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Shit - sorry to break it like that. 
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I had no idea he’d died; dammit…
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Oh, count me in, too!
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Just in case wine don’t cut it…
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Whenever someone mentions Dolezal, my thoughts turn to the sad story of the South African woman Sandra Laing, a “coloured” woman born to white parents during apartheid. Legally she was “white” because of her ancestry (multiple generations of European descent), but she was too dark to be accepted as white by South Africans. Eventually she legally had her classification changed to “coloured” so she could be with her ethnically Zulu husband and their children, but it was just codifying what was already true according to the social conventions imposed upon her.
It really speaks to the arbitrariness of ideas of “race” and the complexities of biology, and although (vaguely) like Dolezal she “chose” to be black, she’d lived a lifetime of failing to fit into white society - and it destroyed her life and alienated her from her parents.
Laing’s life feels a lot more relevant to discussions of identity (and couldn’t be more different than Dolezal’s)…
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Ah yes, that fact I’m wrong about. For some reason I thought he looked Italian.
That’s because, unlike South Africa and Laing’s sad story, there is no such thing as “legal racial identity” in North America…with the exception of status Indians. However Dolezal’s argument from personal identity is analytically identical. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/hypa.12327
What??? Ah shit, he was the best character in that show by far. 
By continuing to bring up Dolezal I think you’re missing a few key points:
- Race, unlike chronological age, is a subjective social construct
- Even so, pretty much everyone thinks her particular claim to “racial identity” is silly
- She never tried to have her assumed racial identity recognized in a court of law, which is what this Dutch clown is doing
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I knew him as Shinwell on Elementary. Damn, he was a good actor.
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That is all true. However: 1) Dutch clown wants his ID to represent his “self-identified” age, which is, to large extent, a social construct. In the middle ages, people were functionally and legally adults at the age of 10-12; not so much any more. 2) the wisdom of the mob, as evinced by this very discussion. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the fallacy of that appeal. Did you read the Hypatia article? 3) As I wrote before, there is no such thing as legal racial identity in North America, so this option was not open to her; and, kinda irrelevant as to whether age is a social identity in the same way that race and gender are. But, props for a reasonable argument.
If you read the Hypatia article, by a rather good feminist philosopher, that I posted, you will see that most of the arguments against Dolezal mirror pretty much word for word those that TERFs and other transphobes use, which commonly included words like “delusional” (as in, “a man who thinks he is a woman is just delusional”). Something for you to think about.
And when someone says “I hate carrots” it’s almost word for word like when someone says “I hate gays”
Really makes you think.
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If someone said “I hate carrots because they are unnatural and God says it’s a sin to be a carrot and besides, just thinking about carrots and where they go …ugh” then yes, it is rather similar to those who hate gays. Your point?
My point is that you’re comparing word usage while disregarding differing contexts about what people are talking about. I get that you want to make others think the context is not important or similar enough to not make these cases different and thus bring about some kind of epiphany, but you haven’t made that case yet besides to link to an article one would have to register an account to access and also simply asserting it, so no epiphanies are forthcoming. This makes the repeated “X sounds like Y if you change it to say Z!!” not so much consciousness raising as simply asinine. Thought it was worth pointing out.
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I (and Tuvel) are not comparing word usage but arguments from self-identity, which are analytically equivalent. The point about word usage was an aside. Forgot Wiley needs an account. Fulltext is here. https://cryptome.wikileaks.org/2017/05/in-defense-of-transracialism.pdf
This guy is a bad faith troll. Age is a social construct that nonetheless has vastly different dimensions than gender. Those two things are independent of each other.
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When several transgender people speak to say that associating us with other peoples is ill conceived; what kind of person continues to speak for us?
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