I’ve seen so many people on the Internet today saying things like “well, if Caitlyn Jenner can say she feels like a woman, why can’t Rachel Dolezal say she feels black, har har har,” that I thought I should say something. But I don’t want to derail the thread on Dolezal, so I’m putting it here…
I know I shouldn’t really have to explain why it’s different, and I’m not very good at articulating that kind of thing anyway. But:
Even if “race” is a construct in some sense — since “we’re all one race; we all came from Africa; blah blah blah, etc.,” and it’s true that the way people have been divided into particular races historically, based on vague ideas of geography and skin color and so on, is rather arbitrary — the fact is that we view someone’s race as being a product not only of appearance and identification and how you’re perceived and (e.g., for African-Americans) having a particular history of shared oppression, but of having a particular biological ancestry. I don’t care how much this woman identified with black people and darkened her skin and did who knows what to her hair, and how much people now perceive her as black, her parents are white and her biological ancestry (as far back as could possibly be meaningful) is white. She can’t change that except by pretending. This isn’t the least little bit like a mixed-race person who does get to choose how they identify and live.
What gender/sex you are has nothing whatsoever to do with your family history or biological ancestry. We all start from the point of having biological elements of male and female, and how you turn out isn’t simply a question of chromosomes but has to do with prenatal hormones, epigenetics, and a lot of other things. And is unrelated to who your parents or grandparents were. Yes, gender expression and gender roles are a social construct (except for pregnancy), but there’s a lot more going on. And just because your parents agreed to assign you to a particular sex/gender at birth doesn’t mean that’s who you are or that you have to accept it as how you want to live. Regardless of whether it’s possible yet to establish the particular scientific cause for gender identity differing from gender assignment. Besides, I don’t always disclose my history (because it’s nobody’s business given who I currently am, and how I have always felt), but it’s not like I affirmatively invent a history of having been raised as a girl! (And even if I did, I think that would be pretty harmless in most circumstances, unless I used that claim to obtain some tangible benefit that required someone actually to have that history.)
That’s the best I can do right now.