So what do y'all think of Rachel Dolezal?

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Though sex is a bit different, being a biological reality, I agree.

I wonder, though, why you don't apply this to race.

It doesn't matter what kind of construct race is.
The fact is the construct and its categories exist.
Rachel Dolezal lied about her category in the construct.
She knew that she was not partly black and her father is not black, and she lied about these things.
It seems that she lied about her upbringing too, sourced from her mother.
The hate mail stories seem to be have been lies too, sourced from post office employees.
She could have tried to do good in NAACP without lying, but she chose to lie.

I wonder if her parents had told her that there was African American ancestry in their family. Why would she just suddenly make something up? Did she change her hair to identify with that part of her culture or something? Why would her family keep silent to all of a sudden speak up and tell the newspapers that she wasn't black? I don't know the whole story or what she said; I just heard about this story actually from this site.

Has she had a DNA test done I wonder?

I'll just say this: if anybody can be of whatever sex and ethnicity he declares himself to be, that'll put a quick stop to all "affirmative action" type policies. Otherwise every lily-white male from Whitesville will simply announce that he's an Inuit woman (or whatever category will garner the most preferential treatment).

Apparently, her parents only spoke up due to some sort of litigation she was involved in against them.

*Are* there differences in brain structure between racial groups, controlling for cultural and social background - so, comparing middle class, english speaking Asian-, African- and Anglo- Americans, to ensure any difference can be reasonably ascribed to their race, rather than cultural differences such as language? Although, there will still be other factors which could influence the results. Hmmm.

What about Aboriginal Austrailians, then? They've been isolated from the rest of humanity for far longer than other sub-groups, so if there are differences, one would expect them to be more pronounced. It would be interesting to see if mixed-race individuals from there ever experience dysphoria relating to their appearence, say because their brain is telling them they should look European/Aboriginal but their actual appearence is the opposite...

I'm sure you'll find biological differences in genes and brain structure.

I recall "the warrior gene" is more common in blacks than whites. A white with this gene will be prone to the same effects as blacks.

Genetics can push us to behave in a certain way, and to prefer one way over another.

Anybody watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia?



Rachel Dolezal totally looks like Dee playing her character Martina Martinez

J-Roc is also a good example from media.

She reminds me of a joke told by Harlan Ellison who described a man who collected pancakes. He "had a closet full of pancakes ... happy man!" So, there is something to be said about enthusiastic fools. I consider Rachel Dolezal a fool because she could have described her admirable racial sympathies (and work as an NAACP leader) as an "ally" of the black community without resorting to claiming membership in it without proof. Even U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was publicly doubted when she exaggerated her family's American Indian membership claim before her election.

We now have transhumanism (elective electronic modification), transablism (elective physical impairment) and transracialism (elective racial identification). I wonder if individuals have truly had lifelong desires to become transhuman, transable and transracial, as many have with becoming transgender. Unlike transgenderism, I would be surprised if any have had these desires before the mainstream media popularized them in the last few months and years. So, which came first, the desires or the hype?

What research was that based on?

Eh? Humans have *always* had the desire to transcend themselves, it's part of being human.

I would not be surprised if there have also always been people who experience extreme discomfort about having legs - it does not strike me as implausible that some people's brain maps will not include their legs, a sort of reverse phantom limb syndrome.

As far as transracialism goes, that depends on what causes it. If there are indeed significant differences between the brain structures of different racial groups which aren't dependent upon environmental factors, then it doesn't seem unlikely to me that an individual could develop a brain that has an internal body map different to their actual body, so they'd be expecting, say, African features based on their internal sense of self, only to find Asian features when they look in the mirror. I would, however, expect it to be most prevalent in people who are mixed race. Do such individuals often end up identifying with one parent's race, despite being closer in appearence to the other parent's?

Then there are those of us who like the reality of playing the cards we were dealt.

Yeah, well, I've been thinking. When life deals you a raw hand, you don't try to play it - you make life take the hand back. You get mad. You demand to see life's manager. I don't want your stinking cards anyway. What am I supposed to do with these? I'm going to invent a combustible card and burn life's casino down.

So, Kobayashi Maru one's own life? Good luck with that. Nobody has been as successfully demanding about his own life as I have. But, like with ASD, some things are non-negotiable. How do we play those things?

There's a ton of them.

MAOA is the gene in question (this isn't the only one). White people had the lowest predisposition for such; blacks (Africans and Islanders) and Asians had similarly high levels IIRC.

There's also anatomical differences in the brains between the 3 common races. This hasn't had as much research into it, though, other than noting the differences.

If you find a white person to have a similar brain and genetic disposition to a black, then there you go.