You did have a choice to grow the beard though. Race is something that does not involve that luxury.
Are you suggesting that having the option to make that choice is somehow a way out? It's merely symptomatic and utter blasphemy.
This hypothetical doesn't really go anywhere because you can make the beard choice with worldly experience vs. choosing race at birth and growing up as that race. It doesn't even compare.
Even if we were to change this around and ask "What if people could change their race only once in adulthood after some life experience?" the racism chart just gets two additional hate columns for the race-changers.
You made me realize that its actually certain things that we as a society decide as sacrosanct and not grounds for prejudice. So it can be with race, which involves no choice, but also religion, which does involve choice. Or political affiliation, which also does involve choice.
As for any sentiment about whether someone "should have" to conform or not: if many people don't have the option to conform, then that angle is a part of a different conversation. It also confuses the issue - in that it places innate characteristics (which have absolutely no functional implications other than the ability to stay in the sun longer in the case of dark skin) that are focused on within a particular culture on the same level as any expression anybody wants to take i.e. once we accept everything, we'll accept black people, therefore we should be working on general acceptance of all things rather than racism specifically.
It's a cop out. We have a race problem. We have a lot of problems, but race is a very serious problem. Not everything should be accepted; people need to conform in a huge number of ways, or else we don't have a civilization. Things should be taken on a case by case basis based on the degree of human suffering and the societal costs of accepting or ignoring variations from the norm. Race, in America, is maybe the most important thing we need to deal with (second only to sexism in my estimation.) Race, especially anti-black racism, pervades and corrupts everything in the US.
Gender identity is fluid, and not nearly as clear cut as something like race. I'm sure there is some genetic influence that affects ones biological tendencies (For example, I am biologically attracted to men, and I can't really change that no matter how hard I wish to "will" it away) but ultimately how one expresses gender, and whom one decides to be interested in, is influenced by so many learned behaviors, social pressures, and factors that go beyond the biological component. Relationships are much more complicated than "Gee, I would like to have sex with that person." One's preferences in this regard are far more than a simple boolean variable, and the choice of expression is ultimately up to the individual.
Every person will have a unique story and their own outlook on this, so I don't think it's fair to place people into boxes and say, "This is the way things work, so this is the label I will assign you." That's not fair on any basis. Not race, not gender, not sexual orientation or any attributes that are out of the control of the individual. You must instead judge the individual based on their unique characteristics, their behaviors, and their own merits, separate from the group to which they supposedly belong.
Racial and ethnic identity is a product of social context and probably somewhat fluid fundamentally, but the social context most people are exposed to probably results in it not tending to express all that fluidly in most cases, especially given that there is less social acceptance of divergence between socially-ascribed race and racial identity than is even the case with gender identity (even in the case of people of mixed ancestry, there is often strong social judgement if they don't identify primarily with the race that is perceived by others to be dominant in external expression.)
However, racism does exist, but it's a social construct premised on an imaginary distinction between humans based on the amount of melanin in their skin.