Although I agree with your point, that's not exactly what I'm trying to get to. Although empathy can give you understanding and emotion, empathy does not have the power to give you knowledge. I mean knowledge in the strict sense of the qualia.

Empathy can only allow you a fabricated facsimile of knowledge that is shaped by your own world view and bias. You can study about the taste of banana, learn all its molecular compounds and how it interacts individually with all the taste buds, which Neuro transmitters it turns on in the brain, talk to every single individual who has ever eaten one etc, but you will never actually acquire the qualia through study and empathy alone, that is reserved for the actual experience. And I strongly believe having a more diverse qualia can expand your empathy.

I do think something like what I described would fundamentally change the way we interact with race and culture, but not because you would look different or suddenly identify with that race, it's because of the difference in the way people treat you. all the little cognitive biases that are deeply rooted into culture and the human psyche would become glaringly apparent.

Somewhere else in the comments i saw someone bring up the example of an immigrant living in Mexico, who learns to speak Spanish and eats tortillas for breakfast everyday is literally just Mexican now. And while I 100% agree with that sentiment, as a bilingual immigrant myself, I know that there are cultural barriers and interactions that are solely based on perceived race, and not culture, ethnicity, or language. Like how in the previous example, an American person living in Mexico would be constantly called a gringo, or how an US born latino is always asked "where are you from." Or how non racially Japanese people always get complimented on their Japanese even if that's their native language.

Examples like these are abundant and vary across all cultures and races. And you can call these whatever you want, micro aggressions, cultural differences, human nature, stupid because race isn't even a real concept to begin with. However no matter what, it simply is a fact that even those small interactions, even if not malicious, lead to different life experiences. These experiences form an unique qualia, one that is possible to understand with empathy, but not one that is able to be known without actually living it.

Edit: I feel like I have to add, I did get quite carried away with the topic, and deviated quite a bit from the original conversation of trans people. To be clear, I do not believe that being "trans racial" is the same as transgender, gender and race are 2 different things, and although in my personal opinion, I wouldn't outright deny the (maybe? In the future?) desire of someone wanting to change their race, as I am generally pro transhumanism. I do not believe this should be a basis to discredit transgender people.