Bruce Jenner was born a man. Something in his brain/life made him feel like he should be a woman, and now she is a woman.

Rachel Dolezal was born white. Something in her brain/life made her want to be black, and she played that out.

I think it definitely is similar. If you're going to say it's acceptable for Jenner to undergo that change because she didn't have a choice... Dolezal didn't have a choice either. We're all born into the circumstances that we're born into, and if our minds don't match up with our body parts, skin color, then it's all the same (to a degree). The only difference I see is that Dolezal wasn't out about it, probably because she knew people would think she was just trying to take advantage of a system.

I think that if a person has an identity crisis due to what they were born into and feel the need to change it so that their mind aligns with everything else, they should be able to do it or not, whether it's gender, race, etc. People make the argument that gender is an artificial, social construct, therefore we shouldn't care if a person changes their body parts. Yet somehow the rules are different for race, which is another social construct? You can't make up the rules for what a person feels, internally, about their identity.

I get what you're saying about race being based on external factors, but at the end of the day that's what that woman feels. Gender has just as many external factors (what men/women can/can't do based on their body parts) along with the internal factors and I think race has that to an extent as well. Dolezal doesn't have the historical ancestral background, but maybe she has empathy for whatever reason and that's why she did what she did. You're being open-minded about one person and closed-minded about another. Think about it.