“I identify as black.”

With those four words, uttered during an uncomfortable Today Show interview with Matt Lauer, recently-resigned NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal may have singlehandedly set perceptions of transgender people back at least as many years.

In the past few days, some conservatives have latched onto Dolezal’s bizarre tale of “transracial” masquerading as a way to discredit Caitlyn Jenner and other transgender people, prompting a flood of response pieces pointing out the scientific spuriousness of the comparison.

But with her Today appearance, Dolezal seems determined to appropriate not just blackness but the rhetoric of transgender identity as well. Even more troubling: she’s getting away with it. Despite an avalanche of evidence to the contrary, some liberal commentators are beginning to repeat Dolezal’s use of transgender rhetoric.

When asked by Lauer point blank whether or not she is “an African-American woman,” Dolezal simply responded, “I identify as black.”

The language of identity is often used in the transgender community to describe a disconnect between the gender someone was assigned at birth and the gender with which one identifies. Most transgender men, for example, were listed as “female” on a birth certificate but identify as men and, accordingly, take a range of social and medical steps to correct that initial assignment.

Source:  Ken Shepherd, http://newsbusters.org