Why race and species comparisons to gender identity fail

What I was trying to say there is that these comparisons only seem clever until you look at what each word actually means. Species is a biological classification. Blackness is a physical characteristic tied to ancestry, heritage, and lived experience: it is not something you declare, it is something you are born into and carry through the world. Gender, by contrast, has always been understood as an internal sense of who you are, one that can differ from what was assumed at birth. These are genuinely different categories, and treating them as interchangeable is not a logical argument, it is a rhetorical trick. The reason gender and sexuality work as identity is not that we decided to make them special: it is that they describe something real about a person's inner life that cannot be read off the surface. A lion cannot have an inner life about its species. A person's skin colour does not shift depending on how they experience themselves. But gender? That one lives inside you, and it always has.