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| Photo of Jessica Krug |
The issue of trans-racials, people who identify as being from a race or ethnicity they are not born into has raised its head again in the person of Hannah Gann a white Jewish woman of considerable wealth and privilege who self-identified as a Palestinian with mixed black (Tunisian) heritage.[1] She is not the first person to make such extravagant claims.
In 2015 Rachel Dolezal came to prominence in the US and internationally having been outed as white. Now, normally being white is not something you are outed as, but Dolezal has quite the chequered history. She was born to white parents, sued a black university for racial discrimination on the grounds she was white, altered her appearance and even became the head of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Spokane. She, a white woman, had managed to pass herself off as black, not to other whites but to black leaders. It caused a moment of crisis for identitarians and was unintentionally great material for comics, though most stayed away from it. This was when Woke was goosestepping its way through cultural institutions, banishing all who would question it to the intellectual and cultural dungeons or side lines, particularly those who were Leftists. So she was best left alone and denounced. The uncomfortable questions she raised were not to be dealt with and unsurprisingly others tried their hand at it.
One of those who did was another white woman who passed herself off as Latina. Ostensibly easier to do. Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan was the first “Latina” president of the National Lawyers Guild who passed herself off as Colombian and sometimes as Puerto Rican. She did well out of it apparently and has been criticised by actual Latinas who haven’t had quite the same success as this brazen grifter.[2] There are others such as the white academic Jessica Krug, who apparently insisted on pronouncing her surname like the Spanish Cruz. She claimed, depending almost literally on the time of day, to being Afro-Latina, Algerian, Black, Puerto Rican etc. but was in fact a white Jew. Her book, published by the prestigious academic press Duke University Press was nominated for the Douglass Prize and also the Harriet Tubman Prize. The Douglass Prize is open to all, including whites, the Tubman Prize is not. Duke University ended up denouncing her and having to donate all their profits from her book to a fund for Latino and Black academics.[3]
This happened not just in the US but around the world. The influencer Oli London said he identified as Korean, then decided that wasn’t good enough and said he was a non-binary, gender fluid Korean and even underwent various surgeries to make himself look more “Korean” and renamed himself as Park Jimin Huening Kai Taeyong Imnida[4] before finally finding his home as a conservative Catholic and detransitioning.[5] It is a very appropriate ending for him. He started off believing there was some soul that was uniquely Korean and he had it and ended up believing in some universal Christian soul that we all apparently have. And he finally accepted he had been born in the right body, well what other body could he have been born in? The only trans he now accepts is the ridiculous notion of transubstantiation, which is the belief that Catholics literally eat the body of Christ at mass. I am not sure which is the more insane claim.
Rachel Dolezal has survived the whole thing, is now known as Nkechi Diallo and no longer says she is black but rather Trans-Racial. She got past her welfare fraud conviction as well and even managed to write a book with the unintentionally hilarious title of In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. Some of the others are still going strong as well.
However, there are consequences to these charades. Gann in fairness to her seems to acknowledge it:
In 2015 Rachel Dolezal came to prominence in the US and internationally having been outed as white. Now, normally being white is not something you are outed as, but Dolezal has quite the chequered history. She was born to white parents, sued a black university for racial discrimination on the grounds she was white, altered her appearance and even became the head of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Spokane. She, a white woman, had managed to pass herself off as black, not to other whites but to black leaders. It caused a moment of crisis for identitarians and was unintentionally great material for comics, though most stayed away from it. This was when Woke was goosestepping its way through cultural institutions, banishing all who would question it to the intellectual and cultural dungeons or side lines, particularly those who were Leftists. So she was best left alone and denounced. The uncomfortable questions she raised were not to be dealt with and unsurprisingly others tried their hand at it.
One of those who did was another white woman who passed herself off as Latina. Ostensibly easier to do. Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan was the first “Latina” president of the National Lawyers Guild who passed herself off as Colombian and sometimes as Puerto Rican. She did well out of it apparently and has been criticised by actual Latinas who haven’t had quite the same success as this brazen grifter.[2] There are others such as the white academic Jessica Krug, who apparently insisted on pronouncing her surname like the Spanish Cruz. She claimed, depending almost literally on the time of day, to being Afro-Latina, Algerian, Black, Puerto Rican etc. but was in fact a white Jew. Her book, published by the prestigious academic press Duke University Press was nominated for the Douglass Prize and also the Harriet Tubman Prize. The Douglass Prize is open to all, including whites, the Tubman Prize is not. Duke University ended up denouncing her and having to donate all their profits from her book to a fund for Latino and Black academics.[3]
This happened not just in the US but around the world. The influencer Oli London said he identified as Korean, then decided that wasn’t good enough and said he was a non-binary, gender fluid Korean and even underwent various surgeries to make himself look more “Korean” and renamed himself as Park Jimin Huening Kai Taeyong Imnida[4] before finally finding his home as a conservative Catholic and detransitioning.[5] It is a very appropriate ending for him. He started off believing there was some soul that was uniquely Korean and he had it and ended up believing in some universal Christian soul that we all apparently have. And he finally accepted he had been born in the right body, well what other body could he have been born in? The only trans he now accepts is the ridiculous notion of transubstantiation, which is the belief that Catholics literally eat the body of Christ at mass. I am not sure which is the more insane claim.
Rachel Dolezal has survived the whole thing, is now known as Nkechi Diallo and no longer says she is black but rather Trans-Racial. She got past her welfare fraud conviction as well and even managed to write a book with the unintentionally hilarious title of In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. Some of the others are still going strong as well.
