Modern Age * Winter 2018 retrograde perspectives: "Cultural conservatives, moreover- especially religious conservatives-are more deeply committed to preserving sex and gender boundaries than racial and ethnic boundaries. For religious conservatives, sex and gender are central to the created order in a way that race and ethnicity are not." Hence Brubaker concocts his elaborate scheme of "thinking with trans" in order to piggyback "racial fluidity" onto the socially validated category of "gender fluidity." In other words, he has attempted to open up a reasonable conversation about the ambiguous category of race by comparing it to the perfectly unequivocal category of sex (obfuscated by using the deliberately vague term "gender"). The procedure is patently absurd. Trans is a telling illustration of the intellectual barrenness, indeed the madness, of progressive ideology and its resultant incapacity to deal sensibly and justly with important political and cultural issues. There are without a doubt physical and cultural features that enable us to distinguish various racial and ethnic groups. By these criteria, Rachel Dolezal is no more a black woman than Bruce Jenner is any kind of woman at all. Nevertheless, the children that Rachel Dolezal bore to a black man can claim to be a mixture of both races. Their existence and that of millions more like them demonstrates that race is not an immutable or absolute quality. The result is a social and cultural situation that calls for scholarly and political attention. Brubaker signally fails to provide much guidance. He notices how the Dolezal case intersected with broader controversies about the status of race: "the proposal to include a 'multiracial' option in the U.S. census met with strong resistance for just this reason: it threatened to disturb the logic of the system of ethnoracial counting and categorizing." But he 124 modernagejournal.comhttp://www.modernagejournal.com