Where’s The Outrage? Dolezal vs. Jenner

Rachel Dolezal is a white woman.  But she’s spent the last several years claiming she was black, pretending to be black, trying to appear as a black person.  She even claimed that a black man was her father (he wasn’t).

And people are freaking out.

The outrage from the black community has been loud, nearly unanimous, and well deserved.  Tweets about Dolezal have included….

• She has painted black community as so shallow by seemingly saying we wouldn’t have accepted her work if she were white.
• Dolezal is a fraud. She is in denial. She is deceptive. She is not a black woman.
• That’s not how that works.
• I’m honestly curious about where we draw the line between sense of self/self-identification and diagnosed mental illness.

All of this, even though Dolezal has said that she “identifies as a black person” and that she didn’t want to be limited by “whatever biological identity was thrust upon” her.

 

Surely the irony is obvious.

Because it seems like just yesterday that Bruce Jenner told the world that he “identifies as a woman” and that he wouldn’t be constrained by whatever gender nature had biologically thrust upon him.

 

So where’s the outrage?

I’ve thought this from the beginning, but Dolezal has made the point better than I ever could have…..

Isn’t Bruce Jenner calling himself a woman pretty insulting to women?

Black people across the country are telling Dolezal that she can’t just become a black adult, because she never experienced the trials of being a black child or teen.

Well I’ve hung around a few teenage girls and a few adult women who used to be teenage girls.  And lemme tell ya, I’ve heard a lot about how hard it is to be a teenage girl.  Hormones and insecurity and bullying and insecurity and menstrual cycles and all the things that make being a woman so hard….Bruce Jenner skipped all of that.  Bruce was a super popular, athletic guy.  He never had to deal with teenage boys….he was the teenage boy that girls had to deal with.

And yet, Bruce thinks that after skipping all of the hard parts about becoming a woman, he can pay a lot of money for a surgery and BOOM….he’s a woman, just like everyone else?

Even as an adult, being a woman isn’t easy.  Menstrual cycles and menopause and dating and dealing with stereotypes at every turn….  I’m not trying to be sarcastic or flippant about any of this.  It can’t be easy being a woman.

But Bruce Jenner has decided that without all of the trials associated with being a woman, he can still be one.  And that ought to anger every woman in America.

I’d be angry if I spent my whole life trying to develop myself as a good father, a good husband, learning the things that men are expected to know and navigating my way through manhood….only to have a woman sew a penis on herself and proclaim that she’s a man too.  Like the tweeter (twitterer?) told Dolezal….”That’s not how it works”.

Surgically modified genitals and breast implants don’t make you a woman any more than curly hair and a tan make you black.  And claiming otherwise, in either case, is cause enough for some outrage.