"Good question, overheard at brunch: why is it considered OK to emulate someone else's gender but not OK to emulate someone else's race or ethnicity?"

This is a question that my son John put up on Facebook last February, that's relevant to the big internet story of the day — that poor lady, Rachel Dolezal, who's suddenly way overfamous. (Already blogged 2 posts down.)

The discussion there is interesting, though it's not about the full-scale life transition that you see with transgender people or with what Dolezal seems to have done. It's about temporary performances, like drag shows and blackface routines.

Is our internalized rejection of blackface helpful in critiquing what Dolezal seeems to have done? Maybe not. I don't see any basis for accusing her of mocking or disparaging black people or trying to leverage any negative feelings other people have toward black people. And she might be genuinely identifying herself with black people, perhaps to the point of delusion, but perhaps in some lucid and enlightened way that we don't yet fully understand.