Thinking to Believe

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP president of Spokane Washington. She has recently been outed as a white woman. Her bloodline is Czech, German, and Swedish, not African. Yet, she has been posing as a black woman for several years now. According to her interview on the Today show, she has identified as a black woman since she was five years old.

What I would like to know is why those who side with the transgender are up in arms over Rachel Dolezal. She is simply transracial. Her true self is a black woman, but she is trapped in a white woman’s body. It is not her fault that she was born in the wrong body. Remember, the mind trumps the body. It doesn’t matter that her body is as white as they come. What matters is how she perceives herself. Since she perceives herself as black, she is black, and she ought to be able to undergo skin darkening treatments to align her body with her true identity.

Those who think transgenderism is normal, and the proper treatment is gender reassignment surgery, please tell me why you think that Rachel Dolezal is not black.  After all, race is not as fixed as sex.  There are only two sexes, but there are many races, and race is not as clearly defined as sex.  New races can be created by consistently mixing two people of different races.  The same cannot be said of sex.  Indeed, what is the racial identity of mixed race children?  If a Mexican woman has a child with an African man, is the child Mexican or African?  Something else?  Race and racial identity is rather fluid.  So if anything, we ought to be more supportive of the transracial than the transgender.

Oddly enough, I don’t have much to say about Bruce Jenner.  Others have provided excellent commentary and I don’t feel the need to add to the mix.  What I will say is that my heart goes out to the man.  I cannot imagine what it is like to feel like you are a woman trapped in a man’s body.  While I think his decision to alter his body to make it look like a female’s body is a tragic one, I understand why he would do so.  He is trying to look like what he thinks he truly is, and he thinks that these alterations will make him happy.  Unfortunately, I think he’ll find out too late that it won’t bring him the happiness he thought it would, and he may even come to regret the decision.  While we should be firm in our convictions and position that his actions are wrong, we should never do so at the expense of his humanity.  He is a person.  A confused person.  A lost person.  A person who needs love, and not just words of moral condemnation.  This is a time that we need to proclaim the truth, but proclaim it with compassion and love.

What I would like to focus my attention on is why our culture is divided on the issue of transgenderism and gender-reassignment, and then show how the logic of the liberal view is applied inconsistently. (more…)