× Expand Rex Features via AP Images

In the summer of 2015, ten days after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender on the cover of Vanity Fair, a debate erupted about whether a woman named Rachel Dolezal could be considered "transracial." Dolezal had long presented herself as black-indeed, she was a local official of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington-but had just been "outed" by her parents as white. Dolezal's claim to identify as black was widely condemned and ridiculed, although she had long been immersed in African American culture and social networks as well as political activism. Dolezal insists that "nothing about whiteness describes who I am."

Understandings of sex and gender have shifted dramatically in recent decades as transsexual and transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream. A broadening segment of the public, especially among the young, urban, and well educated, has come to accept transitions from male to female or the reverse. More striking still is the growing public acceptance of gender identities that fall between or beyond the binary categories. Beginning last fall, for example, applicants to the University of California who preferred alternatives to male or female could choose among four additional options on application forms: trans male, trans female, gender queer/gender non-conforming, or different identity.

Yet even as gender has been re-imagined in far-reaching and unprecedented ways, race continues to be understood as unchanging and unchosen. There's a puzzle here. Differences between the sexes-morphological, physiological, and hormonal-have a much deeper biological basis than differences between the races. Sex and gender might therefore be seen as less choosable and changeable than race.

What explains this paradox? It seems to me there are two keys to understanding why the reactions to "transgender" and "transracial" have been so different in contemporary culture.

The first key lies in the distinction that social scientists draw between the biological phenomenon of sex and the cultural and psychological phenomenon of gender. This distinction makes it possible to understand individual gender identity as independent of the sexed body-as an inner essence that is knowable only by the individual.

Yet, in what has become the dominant view, gender identity is understood as rooted in biology even though it is independent of the visible features of the sexed body. Consequently, gender identity is both a state of mind and a material fact that the individual, having been "born that way," cannot control.

On this way of thinking, while we cannot change our inner gender identity, we can change our public gender identity by changing how others see us. Indeed, authenticity requires that transformation. Some transgender people choose not to transform their bodies through surgery or hormones. But the congruence between inner gender identity and the visible body remains a powerful cultural ideal. The transgender twist is that instead of conceiving of the sexed body as an unchosen and unchanging substrate and gender identity as its expression, people can now imagine their gender identity as unchosen and their body as changeable.

The sex-gender distinction has no equivalent in discussions of race. That makes it difficult to think about racial identity as an inner essence that is independent of the body and knowable only by the individual. And it helps explain why Dolezal's claim to "feel" black had little public traction.

Your donation keeps this site free and open for all to read. Give what you can... SUPPORT THE PROSPECT

THE SECOND KEY TO explaining why sex and gender can be changed more easily than race lies in the idea of inheritance. Although biological sex is governed by genetic inheritance, the process of inheritance begins anew with each act of fertilization. History and lineage are irrelevant. But as the philosopher Cressida Heyes has argued, history, lineage, and intergenerational continuity are central to our understanding of the inheritance of race. Ancestry is understood as constitutive of race, yet as entirely irrelevant to sex and gender.

The authority of ancestry over racial identity limits the possibilities of self-refashioning.

An individual who identifies with a race to which she is not entitled by ancestry cannot claim to have been "born in the wrong body." (Jess Row's 2014 novel Your Face in Mine, about an individual who does make this claim and undergoes "race reassignment surgery," reads as satire.) Even as the cultural ideal of authenticity authorizes sex changes, it stigmatizes attempts to change how others see one's race.

Nonetheless, racial as well as gender identities have been opened up to choice and change in recent decades. Increasing rates of intermarriage, the multiracial movement's campaign for recognition of mixed and multiracial identities, and even genetic ancestry tests that report their results in the language of admixture have highlighted the inherently mixed nature of race. For an ever-widening circle, ancestry no longer provides unambiguous answers to questions about racial identity. Paradoxically, the more we know about our ancestry, the less unambiguously that ancestry determines our identity. Mixed ancestry not only permits choice; it requires choice.

The authority of ancestry has also been eroded by another contemporary shift in both academic and popular thought. Recent work in the social sciences and humanities increasingly views race, like gender, as something we do, not something we have. Instead of being inborn, identities are enacted. A significant current of popular culture-from Eddie Murphy's Saturday Night Live "White Like Me" skit through Michael Jackson's racially coded self-transmutation to the reality TV show Black.White-also highlights the artificiality, constructedness, and instability of racial categories.

Understandings of race as a deep, authentic, and unalterable identity continue to inform everyday understandings and practices as well as racist ideologies. And needless to say, opportunities for choice and change remain unequally distributed. As the Black Lives Matter movement highlights, the black body has a distinctive vulnerability.

Analogies between gender and race have their limits. While transgender is a socially recognized and legally validated identity, transracial is not. In that sense, the widely tweeted slogan during the controversy over Dolezal-"Transracial is not a thing"-was correct. Yet transracial is nonetheless a usefully provocative concept. It calls attention to the massive unsettling of racial as well as gender identities, and to the fact that race and gender are socially constructed categories that are increasingly-although in different ways and to differing degrees-open to choice and change.