The Race/Gender Analogy

Hello internet.

Biological sex is to gender as X is to race.

What is X? It is bound to be something to do with genotype (and usually skin colour, facial bone structure), but there seems to be no existing concept that can spell out exactly what X is. Presumably that is because there is no single thing. I will be using the catch-all symbol X to represent these features.

The race/gender analogy is supposed to draw out the arbitrariness of gender discrimination, or alternatively to bring to light the injustice of one gender having systematically worse life chances that another. We would not tolerate this kind of imbalance between races (or Xs), and would thus look for policy solutions for it, so to be consistent we should not tolerate this imbalance between genders (or biological sexes). This is the usual direction the analogy is applied, but I think it can constructively go both ways.

To anyone unfamiliar with the precise terminology, biological sex refers to whether someone is male or female (or both or neither). Gender is a social construct which typically maps men onto males and women onto females. The fact that it is a social construct makes it in some ways inherently oppressive: it is the set of expectations we have about people based unfoundedly on the bare scientific facts. Now I could argue about the exact extent of the differences between male and female humans (just as one could argue about the differences between Xs) but I think it is not constructive, relies on empirical not conceptual support, and would not substantively alter the way we think about these issues anyway.

When we hear feminists talk about smashing the gender binary, they are talking about decoupling sex and gender. It is not fair that society should form certain expectations of you and pressure you into certain roles and self-perceptions based on a fact about you which is entirely out of your control. If we are to have gender at all, we should not be limited to two, and people should feel free to have whatever gender they wish. The sex-gender parity has got to go.

Yet there is an asymmetry here. These arguments seem to apply just as strongly to race. However race is an important concept in the politics of identity, and what is more it is important to have information on the classifications captured by the term race so that we have the tools to identify problems in order to fix them. Yet we also have good reason to destroy the idea of race, or make it so that race, like gender, is a social label that we can choose for ourselves, a choice which society will respect.

There is a tension here between the dual needs to break down oppressive social constructs and the need to gather information about what society actually thinks, what distinctions it actually draws and what the consequences are of these distinctions. As such we cannot just "do away with race" for official purposes (such as in surveys and so on) while the concept stills runs rampant through peoples minds.

I suggest that a way to start on addressing this tension is by not asking people what race they are, but asking them what they think other people think their race is. This externalises the idea of race, leaving it somewhat more open to the individual to choose whether they are going to have a race or not, and hopefully most of us will choose not to. This was we can carry on gathering important information and at the same time reduce the oppressive power of the race construct.

This feels inconclusive, and I am sure there are many more considerations I have not thought of, but I think that firstly the race/gender analogy is a powerful tool for highlighting instances of oppression for women, and secondly that it gives us reason to believe that the world would be better if the idea of race either didn't exist or was remarkably different.

Caleb