However, there are consequences to these charades. Gann in fairness to her seems to acknowledge it:
I still believe in every cause I ever supported, in the ongoing fight for justice and in the righteousness of liberation for all oppressed peoples… I still believe that theirs is the real story and mine is just a sick, deluded distraction.[6]
Almost everyone accepts that these charades undermine the causes the deluded participate in. All of the women mentioned here could have participated as women in struggles against women’s oppression. Two were Jewish and they could have participated as anti-Zionist Jews. But that doesn’t get them enough points in the Oppression Olympics that are so favoured in social movements. The more boxes you can tick, the more a right to be heard you have and the easier it is to shut down an opponent with “That’s because you are not…”. Class doesn’t matter and identity politics rule the roost.
I lived in London for a short period in the 1980s and even then you could see the reactionary anti-working class seeds of what became Woke politics. The joke at the time was that if you were a black, Irish, lesbian in London with a disability nobody could criticise you. That is no longer a joke, that is the rule amongst most social movements, liberal and Left organisations. If you don’t have a disability pick one, preferably one that is not easy to challenge. In the 1980s, workers looking for an extra sick day would claim bad back. Couldn’t be disproved, or at least that is what one of the local doctors in my neighbourhood in Dublin used to say. He gave them out like confetti. Now you pick a complicated one, that only a medical professional after lots of study could claim wasn’t true. Left organisations and social movements have the highest rates of just about everything going, from autism to ADHD. It gains them brownie points and undermines those who actually suffer from these conditions.
At the time of the Rachel Dolezal scandal, Trevor Noah the South African comedian, based in the US, was also in the ascendent and a woke warrior. He was scathing of Delozal and the likes and said you can’t pick and choose the good parts. You haven’t lived as a black person, and all the oppression that entails, so you can’t just claim to be one. To be clear, race and ethnicity are socially defined concepts and whiteness as a concept has only existed for a few hundred years. The genetic differences between blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians etc, are miniscule and limited to secondary features like skin colour etc. Whether you can identify as black or Asian crosses no significant biological frontier, just a social and historical one. So far most liberals and Leftists reading this piece may have been nodding along in quiet agreement. Here is the sting in the tail.
If you can’t be trans-racial, then you can’t be transgender either. The biological differences between men and women are huge and sex is a biological category and women exist as a biological category. All of those who shriek in horror at the nonsense of Dolezal, Gann and others but think Eddie Izzard is a woman need to reconsider their politics and perhaps their mental health. The Trans-Racials only positive contribution is that they helped shine a light on this nonsense in quarters that were not open to discussion on the question of transgender. Some have the ridiculous idea that a man can identify as a woman, but draw the line at a white man identifying as a black woman. Stupidity reigns supreme.
References
[1] NBC News (23/09/2026) ‘Temu Rachel Dolezal’: Philly activist confesses to years of identity fraud faking Black and Palestinian Heritage. Doha Madani.
[2] Prism Reports (07/01/2021) The National Lawyers Guild’s former first ‘Latina’ president is a white woman. Tiina Vásquez.
[3] The Guardian (14/09/2020) Publisher denounces Jessica Krug for pretending to be black. Alison Flood.
[4] Newsweek (28/06/2021) Oli London Before Surgery Pictures as Instagram Star Identifies as Korean. Ryan Smith.
[5] EWTN News (04/11/2022) De-transitioner Oli London shares conversion to Christianity. Edie Heipel.
[6] NBC News (23/09/2026) op. cit.
At the time of the Rachel Dolezal scandal, Trevor Noah the South African comedian, based in the US, was also in the ascendent and a woke warrior. He was scathing of Delozal and the likes and said you can’t pick and choose the good parts. You haven’t lived as a black person, and all the oppression that entails, so you can’t just claim to be one. To be clear, race and ethnicity are socially defined concepts and whiteness as a concept has only existed for a few hundred years. The genetic differences between blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians etc, are miniscule and limited to secondary features like skin colour etc. Whether you can identify as black or Asian crosses no significant biological frontier, just a social and historical one. So far most liberals and Leftists reading this piece may have been nodding along in quiet agreement. Here is the sting in the tail.
If you can’t be trans-racial, then you can’t be transgender either. The biological differences between men and women are huge and sex is a biological category and women exist as a biological category. All of those who shriek in horror at the nonsense of Dolezal, Gann and others but think Eddie Izzard is a woman need to reconsider their politics and perhaps their mental health. The Trans-Racials only positive contribution is that they helped shine a light on this nonsense in quarters that were not open to discussion on the question of transgender. Some have the ridiculous idea that a man can identify as a woman, but draw the line at a white man identifying as a black woman. Stupidity reigns supreme.
References
[1] NBC News (23/09/2026) ‘Temu Rachel Dolezal’: Philly activist confesses to years of identity fraud faking Black and Palestinian Heritage. Doha Madani.
[2] Prism Reports (07/01/2021) The National Lawyers Guild’s former first ‘Latina’ president is a white woman. Tiina Vásquez.
[3] The Guardian (14/09/2020) Publisher denounces Jessica Krug for pretending to be black. Alison Flood.
[4] Newsweek (28/06/2021) Oli London Before Surgery Pictures as Instagram Star Identifies as Korean. Ryan Smith.
[5] EWTN News (04/11/2022) De-transitioner Oli London shares conversion to Christianity. Edie Heipel.
[6] NBC News (23/09/2026) op. cit.
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
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