is to be female.

But being a man is not all beer, BBQs and football.

And it means more than having to shave. Or simply not having tits. Or being treated like “one of the boys.” There's more to being a man than just “passing” as one.

It is sure as Hell not something you can get with a few injections or even surgery.

Being a man is not something you can fucking buy.

Talk about crass, patronizing, minimizing, offensive and insulting!

As I wrote in Androphilia, being a man is an experience. While I don't buy into the gender studies catechism that reduces virtually all extant perceptions of gender to mere social constructions, I think we could agree that males undoubtedly go through a complex socialization process throughout boyhood and throughout their lives which exerts a profound influence on their individual psychology. I think we could agree that males experience different social pressures and are subject to a different set of expectations than females. Each male has to negotiate these different expectations and pressures as an individual and struggle for (or accept) his position in a wide range of different male hierarchies throughout his life. Males have different relationships with their fathers, their mothers, their male peers and their female peers simply as a result of being male. Whether a man consciously places importance on his experience of maleness or not doesn't really matter. It's a fundamental and inextricable part of his personality that shapes the way he sees the world and relates to it.

To say that someone can simply “feel” male and become a man overnight--or even over the course of a few years--trivializes the experience of maleness. The best a woman can do is become a believable caricature of a man, who “passes.” Passing is not being. Postmodern fantasy only creates reality over a cup of free-trade organic coffee. And why would we reward this woman with the title "man" based almost solely on her ability to deceive us into thinking she is one.

If I were to darken my skin, and “pass” as black, and then claim to be be a black man doing anything, real black people everywhere—black people who were born black and have only ever experienced life as black people—would have every right to be disgusted and to dismiss my claims completely. If I were to claim to be the first black man to do anything, I have no doubt that whites and blacks alike would universally denounce me as a fraud and a nut. And I'd deserve it.

I believe that everyone should have a right to do just about anything they want to their own bodies. When it comes to things that only affect the consenting adult(s) involved, I don't have a problem living in a world wherein just about “everything is permitted.” But freedom does not entitle anyone to have every eccentricity enabled, humored, supported, applauded or encouraged.

As humans, we are all amateur social psychologists. We all have extensive experience in dealing with each other. I don't have to defer to liberal psychologists and therapists who have their own biases and interests to serve. We do have a right, both as a society and as individuals, to separate the reasonable from the absurd. It is time for society to stop passively participating in the postmodern project of rendering everything meaningless.

This woman is not a man simply because she says so, or because her enablers say so, or because she's managed to get some paperwork to “prove” that she's a man. She's having a baby, for crying out loud. Her claim to manhood, no matter how often she “passes,” or how much support she receives form her enablers, is an exercise in absurdity that relies entirely on a model of gender grounded not in history or science, but in feminist and postmodern theory. Rather than accept the fact that she's a mannish woman and work with the cards she was dealt—like the rest of us have to—she's become so delusional that she somehow believes she really is man and was somehow meant to be a man. (Meant by whom?)

Science doesn't know nearly enough about the human brain or gender differences to even begin to validate a claim like that. Why are we so ready to accept whatever she says about herself at face value? Why are we so ready to assume her motives are untainted by a gender feminist agenda—so popular among lesbians—that openly seeks to subvert male power (and the patriarchal architecture of Western Culture) by promoting androgyny and downplaying the significance of the natural differences between the sexes?

If we accept that this woman is a man simply because she “passes” as one, what are the broader social implications of that? What exactly is it that are we passively agreeing to?

As far as I'm concerned, FTMs (and MTFs) are the "transgendered" version of "wiggers." We should treat them like the posers they are.

It makes no sense to validate ridiculous behavior by playing along.

Beattie, Thomas. Labor of Love. The Advocate. March 26, 2008
http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid52947.asp