anon: what is the difference between rcta and transracial?
From a cursory search, RCTA and ECTA look to be terms coined on TikTok. I’m not all that familiar with TikTok communities (I only use it to view ones my friends recommended to me for the most part) so I’m just basing my response to your question from what I can find from internet articles (like this one, tw anti-trace and anti-diaethnic rhetoric).
So at a glance, it looks like the concepts of RCTA (race change to another) and ECTA (ethnicity change to another) are interchangeable with trans/diarace and trans/diaethnic. Yet, the RCTA and ECTA communities appear to try and distance themselves from trans/diarace and trans/diaethnic individuals by stating that they “…believe that they’re more ‘educated’ than [transracial-identifying people] because they ‘try’ to learn more about the inner culture and the languages,” which we already know trans/diarace and trans/diaethnic people already do. They also “…often view transracial-identifying people as problematic "fetishists,” but view RCTA-identifying people as “respectful,” which is still just attempting to distance themselves from being trans/diarace and trans’diaethnic.
The other thing is that they use some outdated terminology (though not necessarily incorrect for everyone) where they say that they are changing to another race/ethnicity instead of aiming to affirm what they already feel internally about themselves.
Based on these findings, it just appears to be individuals on TikTok trying to separate their own experiences from others that they would otherwise share such experiences with, but don’t want to associate with the more “controversial” terms like trans/diarace and trans/diaethnic as these tend to be associated more with the general public with “controversial” figures like Rachel Dolezal.
Let me know if I’m incorrect though, like I said earlier in the post I’m not familiar with these communities and articles that are clearly biased against both them and the trans/dia race and ethnic communities is probably not the best source to discuss nuance.
I’ve spent alot of time around RCTA folk, and I’d also like to point out that RCTA people lean more on manifesting, subliminal and spiritual beliefs than transrace people do. Typically the goals for transrace folk include changing skin and hair colour, style, and sometimes pushing themself to act more like that race.
I’ve seen a lot of RCTA folk actually shit on that for some reason? Saying that it’s “weird and disturbing” to want to use surgery (and other physical forms of transition) to change one’s racial appearance.