If Jenner decided he was a black man instead of a woman, painted his face black and made a play on all the stereotypes of what makes a person "black", would he be given this same worship, or would he be called a racist? Serious question, no straw man arguments.
deathtokoalas
with jenner, specifically, i'm not 100% comfortable making this argument - i think you have a mild point. but, more generally, the idea is that the personality already aligns with the effeminate, meaning the individual is actually functionally impersonating being male and the transition eliminates the fraud. you have to begin with the assumption that humans are variable, and the idea of "female" and "male" - on a psychological level - is actually a completely false human construct to begin with.
but, you actually don't generally see transwomen pushing stereotypes like this. you generally see drag queens pushing stereotypes like this. i'll get back to this.
now, is "being black" a similar false construct? i'd argue it mostly is. there's nothing more inherently "black" about hip-hop than there is inherently "female" about corsets. so, you have to look at context...
let's take a step back and actually look at the scenario of a drag performer, instead. is performing in drag different than back face? i'd have difficulty accepting that there's a difference between being a "female impersonator" and a "black impersonator" on the level of what's actually being done. but, there's a big difference in context. "blackface" isn't a problem on the level of the actual make-up, it's a problem on the level of it promoting negative racial attitudes. i don't really have a problem with a white guy being barack obama for halloween - i think this can be done tastefully and the pc reaction prohibiting it altogether is kneejerking and overreacting. in that sense, i may spin the issue around and argue from the opposite perspective - that, if done without implying something racist, impersonating a black person is not more offensive than performing in drag.
the difference is that i've never met - or seen in print - any comparable reaction to drag performances, for the precise reason that they don't tend to be degrading. the closest is the (mostly accurate...) feminist argument that drag performers are interpreting the female through the male gaze in the first place; that is, that everybody in the room understands that this "female impersonator" is only impersonating the female in the context of a warped patriarchal concept of it. it's consequently actually an expression of masculinity.
but, this is a valid point to raise. and i'm interested in seeing what further reactions to it are.