When feeling is believing

In dismissing her critics in a recent interview, Rachel Dolezal sniffed that they    

couldn't grasp racial and ethnic complexities.                                                          

                                             

As the late Chris Farley of Saturday Night Live fame used to say, "Well, la-dee-   frickin'-da!"                                                                                                               

There are, of course, no entrenched demarcations between designations like black, white, asian, hispanic, etc. There may well be no %100 purity, and that's fine. Perhaps Dolezal believed herself to be black to some small degree, and elected to embrace that insignificant trace as all-encompassing definition.

She just looked silly doing it. And, judging by quotes she littered behind her, she apparently believed anti-white sourness to be a necessary component of her counterfeit "real" blackness.

In 2015, truths are not matters of objective fact, but are instead resculpted or even raised new to indulge "feelings." Individuals' emotional satisfaction have become the selfish and silly replacement of intellectualism and objective realities.

And the story of Rachel Dolezal and her fumbling "transracial" self-reinvention came along at exactly the wrong moment for cultural progressives.

'Dedicated followers of fashion' who had only recently puffed themselves up with stout, preposterous defenses and rationales for Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, found themselves on all fours playing pop-philosophical Twister to contrive positions explaining why, if a he could magically become a she, a white woman couldn't -- Presto! Chango! -- become black.

One example: In a 6/12 Mic essay, Feminist Wire co-manager Darnell L. Moore complained that, "[S]ome are carelessly equating the so-called 'transracial experience' with that of transgender people, ignoring, for one thing, that however socially constructed markers of racial divisions may be, skin color is hereditary."

Moore's stressing of heredity's importance seemed to indicate some regard on his part for objective biological reality. Odd, then, that his regard did not extend to explaining why, in his apparent reckoning, the immutable difference between male and female chromosomes is utterly insignificant.

Moore soldiered on, taking care to avoid the c-word: "To be clear, in attempting to pass as black, Dolezal falsely represented her identity. Trans people don't lie about their gender identities -- they express their gender according to categories that reflect who they are."

Gender, than, is not determined by nature, in the trendy pop-gospel of Feminist Wire co-manager Darnell L. Moore, but can now be reshaped according to heart-whim. In other words, anyone can be anything.

Except black.

I believe persons who choose to alter their gender have as much right to make their own life decisions as do any other of us. But I am persuaded by the idea that they then merit distinct classifications, rather than that the classical male and female ones be bent into accommodating shapes.

One frequently hurled argument favoring freshly minted "transgenderism" is that a consensus majority of the psychiatric professions today accept "gender diaspora" as a legitimate phenomenon.

But to posit that that recognition is indisputable and necessarily the 'final word' is to believe that the psychiatric majority is infallible. In championing gay rights -- a cause that I, too, support -- advocates sometimes note that once-solid consensus has changed, before. Gayness was in 1973 removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But to have been on it to begin with, a misjudgement had to have been
generally accepted by a majority in the psychiatric body. Who is to say the now-voguish "gender diaspora" notion won't in the future also be acknowledged as erroneous? After all, psychiatrists are human, people do make errors in judgement, cultural passions are not without bearing, and doctors are only able to utilize the research contemporarily available to them.

The only thing we can be sure of when it comes to the psychiatric community is that we cannot be sure of anything at all.

This silly debating of observable facts did not begin with racial poser Dolezal or gender one Jenner.

The farcical 'rethinking reality' phenomenon was at the center of the 1990-2005 argument over whether comotose adult cardiac arrest/oxygen deprivation victim Terry Sciavo was literally and definitely human. Only to annoyingly fine-pointed, me-first pretenders to intellectualism can a person somehow not be a person at all.

As the poor woman lay in her hospital bed, tubes in high function, busybodies wholly removed from her circumstance jousted on cable news, unashamed that their ideological promptings and political ambitions were easily discernable.

Of course, I understand that there are considerations other than appearances, and that they can be important in making determinations. For instance, did the absence of intellectual capacity, and the likelihood that such would forever be the case, mean Terry Sciavo had already effectively ceased being human?

How do we define "human?" By capacities for higher reasoning, for awareness of not just oneself but also surrounding circumstances?

Must such be present for humanity to be actual? Isn't it more than a little slavery-era or nazi-esque, to "debate" what constitutes humanity? Isn't humanity self-evident?

Can life only be safe for those able to speak for their interests and who possess some degree of power, or at least the ability to inspire advocacy by the power-wielding majority?

The same questions arise when considering abortion. If independent viability is the standard, how can one justify prolonging the lives of adults dependent upon artificial support? Haven't they, by that reasoning, ceased being human?

For my part, I'm not nearly as stalwart in my support of reproductive choice as I once was. Oh, I understand that an embryo in early stages of development is not objectively a person, and for that reason I still support early abortion.

But when a pregnancy is in its late stages, the embryo has attained personhood. And I do not support abortion at such a point.

Considering this matter from only a single perspective, such as "women's rights to reproductive determination" leads to a conclusion that dismisses all other relevant concerns. It is supremacist thinking. There is more than one life involved. And nature decided that a long time before any of us held forth on the subject.

All of these matters - Jenner, Dolezal, Schiavo, abortion - have in common the phenomenon of educated persons actually arguing over what is objectively so. And that only reaffirms the truth that being educated is not necessarily the same as being smart.

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