Somebody issue her a heat lamp to be set on a rotating timer!
I think the “whatever” is unnecessarily dismissive. But maybe that’s just me. And most women I’ve known don’t necessarily identify having periods as the essential sine qua non of womanhood. (Or missing them and worrying about pregnancy. Not all women have sex with men, but that doesn’t make them non-women.) As far as “feeling like a woman” is concerned" (a nebulous concept at best), all I can do is repeat what I said last month in these two posts in the earlier Jenner thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18439685/#Comment_18439685; and http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18439689/#Comment_18439689.
By the way, I wasn’t born a woman or a man. I was born a baby. And I don’t think science has progressed nearly enough to state with certainty that there isn’t a biological/hormonal/epigenetic cause of transness that’s separate from chromosomes (not that most people have ever actually had their chromosomes tested, or would know what a chromosome looked like even if it bit them.) 200 years ago, nobody knew chromosomes from Adam (or Eve), and they had nothing whatsoever to do with determining sex. Nobody knows what criteria will be used 200 years from now. And all that aside, even though I wasn’t raised as a girl, please don’t assume that my childhood was in any way the same as a non-trans male child. One of the most common mistakes made by those who think transition simply involves going from “man” to “woman.”
On the other hand, 200 years or 2000 years from now, science isn’t going to be able to magically and retroactively give Rachel Dolezal black parents or a childhood as an African-American, or living in a tepee and hunting for food with bows and arrows.
Thanks for noticing the mistake.
Corrected:
Oh for the love of… can people at least spell her name right?
As for chromosomes determining sex/gender… that is such a weird way to look at it. Is anyone going to seriously tell people with complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (or insert other syndrome here) that they’re not women because they have XY chromosomes?
Methinks some people would seriously benefit from reading a book like Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex.
^going to read that @romanigypsyeyes ! We can all benefit by reading about things we don’t know!
Some of her family members are going to be interviewed on Anderson Cooper tomorrow night.
As a warning, it’s a bit academic and dense but a huge wealth of information. IMO, it’s one of the great primers on the subject (though, as you can tell by the title, it’s mostly historical but it traces to modern day). It’s written by Alice Domurat Dreger who also wrote Galieo’s Middle Finger (which I haven’t read but has been popular recently).
Romanigypsyeyes, yes, some people do seriously argue that AIS women aren’t women, despite having been socialized/raised as girls and being physically indistinguishable from any other women without an internal exam, except for not having periods. Germaine Greer, for example. For people like her, being a woman is all about the blood and the chromosomes.
The fact is that there’s no one physical or experential attribute that’s universal to every single woman. Whatever list one compiles, there are always exceptions, but for the most part people don’t view the fact that a woman can’t tick off everything on the “list” as disqualifying her from being a woman. The only general exception is trans women: a lot of people will go to any length to disqualify a trans woman from womanhood, no matter what she looks like or how she was socialized, and no matter how many times the goalposts have to be shifted and how many “essential” attributes have to be thought up in order to disqualify her.
@DonnaL yes I figured that was the case after I typed it out.
I suppose I should say is any reasonable person going to argue blah, blah, blah.
Also I’m not familiar with her… to the google!
ETA: Nevermind, I do know her. The name didn’t click… definitely know her work though!
^not to hijack this thread, but if you are a woman, whether born or transitioned, you are a woman in my mind. I’m confused by “trans” which I would think means not fully transitioned, (or not wanting to), but I guess I am wrong on that. Oh well, live and learn!
on topic: Now this Dolezal woman just seems kooky to me…
Trans is just kind of an informal umbrella term – it includes transgender, transsexual, and everything else, and implies nothing about one’s stage of transition.
So… relevant, it’s apparently going around that her parents are young earth creationists and that’s how she was raised? This story just keeps getting stranger and stranger.
"Whatever list one compiles, there are always exceptions, but for the most part people don’t view the fact that a woman can’t tick off everything on the “list” as disqualifying her from being a woman. "
Right. But it’s got to be based on … something. No? I mean, you felt strongly for years that you were a woman (which I’m not doubting one bit). I would imagine part of that is that you looked down and felt - these aren’t the right parts for who I am. So somewhere there’s a biologic / body part linkage - because presumably having those body parts “corrected” via hormones and / or surgery became important somehow. Otherwise, if it was just about cultural signifiers (dress, makeup), you could have just put on a dress and makeup and be done with it - but that wasn’t enough.
Please understand I can fully support you in your transition but also think that the Rachel case does call into question what are biologic immutables and what aren’t.
Apparently she’s going to make her statement tomorrow. I’m going to take a guess at what it is. She’ll take complete responsibility in a high minded, scholastic sounding speech that says very little about what she actually did…and then blame it on the suffering her parents caused her in her childhood, the desire to change who she was, in order to forget the misery. It will also be societies fault, the racism, the injustice, she just wanted to speak up for that. Kind of like a politicians speech when they get caught doing something wrong. They attempt to keep their dignity, while talking around the subject, blaming someone else, and diverting it to talk about something other than what they actually did.
Just taking a wild guess on this. She will apologize, while pointing the finger at someone else, as to why this all happened.
It is an odd way to look at it because it is oversimplified, which is why I don’t look at sex and gender that way. However, as I’m sure you know, people do tell those with abnormalities what sex and gender they are. 
@busdriver Wow, a statement? I look forward to that. Agreeing with what you said, I think it will end with a “I don’t give two *** to what anybody thinks.” considering that’s what she earlier said.
She is not making her statement tomorrow - it has been postponed.
Exactly, Pizzagirl. A social transition (either part-time or full-time) is enough for some; it wasn’t for me. But physical transition alone wasn’t enough for me either.
I haven’t been closely following this thread or the story. I started to read a link posted earlier of an interview with her but quit because … Well, why should I believe anything she says? But does anyone have a link to a decent story about her relationship with her parents? Is there reason to believe her stories in regards to them? Or theirs in regards to her?
Is there more to her parents’ story aside from the fact that they are white, their ancestors are white and so is she? That much seems to be true beyond dispute. I guess if they are giving an interview it will come out. I would think that if they had been as abusive as she is apparently claiming they would have just bowed out and gone about their lives quietly but who knows.
Well, that’s what I don’t know. I assume they would say they didn’t beat her, but I wonder whether their past is really as kooky as she alleges or do they dispute pieces other parts of her biography. She just has no credibility with me so I question all of it.