Legal Commentary

As a resident of Ohio, I feel eminently qualified to comment on the candidates in this election (and, by negative implication, I am not particularly qualified for any other reason). One thing that occurs to me in all the talk about Obama and race is that we in the US (and perhaps elsewhere) have virtually always made "exceptions" when it comes to race - that is, we see some people as "not really" black, for example. Think of OJ Simpson (pre-indictment), Tiger Woods, or Colin Powell. (Or, for the reverse phenomenon, consider Eminem.)  People acknowledge the race of those individuals, of course, but they seem to be immune to racial biases and prejudices that other racial minorities face. It seems that Barack Obama is at times in this category, and that some of the race-card-playing that is going on in the campaign may be directed at moving him out of that category.

By the way, to be clear, I am not suggesting that at all that it's a good thing that we consider some people to "not really" belong to a certain race - it's just a phenomenon that I am certainly not the first to notice.

Yet, at the same time, that phenomenon does not really exist for gender, does it?

Has there ever been a woman, at least in US history, who has been immune from the biases and expectations of her gender because she is considered "not really" female (at least in any sense that is not totally denigrating)? Of course, in some of the race examples I gave above, the individuals are multi-racial, and perhaps this plays a role in some people's minds; there is obviously much less "mixing" that is possible in terms of gender. But in any case, are there any such examples of "crossing the gender line? "