The Easy Gullibility at the Heart of Self Proclaimed Identity
Lew Hanna and I, when we were both in high school, used to go to the mall and pretend I was a Russian foreign exchange student. I did, in my opinion at the time, a fairly convincing broken accent and Lew acted as my guide to all things American. We'd wander through the mall, weaving in and out of the stores and I'd marvel at the modern wonders of capitalism as if Russia were a barren wasteland devoid of things like distressed jeans and Orange Julius.
"Vhat is dis?" I'd exclaim sounding vaguely like a vampire.
"Uri... this is a scented candle. We have them everywhere in America."
"Scented? In Russia we haff buckets of vax and use old socks for vicks. They smell like vax. Dis is amazing! It smells like vanilla!"
I doubt we fooled too many people but I'd argue that so many people were too busy doing their thing to truly give a shit, a percentage likely passingly believed a kid and his Russian friend had swung by to marvel at the fruits of American capitalism. This was in the 80's, just as the Cold War had ended and my guess is that it was at least plausible.
Sacheen Littlefeather, the activist who famously stood in for Marlon Brando to refuse the best actor Oscar in 1973, faked Native American ancestry, her family have said.
In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Littlefeather’s sisters Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi said that their sister’s claim to have Apache and Yaqui ancestry through her father was “a lie” and “a fantasy”.
Orlandi told the Chronicle: “It’s a lie. My father was who he was. His family came from Mexico. And my dad was born in Oxnard [California].” Cruz added: “It is a fraud. It’s disgusting to the heritage of the tribal people. And it’s just … insulting to my parents.”
This isn't new. It may be one of the longest term transracial grifts on record but Littlefeather was only in the public eye for a small window. Knowing Brando's proclivity for flipping off the system in Hollywood, it is even conceivable that he knew she was a sham and it was this reason alone for choosing her to accept his Oscar. She tried to leverage her Oscar fame into a Playboy spread and get in the movies but it didn't pan out. So, with a lower profile, most people just accepted her claims and moved on.
Rachel Dolezal was so effective at pretending she was black that she was made president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington. The subject of public scrutiny when her parents publicly stated that she was white while pretending to be black followed Dolezal's reports to police and local news media that she had been the victim of race-related hate crimes; a police investigation did not find support for her allegations. Dolezal had also claimed to be mixed-race and that a black man was her father. She was dismissed from her position as an instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and was removed from her post as chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission in Spokane over "a pattern of misconduct." In 2015, Dolezal acknowledged that she was "born white to white parents," but maintained that she self-identified as black.
Self-identified.
For most of my life, I was told our family was almost entirely Irish. I've self-identified as Irish for so long it's embedded in my sense of who I am. My ex-wife called me the WIB (White Irish Beef). I've maintained I'm impervious to psychoanalysis because of the Sigmund Freud quote claiming the Irish were exempt. The luck of the Irish. My temper and love of whiskey. Irish.
Recently my mother did one of those Ancestry.com things and discovered we were a bit Irish but mostly Welsh. I didn't know quite how to take this news. At first, I decided "Fuck it. I'm still Irish because I say I'm Irish." Mom assures me we're Welsh but our forebears lived in Ireland for 200 years before coming to America but Welsh is Welsh, gang. It's fundamentally dishonest to continue self-identifying as Irish especially given that I now know I'm apparently fucking Welsh. What is it to be Welsh and, further, does it matter in any substantive way to... well... anybody?
Catfishing scams were all the rage until they started making reality television about them. Who's to say that a fat dude living in a garden apartment can't self-identify as a nineteen-year-old college girl looking for love? If, in fact, the direction of self ID is, as I'm told, you are exactly what and who you say you are, what substantially is the difference between Sacheen Littlefeather and Kayla Lemieux, the Manufacturing Technology teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School in Ontario who claims to be a woman by wearing a wig and ridiculously large prosthetic tits?
Is race and gender that different? The argument seems to be that a person claiming to self-identify as a different race has not lived as that race. That someone like Dolezal grew up without the hurdles of being black and thus cannot identify as such because she couldn’t possibly share the collective trauma of the legitimate barriers of living black in America. Is growing up with the challenges of being black somehow more traumatic than growing up female? While a convenient point of view for the transgender community it is also fundamentally dishonest. Women have a much longer history of marginalization than even the Jewish communities, their lived experience more fraught with danger and second class treatment, and to simply live as a man for decades and then decide to identify as a woman is as valid as me pretending to be a Russian student.
One difficulty resides in an important distinction—appearing as that which you identify pacifies those most in conflict with your choice. Sacheen Littlefeather looks like a Native American. Kayla Lemieux looks like a middle-aged guy in drag. Perhaps the phobia (which is less about fear and more about intolerance) against transgender people isn't against all transgender people, just the ugly ones. The trans folks who look like women with facial hair or men with feminine make up are far more likely to be misgendered than, say, Hunter Schafer from Euphoria.
This isn't fair but it isn't false, either. It's ungenerous but isn't intolerance about the least generous attitude on the spectrum?
Before it had become a thing, a friend called me a cis-gender man.
"A what?"
"Cis-gender. It means your gender identity aligns with the sex registered at your birth."
"So, you're saying I'm a dude with dude parts?"
"Sort of, yeah."
"What if I just identify with being a man? What I don't, uhm, identify with a label someone else decided for me? Isn't that similar to people insisting Dolezal is white or Caitlin Jenner insisting she's a woman?"
"Sort of but not really."
"How so?"
"I'm not going to explain it to you. It's too much trouble."
"OK. I prefer to not be referred to as cis-gender and identify as a dude. Is that cool?"
"No. But whatever."
At the end of the day and a few years later, I realized it really didn't matter what other people called me. The only reason it might bother me would be if I was already uncomfortable with my own definition of myself. In the parlance of a generation a few beyond my own "I don't care what you call me as long as you don't call me late for dinner."
I believe that's at the heart of this. Does it matter if Littlefeather was Mexican and not Native American? Only to those who didn't have their moment of fame and who felt lied to. Did it matter if Dolezal wasn't black? Only to those who believe one must be black to be president of a chapter of the NAACP (as I understand it she did a lot of good there until she fabricated a racial attack) and sense that if white people can be black, it’s just another lost opportunity in capitalism for themselves. According to most students of Kayla Lemieux, they don't really care (and if the controversy gets them out of class, rock on). The only people upset about her are concerned with grooming which is silly given that their kids already watch Game of Thrones (incest, sex, murder, and dragons) and the aforementioned Euphoria (teen sex, teen drug use, teen trans issues, more teen sex, and all by incredibly hot twenty-two year olds acting like teens). If grooming there be, it certainly isn’t coming from their school, gang.
We’re a gullible bunch. We imbue authority on anyone wearing a white coat or a black suit. We buy into the rich guy on a boat who will show you how to make millions yourself. We get hooked by the fitness guru who sells us pills to melt fat. We believe because it’s easier to get hoodwinked than to distrust everyone around us.
Self identification is the adoption of a costume. As long as that costume makes you feel good and doesn't infringe on anyone else, what's the big deal? Hell, my mom dressed up as an evil rabbit for Halloween and I didn't yell at her "You are not a rabbit! Stop pretending to be one!" On the other hand, if she dressed up that way and insisted on eating grass in the yard, it's time for the home.
