rachel dolezal - white person who identifies as black (and head of the spokane chapter of naacp)
caitlyn jenner - biologically male who identifies as female
here's why people shouldn't compare dolezal to jenner: there are significant physical differences between male and female brains and there are none in brains of people with different ethnicities.
scientists can look human brains and be able to identify the sex of the person the brain belonfed to (maybe not like, just, on the surface, with after poking around the brain a bit). scientists can do this with good certainty and be correct a large majority of the time. they can't for brains of people of different color. not even "purebreds."
a lot of what we consider ethnicity, honestly, is culture. sure we have a lot of physical differences and some of those are not entirely superficial (like how hair, eye, skin colors are pretty much insignificant, whereas differences in muscle and tendon physiology makes for different kinds of athleticism which certainly influenced our history as developing cultures [which isn't so important now, but would certainly matter if zombies turn out to be real and we need to run from them {tho really, physical fitness will matter far more than types of muscle striation}]).
some people have come out to say they doubted dolezal's "blackness" based on things she would say. specifically, how she said it. read: accent and slang. but that's dumb. if a black person were raised in an amish community, in rural mongolia, or by the british royal family they wouldn't talk the way blacks do here. those are cultural differences. they are not innate. identifying as black implies that there are significant biological differences amongst races, which i think most people would deny (and not just so as to appear politically correct).
speaking of biological differences in the brain. i'd love for transgender people to donate their brains to science so we can see if there are differences. esp if the transgendered person wasn't on hormones.
2 comments:
I agree - comparing Dolezal and Jenner is apples and oranges. Transracial does not mean what people think it means, or at least has not been used that way in the past. I recently learned that it has been used for years in the adoption community to refer to people adopting children from a different racial background than the parents.
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/06/17/3670801/transracial-adoption-rachel-dolezal-caitlyn-jenner/
thanks for the article! i don't think i'd heard the term "transracial" before this dolezal thing. this was an interesting read. it's interesting too, because even for us non-adoptees, the race vs culture is an issue. i am at once both american and chinese. there are parts of my upbringing that make me chinese (more respectful of elders, certain social etiquette, filial piety, etc) but a lot of me is also very american (independent, unafraid to voice my opinion and stick to it, no big problems saying no). we are, fairly or not, immediately labeled (and judge) by our sex and our race (and more!).
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