As a former supporter of transracialism, my thoughts are probably predictable, but I'll elaborate a little just in case. I am in full support of the transgender community on the basis of the elementary moral paradigm of allowing an individual to define his or her experience. That includes gender, presentation of gender, etc.

Dwelling on it even slightly, how lucky am I that I may freely feel and present the gender that is in traditional conjunction with my sex? If you want to be technical, statistically speaking, most people enjoy this privilege, so I am not that lucky. But you get what I'm saying. How hard is life sometimes, fellow adults? Am I right? Now subtract from the foundation of your life comforts the fundamental privilege of naturally meeting established gender norms. Now there are debates about whether anyone should listen to you at all when you define your gender. What's next? Going to tell our neighbors which of their sexual fetishes we personally approve? Missionary again, Joe? Come on, man.

Anyway, out of empathy and a modest comprehension of gender as a product of the brain, I will call you the gender you like.

I had thought, someone feels they identify with a different race, what's the difference? Aren't we disallowing freedoms by failing to accept that Chester is more of a Tyreese at heart?

Well, no. We're not.

Here is the key, for me: genders male and female are labels that we place on certain experiences that can occur to any human being, cross-culturally. Separate cultures have, prior to contact with one another, maintained distinctly similar ideas of gender for a very long time. Not identical, but certainly comparable.

Hormones can also play a significant role in shaping gendered behavior. They can “masculinize” behavior by physically altering electro-chemical circuits in the brain. That is, when gender-oriented hormonal distribution occurs throughout a person's early life, it can literally shape that person's brain. At a microscopic level, men and women’s brains can be patterned physically differently, although there is often overlap and neural sexual dimorphism is still only minimally understood.

In any case, the patterns of thought you develop will structurally alter your brain at a microscopic level. If experience and hormones are architects of your mind, and the result is that you identify with one gender over another, that is the condition of being gendered. Often, gender and sex co-occur in the traditional method. But if your body is male, your brain can still be patterned to think in ways that society labels as female. If you identify thusly, I satisfactorily call that condition being female (in terms of gender).

It seems to me that gender is a natural product of humanity, to be summary.

So here is why Chester is not actually Tyreese: black culture (if we're being honest, this is the most hot-button and therefore most interesting available case) is not an innate feature of human development and experience. It is not hormonally predicated, and does not occur naturally. If there were a nuclear apocalypse (hold that thought, Kimmy), and all culture were lost, American black culture as we know it would never arise again. It is the aggregate of very specific global developments beginning with ancient African culture, leading through slavery, civil rights violations, and more.

Gender, meanwhile, would re-occur along very similar lines. At least, cross-cultural maintenance of male and female constructs indicates this is probably so. Shoot me, I'm not omniscient.

Chester does not know what it is like to be a black person because he did not grow up in an environment that directed black expectations at him. His family was not black, and he has never had more than a bit of anxiety when pulled over by a white cop. He has never watched the world through the eyes of a black person. What he feels is not true blackness, but an imitative construct that he has empathetically developed from his white expectations.

So, I mean, bravo, dude. You're empathizing, and empathy is a wonderful thing. But you don't really know it because you ain't really been there, man.

That said, I will in similar fashion not honor identities such as “insect-person,” “merfolk,” and what have you. I will acknowledge that you have established a construct in your mind, and that you identify deeply with it. But as you have literally never been a bug, and merfolk are a fiction, you do not receive my respect on that account. You've never been in the back panel of my old PlayStation 2, so you have no idea what I keep in there.

Also, please stay out of there.