When I was a senior in high school I got my picture taken in one of those three-for-a-buck photo booths. Because the lighting was a little off, the color of my skin appeared a bit darker than it actually is. I can’t remember exactly why I ended up showing it to the high school dean helping me with my college applications process, but I do remember the joke he made about it to this underachieving B student. “With this picture I could get you into Harvard,” he wisecracked. How little both of us knew about what the future would bring two generations later.

Progressives don’t quite know it yet, but their ideology just exploded in their faces like a cheap cigar. The explosion came courtesy of two big stories, one right after the other over the course of two weeks. The first story was the coming out and subsequent lionization of Bruce, a.k.a. Caitlyn Jenner in all his/her “Vanity Fair” photo-shoot glory. A little fake boobs and a wig here, and a lot of photo-shopping there, and the next thing you know, Jenner is the toast of the progressive town — and woe unto any “bigot,” “genderphobe,” “fuddy-duddy,” etc. who isn’t down with the “I Am What I Say I Am” chorus.

It’s a familiar refrain, one that kicks chromosomes and genitalia to the curb in favor of the idea that one is “trapped” in a body of the wrong sex. Thus Bruce becomes Caitlyn despite the “inconvenience” of his XY chromosomes and, as he/she has himself/herself admitted, having a penis and testicles.

Now I have no beef with Jenner, or anyone else for that matter calling him/herself anything he/she wants. I have a big problem with the notion that society should accommodate such declarations based on nothing more than those declarations. Thus if “Superman” is standing on the window sill of a burning building, I expect the fire department to make every attempt to deploy a safety net, or one of those giant air cushions, on the street below. Superman may declare himself the Man of Steel with all the attendant powers, but allowing him to die in a crumpled heap on the street — for accommodation sake — is sheer madness.

Yet at least as far as transgenderism is concerned, progressives are prepared to go mad. A number of women’s colleges have decided to accept men who declare themselves women, and this bit from the New York Times should give one an idea of how complicated the process has become at Barnard College. Its new policy “welcomes applicants who ‘consistently live and identify as women, regardless of the gender assigned to them at birth.’ Students who enter as female and then transition to male while at Barnard will be able to stay at the college and receive a Barnard degree. Transgender men, who were assigned female at birth but identify as men at the time of application, are ineligible for admission, as are students who identify as neither gender, regardless of their birth sex.”

The entire state of California is way ahead of Barnard. In 2013 Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill requiring public schools to allow kindergarten-through-12th grade students access to whichever restroom and locker room they choose, based on their self-perception, utterly irrespective of their birth gender. Now one may wonder how many kindergarteners have sexual identity problems, but as far as progressives go, it’s never too early to begin the process of ideological indoctrination. In fact, if one is indelicate enough to suggest that giving children medical treatment to effect their transitions constitutes medical malpractice or parental abuse, expect the usual deafening level of vituperation from the usual progressive suspects.

Which brings us to story number two. Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane, WA, chapter of the NAACP and adjunct professor of African-American Studies at Eastern Washington University, has engendered yet another cutting edge term: trans-racialism. That’s because despite years of passing herself off as a woman of color, Ms. Dolezal is of the Caucasian persuasion. So Caucasian that in the picture of her as a young girl presented here, she could have passed for Opie’s big sister on the “Andy Griffith Show." "She’s clearly our birth daughter, and we’re clearly Caucasian — that’s just a fact,” said father Lawrence A. Dolezal sin an interview from his home in Montana last Friday. Both of her parents further revealed Dolezal’s heritage is Czech, Swedish and German, with possible traces of Native American.

Unsurprisingly, Rachel disagrees. When asked if she was white in one interview, she said she didn’t “understand the question.” She was a bit better prepared for another interview, insisting the question “is not as easy as it seems,” before ultimately declaring, “We’re all from the African content.” She got better still in an interview with Spokane’s KREM television. “If I was asked, I would definitely say that yes, I do consider myself to be black,” she insisted.

Dolezal has spun a series of improbable tales to buttress her black persona. She has claimed her adopted black brother is her son, that she is blonde because she had cancer, and that she and her siblings were physically abused by her parents, who would punish them according to “skin complexion,” using a baboon whip when they lived in South Africa. Her parents insist they never lived in South Africa. Regardless of Dolezal’s claims, or who’s telling the truth between her and her parents, none of it will matter an iota when Dolezal ultimately stumbles upon her ideologically inspired ace in the hole. To wit:

I am an African-American woman trapped in a Caucasian woman’s body.

And make no mistake: The progressive flop-sweat is already showing. “Jim Crow laws often imposed a ‘one-drop rule’ so that people with even a sliver of black ancestry, no matter how white they appeared, were legally considered black,” the New York Times informs us. “It is only because of that history that Ms. Dolezal could be accepted as black,” said Martha A. Sandweiss, a history professor of Princeton University.“ (Again, unless her parents are lying, Dolezal doesn’t even attain that meager standard).

Sandweiss continued. "There was very little to be gained by identifying yourself as black, so if you did, no one questioned it,” she said. “It shows how absurd racial classifications often are.”

Really? In an age of enforced diversity, affirmative action, college admission quotas, and racial set-asides for businesses and government positions, there’s little to be gained by being black? And racial classifications are absurd? Like Black History Month, the Congressional Black Caucus — or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?

Daily Beast columnist Pat Blanchfield is aghast, wondering what is “wrong” with Dolezal, and noting her case “suggests more than just a deep-seated problem, something more than just a highly narcissistic form of histrionic personal disorder, or an unhealthy need for obsession and approval.” Maybe so, Pat, but she hasn’t made the cover of Vanity Fair — yet. Unfortunately for Blanchfield, he states something utterly anathema to progressives near the end of his piece, insisting that “beyond that level of banal abstraction, our freedom to live out our stories as we see fit is not a universal entitlement.”

One is guessing Gov. Jerry Brown, Caitlyn Jenner and countless others would heartily disagree — including transgender mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Fallon Fox, who left "her" completely overmatched opponent with a concussion and a damaged orbital bone requiring seven staples in her last fight. Liberty News reaches the mind-numbingly obvious conclusion. "Because of how men and women are differently built — Fox, who was born a man, has larger hands, shoulders, bones, and muscle mass — a transgender opponent has a huge advantage,“ the website states.

Ya think?

Nonetheless, progressives are more than willing to abide such realities, even as Dolezal draws their psychoanalytical fire. And therein lies the ultimate problem. Self-identification for one, equals self-identification for all. And for those who insist there’s a certain level of legitimacy in the "middle regions” of sexual identity, why not the same for ethnicity, no matter how far back along the chain of human evolution one must go to realize it? In short, if anything goes, everything goes. Otherwise, the very same self-righteous hammer progressives wield against those who resist their transgenderist agenda must be applied squarely against their own foreheads if they even dare to question Dolezal’s self-affirmed legitimacy. Furthermore, I would suggest that anyone applying to college or for a job might want to consider the advantages that might accrue, for example, to being a black woman trapped in a white man’s body — or any other permutation of the human condition one desires to be, for any advantage whatsoever.

The progressive standard has now been set. Or, to put it more familiarly, the inmates are running the asylum. And I’m going to Harvard. Boolah boolah!

© Copyright 2015 The Patriot Post