Trans-racial. Man born white but feels Filipino.

I dislike the term. I think you can be intrigued and submerse yourself in a culture, your own or another, but you don't get to choose your race as I do believe it is genetic. I would think that someone adopted into another racial culture could probably identify as their birth race, the race of their parents, or both. My cousin lives in Japan. He is married to a Japanese woman. Their kids are obviously part Japanese. That doesn't make my cousin Japanese.

Of course, and jump on me if you want, I believe that sex is genetic as well. I do believe that gender does not always equate with the genetic sex.

I had a friend many years ago in graduate school who was lily white but self identified as Chinese for a similar reason. I don't know. Our community accepted her for who she was but I know our ethnic Chinese friends found her to be a bit pretend, they had experienced many things throughout their history that a white girl from Minnesota never did no matter how much she identified as Chinese. It was not a bad thing that she loved the culture such that she wished to live immersed in it, it was a bad thing that she invested so much in her understanding of herself as being ethnically Chinese.

I think the difference between this and being transgender is that when you claim a heritage that is not yours, you claim a history that is not yours. Sometimes this creates privilege and power issues. A person who is transgender adopts the inherent disadvantage of being transgender because there is no privilege position that exists in this context. If I were to live as a man I would not gain male privilege. But where a person already has privilege by their birth, it can feel disrespectful for them to then claim to be part of a culture that has experienced societal disadvantage through a period of generations.

I could live as a man, identify as a man, look like a man and talk like a man. But I would be a transgender man and certainly this means something somewhat different in some ways from being a man born a male. In a similar way I am an immigrant, I am native born of another country and native speaker of another language. But I am now an American citizen, identify as an American citizen, but still I carry the truth of my history in that identity. Certainly identity is complex in some ways.

I find this fascinating. I went to some diversity training last year about cultural responsiveness in the classroom, and the speaker talked about ethnicity and race as social constructs. Same thing in a 400 level college class I took about diversity. We don't think of it that way. We (the general we) tend to identify race and ethnicity with genetic features and culture/locations.

If it is truly a social construct, than a "white" person identifying as Filippino shouldn't be an issue. Same for the white woman who identified as black.

I'm not sure exactly what I think about it. When I sat in the training and the class, it made sense on some level. In the real world, it is harder to line up with what I see and experience.

Sometimes I wonder if genetics sometimes plays a part in the type of food and drink you like. I love middle eastern food. Love it all.
I have Persian roots.
I don't identify as Persian. It is one thing to love a culture , quite another to actually be that culture.