Even though gender and race are both social inventions, they’re not really interchangeable like that.
To cite one example: race is considered heritable, and there have historically been harsh consequences of that lineage. In the US, the one-drop rule ensured that anyone with even a single Black ancestor would be subject to the legal discrimination that status entailed (this is called “hypodescent”). So the idea of someone saying “I identify as Black” is… fraught, to say the least.
To cite one example: race is considered heritable, and there have historically been harsh consequences of that lineage. In the US, the one-drop rule ensured that anyone with even a single Black ancestor would be subject to the legal discrimination that status entailed (this is called “hypodescent”). So the idea of someone saying “I identify as Black” is… fraught, to say the least.