In this OpEd, I take on the notion of trans-everything. This ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
Seven years ago this week, the news broke that the Spokane NAACP chapter president, Rachel Dolezal, was actually a white woman masquerading as black. When asked by investigative journalists, Dolezal’s white parents provided photos of this blue-eyed, lily-white, freckled-faced girl with straight blonde hair.
Dolezal identifies as black and considers herself transracial: a person who identifies as a race other than what occurred naturally at birth according to his/her biological ancestry. So, she blackens her skin and kinks her hair and pretends to be African-American.
Many in the African-American community objected strenuously to a white girl from Montana pretending to be black. Kitara McClure, the former multicultural director at Spokane Community College and a member of the NAACP, created a petition at moveon.org for Dolezal to resign.
Similarly, British internet personality Oli London identifies as a transracial Korean. He has undergone multiple ethnic plastic surgeries to make himself look like South Korean boy band BTS singer Jimin.
But no matter how much Dolezal wishes to be African-American and London to be Korean, painting skin and undergoing plastic surgery doesn’t make it so. These are merely elaborate costumes that are no more real than actors on stage.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren claimed she was part Cherokee and Delaware Indian. She had checked the box indicating that she was Native American on her college applications, and again labeled herself as a minority in the directory of law professors from 1986 to 1995. Harvard Law School touted her as an example of the tenured faculty’s diversity. Warren was highlighted in a 2005 report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Minority Equity Committee as a minority recipient of a teaching award at Penn. As it turns out, Warren has 1/128 Indigenous American DNA.
The Cherokee Nation and other tribal nations do not take kindly to someone pretending to be native American. Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin, Jr., had strong words: “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”
Warren should have pushed back on the Cherokee Nation, calling them transracial-phobic and demanding her casino revenue. That works in other “trans” disputes. But the tribes don’t play those games. And neither should we.
And it just gets weirder. “Otherkinds” or “alterhumans” are a subculture of people who identify as angels, demons, dragons, elves, fairies, sprites, wolves, foxes, horses, aliens, therians, vampires, werewolves, etc. In the past, this was called playing make-believe or pretend. Now it’s an identity that cannot be disputed, dissuaded, or disillusioned.
The original 1828 Webster Dictionary defined gender as “a sex, male or female. Hence, in grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex.” With animate nouns, gender and sex are the same.
Lexicographical gymnastics is the reason progressives are unable to define what a woman is. Until the last decade, mankind has always known what a woman is. But in our progressive age, women can have penises and need urinals in their bathrooms while men can have vaginas, menstruate, and need tampons placed in theirs.
Progressives say that if a man “identifies” as a woman, then he is a woman. And feminism has come to its inevitably tragic conclusion — women being forced to bow before men in sports and in the court of public opinion for fear of being shunned. Men have stolen the identity of “woman” in the same way that Rachel Dolezal stole her African heritage. Women once fought to have their inherent biological differences seen as strengths, and now have cheapened their own sex by denying that those inherent differences even existed in the first place. The same can be said for the male transgender movement, although infused with less feminist irony.
Knowing how to identify a man or woman is not only foundational to our humanity, but our morality. That we deny something so basic is a reflection on the depravity of our culture.