One further thought on the Rachel Dolzeal thing. From what I’ve heard, the argument against what she is doing, or trying to do, depends upon a sense that she’s not genuine: that she’s only cosplaying being Black, that she doesn’t really feel Black in her heart and soul. That it’s a pretence. But these are very poor grounds for opposing her life-decisions. Sincerity is untestable and unfalsifiable. If a Transwoman were to say ‘though born biologically a man, I really, genuinely feel myself to be a woman’ it would be impertinent and offensive to reply ‘no you don’t, not really, you’re only pretending’. This is a general ethics. It is the position that I cannot, and do not have the right, to tell you how you feel. And actually I suspect that something else is happening in the Dolzeal case which, though it’s not often articulated (or if it is, then I haven’t seen it) is at root much less progressive set of assumptions—something that goes ‘for a White person to adopt Blackness is appropriation and therefore bad, but for a (biologically-born) Man to adopt Womanness isn’t appropriation. But this is to suggest that ‘women’s stuff’ (women’s lives and experiences and feelings) is, somehow, common property, trivial, not worth defending or demarcating, open for anyone to step into. Which is of course how men have treated women and their stuff, in the main, for thousands of years. That, in other words, White people don’t feel they have the right to appropriate Black experience, but Men feel, as they always have, that they do have the right to appropriate Female experience. Better—in the sense of more strategically worthwhile—would be to support people like Rachel Dolzeal, not second-guess her motivations but suggest that she and people like her are a tiny percentage of the larger population, that she does no harm, and that she has the same right as any person to live her life in a way that approximates to the way she feels inside. That our default ought to be: when a person tells us how they feel we believe them, unless we have very pressing and unmistakeable reasons to believe they are being disingenuous, and provided they do not present their feelings as a reason to harm others.