Tucker Lieberman
1 min readMay 31, 2021

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The part you are quoting is someone else's view I was paraphrasing. I was paraphrasing Meredith Talusan's Guardian article. I think the idea here is that Dolezal leveraged her own public presentation as a Black woman to gain access to funds that had essentially been intended for Black people (as she was working as an NAACP chapter president) and to otherwise take up "space" meant for Black people, whereas this is not generally a motivation or outcome for transgender people. Yes, there are certain efforts, investments, and opportunities given or made on a gendered basis, but they're not exactly the same as those made on a racial basis. Gender just works differently than race in this respect. There's not much point in making an enormous list of the way in which race is similar to or different from gender. It's a distraction.

My position is that a Dolezal-like identity or experience is overall so very different from a transgender identity or experience that it doesn't even make sense to do a compare/contrast. Some things might be similar; lots of things will be very different; it isn't helpful to make a list. We can't do anything useful with that list. When someone like Dawkins tweets that we should do the compare/contrast, he's trying to get us to engage in this exercise, and we are better off not engaging in it. It isn't a serious academic question. It is trolling.

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

Cult classic. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." Editor for Prism & Pen and Identity Current. tuckerlieberman.com

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