"I identify as black"

To trust others, you want to know where they fit in the scheme of things. You are used to treating women one way in particular situations, men another, and you expect them to respond appropriately. There are some things you can say to whites that you can’t say to blacks, and vice-versa; there are codes for the "right" way to behave for children, for police officers, for your wife or your husband, for other people's wives and husbands. You expect others to play these familiar roles and to know the codes as well as you. If they violate them in some way, even trivial, you wonder about them, and you can't really trust them in other ways.

Now we get Rachel Donezal, who has said for years that she is black and has held high positions in the NAACP, but who, it seems, is actually purely white. It rattles us. If it was the reverse - black passing for white - it would be much less upsetting; one might condemn it, but it would be easy to imagine why she would do that and what game she was playing. But we can't figure out what game she is playing here. It disturbs our expectations of how people act. Some people try to cram her into a familiar box: she must be doing it out of self interest, to gain advantages from affirmative action! But there is no evidence that she tried to do that; on the contrary, she almost certainly made life harder for herself.

Yet Donezal is only a particularly obvious case of something happening more and more widely: people are choosing, even constructing, their ethnic and sexual identities rather than accepting those given to them by tradition and birth. Many who might be called black do indeed choose to identify as white. President Obama had a choice, and he chose black. Why is that different from Donezal? He had one black parent, to be sure, but he still had to make a choice, and he was welcomed by the black community. Then there is the sudden attention to transgender people: even more sharply than race, gender has been the fundamental marker of human identity and the definer of relations - yet now Bruce Jenner can become Caitlyn.

It's understandable that many people want to say, "Stop this madness!" If anyone can be anything, how do we know who anybody is? How do we know what to expect? Can people choose to act any way they want? Isn't this a course towards chaos?

Shakespeare expressed this feeling at a time of challenges to the settled order of “degree”:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows!

What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!

What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!

Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors...

But despite the discomfort and the fears, it's not going to stop. Jenner and Donezal represent just another step in a progression that had gone on for many centuries since Shakespeare's time, which has opened the opportunity for the shopkeeper's son to be a lawyer, and then for his daughter to be a senator, and for the grandson of a slave to be his boss. At each step of this long progression the same cry had been raised: it breaks the rules, it's immoral, it threatens our way of life! Each step has indeed been difficult and confusing, but our society is much larger and better for it. Now: if a woman can be president, why can't she be a man? And if she is born white, why can't she be black?

There's only one way to avoid chaos in a world where people really get to choose who they are: to try to understand them. If we can understand why Caitlin Jenner made her choice, we can start to make sense of her motives and, ultimately, to trust her. She has gotten to tell her story, in Vanity Fair, so millions have begun to stretch their understanding of how people might feel and act. But for Rachel Donezal, there has been less opportunity: she has been driven largely into silence.

We should stop and listen to her. We should listen to what she has to say about how she sees herself and the world. We should try to see her perspective. Then, if necessary, we can judge.