Who Were the Sea Peoples?

This is often brought up in discussions of transgendered people, apparently to prompt the reaction, "Well, if those nice Polynesians did, than we should too!" However, "recognizing a third sex" did not always turn out well for those so recognized: "The Romans... regarded intersexed infants as supernaturally cursed and put them to death... [Among] the East African tribe, the Pokot... frequently, intersexed children are killed in the offhand way one discards an ill-made pot..." -- Clifford Geertz, "Common Sense as a Cultural System," Local Knowledge , pp. 81-83 Maybe the Polynesians were on to something here, and maybe not. My point is simply that citing what some other people in some other time and place did about some problem we are facing now is interesting , and can suggest avenues for further exploration, but by itself doesn't really decide much!

I am interested in the sharp distinction being made between these two cases as an example of the incoherence of the progressive worldview, and not because of the cases themselves. And commenters attempts to defend this sharp distinction in response to previous posts leaves me more convinced than ever that I am right about this incoherence. The two main arguments put forward defending the distiction were: 1) Dolezal lied about her father and/or about being black. The first lie is not good, but does anyone seriously think that if Dolezal had not done that, then everybody would have said, "Oh, OK then, what she did is cool!" No, I didn't think so. Therefore, this is a completely peripheral issue to the main question at hand, which is "Is it OK to identify as a different race than one's 'real' one?" Bringing it up is merely an attempt to sidetrack the discussion of this main question. As far as the second "lie" goes, to declare it is...