Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner

Again and again, I tried to make sense of these mind-bending transitions: Why was Jenner’s change met with (mostly) acclaim for her courage, while Dolezal’s was greeted with (mostly) vitriol for her deception?

Is gender more mutable than race? Was Dolezal appropriating the African-American experience or trying, however clumsily, to shape an authentic self? Is it different for someone born male to “feel female” and style herself accordingly than for someone born white to identify as black, and do the same?

It took a New Yorker cartoon by Emily Flake to bring a jigger of clarity to my mental murk. In the drawing, a woman in a grocery store stands by a display of pluots and explains to her companion, “It’s. . .an apricot that self-identifies as a plum.”

I laughed aloud, knowing it wouldn’t have been so funny last year. And then, for one shattering second, the whole episode — both episodes, actually, Jenner and Dolezal — seemed as absurd as the captioned sketch.

Plum is a plum is a plum?

The cartoon reminds me that there’s nothing inherently “apricottish” or “plummy” about the stone fruits we gobble each summer. It’s an apricot because we call it an apricot; a plum because we’ve named it “plum.”

And when enterprising fruit breeders decided to hybridize — the process nature accomplishes on its own, just more slowly — they were the ones who coined the name “pluot” for their sweet invention.

The cartoon is witty. It’s also brilliant because it pokes at the real question here: If gender and race are stories — created by all of us, because we yearn to make sense of our world by categorizing everything in it — then whose privilege is it to tell those tales?

Is the intersex infant — born with ambiguous genitalia that could be “read” as a large clitoris or a miniscule penis — a boy because the obstetrician and the parents say so or, perhaps, a girl because from the age of two, the child insists on wearing pink tulle and pirouetting across the living room?

Is the biracial teen — the one with kinked hair, caramel skin, and rusty freckles — white because he feels closer kinship with the Irish side of his family? Or black because the cop who stops him at three in the morning sees something different — and dangerous?

Evolving stories

It’s worth remembering that our stories about gender and race, along with the public policies that reflect and codify them, are, in Barack Obama’s words, “evolving.”

It was only 1967 when the last miscegenation laws, which made interracial marriage a crime, were deemed unconstitutional. And as recently as 1977, 53 people were arrested under Houston’s anti-cross-dressing ordinance, a law that was overturned only in 1980. Even for children, gender-atypical clothing was considered transgressive; my own elementary school forbade girls from wearing pants until I was in the third grade.

We roll our eyes at that dusty rule now; in 20 years (or fewer, if transgender activists and their allies keep up the good fight), will we chuckle ruefully about those outmoded signs designating school bathrooms for “girls” and “boys”?

Despite a two-term African-American president, notwithstanding June’s Supreme Court decision making marriage equality the law of the land, the reactions to Jenner and Dolezal make it clear that our conversation about race, gender, and identity is far from over.

Betrayal and survival

I do think there’s a difference worth parsing. For centuries, African Americans who were light-complexioned enough to “pass” sometimes did so in an effort to gain jobs, housing, or access in a world that was (and still is) biased against darker skin.

Women did the same when they took on men’s uniforms to fight in the Civil War or adopted male names to get their manuscripts onto an editor’s desk. Were those acts of betrayal — abandoning one’s gender or race to gain individual privilege rather than joining the collective struggle? Or acts of survival? I think they were a little of both.

Fashioning an identity

What’s troubling about Dolezal is that she used her privilege as a white woman to fashion an identity (and I use the word “fashion” deliberately, since her notion of blackness seems to center on braids, bronzers, and clothing) that was only skin-deep. But she acted — in her university teaching position and as president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP — as if those outward markers conferred a set of life-shaping experiences.

Rachel Dolezal has a story — a knotty and painful one, to judge from her own and her family’s comments. But it’s not a story of growing up black.

Had she presented herself as a white woman with a profound, lifelong connection to black culture — as a white woman who felt, however perplexingly, that she’d been born in the wrong skin — I might have had more empathy.

This way, I just felt duped.

Welcome to womanhood

I had a different reaction to Jenner, who wasn’t trying to fool anyone. In fact, I felt an unexpected solidarity, even while I cringed at her uber-feminine garb and the wolfish comments on her surgically altered shape. I thought about writing a postcard: Welcome to womanhood, Cait.

But here’s what I really want to say to Jenner, to Dolezal, to everyone who’s still trying to puzzle out his or her place on the map: We are all odd fruit, more story than science. And the exasperating, shocking, wondrous thing about that story is how it can change. Over centuries. Over a single lifetime.

I look forward to a time when we bust the categories — male, female, black, white, gay, straight — wide open to make room for the complicated, contradictory, nuanced experiences that live inside and between those boxes.

Which might mean inventing new language — as transgender folks have with the pronouns “hir” and “ze” — that might help us understand those whose lives break rules, straddle boundaries, and confound our notions of identity and choice.

Because it’s the stories — the ones we tell ourselves, the ones others spin about us — that shape who we become.

Just ask the pluot.

For Maria Thompson Corley’s essay on Rachel Dolezal, click here.