NBC News has a helpful explainer, informing us that race is not a real thing but that you cannot switch races.

Race is not real, but it is immutable.

Uh-huh? Yeah, if you say so. It makes no sense to me, but I still think that people with penises are boys, so I am behind the times.

"Race is not genetic," yet it includes "inherited characteristics…passed down through generations."

🙃

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) August 2, 2023

I am not sure what is more absurd about this story. Is it the existence of a new fad among teen girls in which they convince themselves that they are not really the race in which they were born? Probably not.

Teens are always having identity crises, and retreating into absurd fantasies is pretty normal, although the existence of an entire industry created to reinforce an impossible fantasy is troubling.

No, what is so absurd is the mental gymnastics that “experts” feel obligated to go through to maintain ridiculous contradictory and assertions.

Race is not real. Race is immutable. Sex is not real. But self-identity is absolute. But self-identity about race is unacceptable.

Make it make sense if you can. I am not mentally flexible enough to do so.

Since before she hit double digits, Alisa, 15, said she has felt a special connection with Japan. The high school student, who asked to be anonymous for fear of being doxxed online, was born in Ukraine and lives in Maryland, but she now goes by the Japanese name Miyuki and listens to “subliminals” that promise she will wake up and be Japanese. So far, she believes that by listening to YouTube videos with lo-fi music and photos of East Asian facial features while she sleeps, her vision has cleared, her eyelids have become smaller and her hair is just a bit darker.

Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race. They tune in to subliminal videos that claim can give them an “East Asian appearance” or “Korean DNA.”

I feel for Alisa but don’t actually find her story that bizarre. Many teenagers–especially those not in the “It” crowd–have identity crises in their teens. In a sane world, people would support them by helping them embrace what is unique and special about themselves, and even more importantly to develop not just self-love but enough self-respect to achieve using the skills and characteristics unique to them.

This isn’t about affirmation of delusions, but rather reinforcing the best in people as they are. God gives each of us gifts, and we need to find a productive way to embrace them. Alisa needs a mentor to help her become the best Alisa she can be.

Alisa and her fellow transracialists are going through a phase, just as in prior generations kids became Goths. I am sure it is frustrating for parents and unhealthy, but hardly a crisis as the transgender craze is.

Unfortunately there is an entire industry dedicated to encouraging dangerous fantasies when it comes to biological sex, encouraging kids to reject who they are and transform into people whom they can never actually become. And since alphabet ideology encourages kids to permanently sterilize and mutilate themselves rather than merely pretend, it is dangerous in the extreme.

Race “experts,” though, are panicked because transracialism is a threat to the intersectional ladder.

But experts underscore that it is simply impossible to change your race.

“It’s just belief,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of cultural and media studies at Queens College, City University of New York. “It doesn’t ever really work, because it’s not doing anything, but they have convinced themselves that it works because there’s other people who have convinced themselves, as well.”

Though they do not constitute a full-blown trend, a number of racial subliminal creators have popped up on YouTube in recent years, with videos racking up on average over a half-million views apiece. On TikTok, dozens of accounts have emerged in recent weeks sharing similar goals and aesthetics and documenting what people describe as their race-change journeys.

Sound familiar? Creating a social contagion on TikTok, with influencers luring kids with identity crises into delusions about making impossible changes? It is a normal and healthy thing if kids want to get disfiguring and dangerous experimental medical treatments, but absolutely unacceptable that kids listen to tapes that make them think they are Asian. (I, by the way, would be worried about those tapes too since they would foster mental illness).

Media experts also point to the potential dark side of the exocitization of Asian culture, saying it could be a form of modern yellowface, or the act of non-Asian people’s making their appearance more “Asian-like.”

Korean American poet Margaret Rhee, an assistant professor of media studies at The New School in New York, said the RCTA phenomenon reflects the current media climate in which East Asian media enjoys widespread popularity internationally and in the U.S.

“There’s also the underbelly of that where we want to be careful,” she said, “because there’s always problems around fetishization or objectification that East Asian cultures have always been subjected to, meaning being revered for these kinds of exotic characteristics but not really fully seen.”

The irony of all this is that the selfsame experts who argue that race swapping is impossible also argue that race is an entirely made-up concept.

Race doesn’t exist, but God forbid you imagine yourself a race other than the one you were born with. You are culturally appropriating.

Experts agree race is not genetic. But they contend that even though race is a cultural construct, it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race.

David Freund, a historian of race and politics and an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, corroborates the idea that a “biological race” does not exist. What we know today as “race” is a combination of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions passed down through generations, he said.

In addition, Freund said, the modern concept of race is inseparable from the systemic racial hierarchy hundreds of years in the making. Simply put, changing races is not possible, because “biological races” themselves are not real.

Got that?

Good. Please explain it to me, because I surely haven’t figured out what the hell it means, because it seems to be gobbledygook. Lots of academic words like “systemic” but absolutely not a lick of sense.

Race isn’t real, but you are born into a race and cannot change it. Of course not in the way you are born with a penis or ovaries. That is different because of reasons. But race, which again doesn’t exist, is immutable. “Experts” say so.

Now most of us see a basic similarity between transracialism and transgenderism. Leftists insist that both race and gender are immutable characteristics because we are born with genetic characteristics that define them. Take a DNA test and the results will tell you about both your racial background and your biological sex. A DNA test can tell you what region of Japan your ancestors come from, and reliably predict your genital characteristics.

It is true that race has at times and places been freighted with social significance, and at other times it hasn’t meant much at all. But the racial characteristics are there regardless. An anthropologist can tell you the race and gender of a skeleton because the characterics are evident. A Black man in ancient Rome is just as much a Black man who was born in Chicago.

Race, though, is clearly LESS immutable than gender. After all, being of the same species people from different races breed together and characteristics blend. Sex is binary, and hence doesn’t change over the generations.

Yet the “experts” claim exactly the opposite, and for totally political reasons. Race and gender are the two most important characteristics in the intersectional hierarchy, and for that hierarchy to be affirmed race must be immutable and gender must be fluid.

RCTA and transracialism — which came to the forefront because of controversial figures like Rachel Dolezal — have been compared to being transgender. However, psychologists and activists push back against comparisons.

Tiq Milan, a Black transgender activist and writer, said it is a disservice to transgender people to compare the two. Race historically emerged as a social construct to establish a racial hierarchy with the white race at the top, whereas variances in gender identity have existed for thousands of years, he said.

“When it comes to who we are as racialized people, it is how we present to the world, but it’s also how people treat you,” Milan said. “It’s not just putting on the hair and the makeup and talking and walking [in] a kind of way. That is fetishizing, and it’s objectifying, and it reduces the beautiful and complicated cultures of people of color.”

As you can see, the whole point is to invert reality and leave people utterly at sea. A confused and despairing person disconnected from reality is ready to join a cult.

And the Left is nothing but a cult.