Man becomes woman and white becomes black in this age of transition

Can I let you in on a secret? I am a transitioning Mongolian yak herder. Confusingly, I may seem to be a white, middle-aged journalist with greying hair, but appearances can be deceptive. Just ask Rachel Dolezal.

Dolezal has just stepped down as president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but so far remains Professor of African Studies at Eastern Washington University. However, her claims to be black have been disputed by two noted authorities on the subject, namely her parents. They say she’s been “pretending to be black for years”, while one of her adoptive brothers, Ezra Dolezal, reported that she asked him a while ago “not to blow her cover”.

As more details have emerged over the last few days, the whole story has come to feel like some wittily controversial satire on race and identity: following estrangement from her inconveniently Caucasian parents a few years ago, Dolezal secured legal custody of another adoptive brother, mixed-race Isaiah, and was quoted as saying, “I’m trans-racial, my son’s trans-racial” (I’m trans-Mongolian, speaking personally, though I’m not sure about my son).

Left and right jumped all over the story, predictably. For Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post, Dolezal is no better than the Black and White Minstrels: “Blackface remains highly racist, no matter how down with the cause a white person is.” On the other hand, Halford Fairchild, former president of the Association of Black Psychologists, believes: “Rachel Dolezal is black because she identifies as black.”

Right-wingers were busy, meanwhile, sniffing out liberal hypocrisy: how could the left-leaning commentariat condemn Dolezal while lauding Caitlyn Jenner, a bloke who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, insisted he was a woman? “Shaved his legs and then he was a she,” as Lou Reed put it in “Walk on the Wild Side”?

Though I hate to give any intellectual credibility to the bug-eyed idiots of the American right, it is a valid question. Gender dysphoria is an acknowledged medical condition, but with few objectively observable symptoms, though one study apparently found that when gender dysphorics were exposed to androstadienone, a pheremone-like hormone used in fragrances for men, they reacted in ways similar to the gender they claimed to be, rather than the gender with which they were born.

But if Jenner says she’s a woman, then she is. That’s surely the only logical conclusion possible in a tolerant, civilised society. However, race dysphoria, similarly, exists entirely in the mind. There is the common sense argument: “men” who feel like women, “women” who feel like men, and the growing legion of don’t knows – that all feels fine to me. Sexual identity is clearly more than penises and vaginas. And who can gainsay people’s innermost feelings? There is nothing any of us can usefully add to Jenner’s life other than the medical means to smooth her transition.

open image in gallery

Whereas anyone with a functioning pair of eyes can dispute Rachel Dolezal’s claims. Her skin is white. Whatever she feels inside, she isn’t black. Blackness may be a state of mind, as Halford Fairchild claims, but as far as this whitey can tell, it’s a state of mind which you have when you’re black. Not when you wear dark make-up, or frizz your hair up, or adopt your mixed-race adoptive brother, or ask another brother not to blow your cover, or become an expert on all matters African-American. It’s a state of mind that’s inextricably intertwined with having black skin.

Amazingly, there’s something of a tradition in the US of whites passing themselves off as blacks, as well as vice versa. Dolezal might want to call Walter White in her defence. Leader of the NAACP from 1931 until 1955, he wrote, “I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” However, he could point to his mixed European and African ancestry, unlike Dolezal. Might some sensible person be able to persuade her that she’s being simply, hilariously, ridiculous? I suspect not. Anyway, I’m just off to herd my yaks.