Last week, I discovered a thread on the web. The Tweet I saw read “Can we start a thread and post the entire white girls cosplaying as black women on Instagram? Let’s air them out because that is ALARMING.” I couldn’t stop scrolling through the replies. There have been dozens of photos of white girls from Instagram who looked like they were trying to rework themselves into mixed race and black girls with fake tan, make-up, hoop earrings, tightly permed curls, bandanas (I mean really?) and possibly even a little bit of Photoshop to make themselves look thiccer. I cackled on the racial transformations but then my brows crinkled with troubling thoughts watching the screen.

Whether or not these girls were actually claiming to be mixed race and black, or simply attempting to look that way, seeing their photos jogged my memory of how I felt in 2015 when news broke about Rachel Dolezal, the white American woman who decided not simply to pose as an African American woman, but to turn out to be a black civil rights activist – which is admittedly pushing the envelope. As a black transsexual woman, the media circus around Rachel Dolezal freaked me out. Seeing interviews where Dolezal spoke about drawing herself as black as a toddler and at all times knowing she was black inside concerned me because I knew pundits would lump us all in together  – transgender people like me and folks like Dolezal, who later described herself as “transracial”.

I knew they might claim that we were all heralding in an Armageddon of Ridiculousness. For a temporary moment, I screamed inside: “Centuries of oppression, violence and erasure of trans people and here comes this racial usurper coming to piggyback on our trans narratives, rebrand neo-colonialism and in so doing sink the entire ship!”

Once I tell people I’m a ‘transsexual woman’ I’m telling people my truth. I belong to a family of transgender* people and although we may all be very different in the way in which we express our gender, what connects us is a meta-narrative of how we arrived at knowing who we actually are regardless of being assigned a gender we don’t relate to. The word ‘transracial’ was used to explain parents of 1 ethnicity adopting children of one other until Dolezal-gate got here along to colonise this vocabulary also.

Luckily, back then, people took it upon themselves to clarify the differences between transgender and transracial. The YouTuber Kat Blaque comprehensively set us straight along with her video “Why Rachel Dolezal isn’t Caitlynn Jenner”. Debunking any comparisons between attempting to alter your race and deciding to alter your gender presentation, Kat explains that, yes, race and gender are absolutely social constructs, but gender isn’t a biological trait passed from parent to child, while race is. Gender transitioning is aligning your outside with the within, on condition that gender is innate; it’s projecting your truth. After which there was the incisive article by Ijeoma Olou titled “The Heart of Whiteness” where she interviews Dolezal. It made me squirm a lot with the stress that I skipped yoga that day because I had contorted enough. Olou’s commentary as a black woman well versed in black feminist theory gave me the comfort I needed to hitch in on the jokes and marvel at Dolezal’s braiding skills.

As I ingested all of this common sense, the panic temporarily abated. But that each one modified when two days ago I discovered myself googling the phrase ‘n*gg*rfishing’, a term I had read on the above Twitter thread to explain girls posing as mixed race and black online, like catfishing, only racialised. My mouth hung open in amazement and again I fretted about what this meant for us as transgender people: “This near the trans day of remembrance we will not have more material fodder for individuals who will dismiss our trans voices as merely more evidence that the world has gone mad!” I believed. We once more needed a reminder that the 2 usually are not the identical, that we cannot conflate transgender identities with these millennial ‘n*gg*rfishers’.

Unlike them, I can’t try on whiteness for a day and see if I actually was as unqualified for the job as I used to be told. I won’t ever know what it’s wish to be cisgender and move through life without ever having my womanhood questioned.

Trying to find that reminder, I realised that it existed inside these young women’s photos themselves, which portray the small box of blackness which threatens to crush me each day. It’s what I confront on dating sites when white men tell me some iteration of “I like black girls!” and I ask them in the event that they love black lives they usually respond “All lives matter!” Of their minds, black literature, black philosophy, black politics and black history are superfluous. What they desire is a contemporary fairground where black girls twerk without having for a break and there are symposiums on chicken frying and there are fountains of Hennessy and Iced Tea and Rum Punch. An affordable plasticised version of blackness without all of that pesky problematic oppression. 

That’s the source of my rage scrolling through all of this mess. I’ve waved goodbye to too many white middle-class cisgender boyfriends who get to return to their lives where they haven’t any problem being considered intelligent, trustworthy and employable. This relationship dynamic of wildly disparate positions of privilege was beautifully and complexly depicted in the tv series Pose, where the white middle-class man from Recent Jersey, Stan, takes on an Afro-Latina transsexual mistress, Angel, they usually attempt to love one another across the divides of sophistication and race. The boys I actually have loved have all mirrored Stan ultimately. They sample and savour my body as a morsel of exoticism in a discreet location where nobody will know of the will they’ve for my uniqueness. They get to scrub me off of themselves.

The identical is true of the women online who placed on an inexpensive costume of black femininity. But unlike them, I can’t try on whiteness for a day and see if I actually was as unqualified for the job as I used to be told. Similarly, I won’t ever know what it’s wish to be cisgender and move through life without ever having my womanhood questioned. That’s the reason I’m offended after I see the Instagrammers and bloggers transforming their skin color and their body shape to look black. I do know of course that these n*gg*rfishers are a joke. I’m just undecided I will probably be the one who gets the last laugh.