Trans : gender and race in an age of unsettled identities In the summer of 2015 shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was outed by her parents as white touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman could Dolezal legitimately identify as black Taking the controversial pairing of transgender and transracial as his starting point Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race long understood as stable inborn and unambiguous have in the past few decades opened up in different ways and to different degrees to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race choosing or changing ones sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing ones race. Yet while few accepted Dolezals claim to be black racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry increasingly understood as mixed loses its authority over identity and as race and ethnicity like gender come to be understood as something we do not just something we have Part One: The trans movement 1. Transgender transracial Transgender and transracial before the Dolezal Affair The field of argument If Jennifer then Dolezal : the argument from similarity Boundary work: the argument from difference 2. Categories in flux Unsettled identities The empire of choice The policing of identity claims The new objectivism. Part two: Thinking with trans 3. The trans of migration Unidirectional transgender trajectories Reconsidering transracial Transracial trajectories past and present 4. The trans of between Transgender betweenness: oscillation recombination gradation Racial and gender betweenness Recombinatory racial betweenness: classification and identification Performing betweenness 5. The trans of beyond Beyond gender Beyond race