Categorisation, the counting and the labelling of people, places, time, events, and human activities form the basis of all governance and politics. The 2024 Paris Olympics demonstrated, on the one hand, the rigidity and the brutality of categories, and on the other, the fluidity, biases and even the impossibility of it. Indian woman wrestler Vinesh Phogat was disqualified for being overweight by 100 grams for her category — the objectivity of which has not been questioned by anyone including the wrestler herself. Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who won the gold in her weight category, had her sex questioned.
In 2023, the International Boxing Association (IBA) had disqualified her for failing a “separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential”. The Paris Olympics organisers said they also went by the passport which identifies Ms. Khelif to be a woman, her sex assigned at birth. Some media reports linked Ms. Khelif’s disqualification in a gender eligibility test and, thus, not participating in the IBA world championship in New Delhi in 2023 to Russian President Vladimir Putin. All told, a person’s sex is no longer an incontrovertible objective fact, as his or her weight is. The methods to identify a person’s sex — chromosomes, hormone levels, genitalia, have been contested. To the extent that sex is a biological fact, it is an increasingly alterable one. When combined with gender, it is a question of personal choice, according to the increasingly popular view in the United States. The sex and gender debate is a major trigger for the social and political dysphoria in the West.
The fluctuation of categories
The fluidity of categories has been a serious governance challenge throughout history. Who is a citizen and who is alien? What kind of violence is crime and what kind is honourable? What is legitimate politics and what is not? Where does homeland end and foreign land begin? Such questions have pushed societies to conflicts and countries to wars, as agreements are difficult to come by, and harder to hold. Currently, live political contestations over categories include the fluidity of Kamala Harris’s ethnicity: is she more Asian- American than African-American? Should Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes communities be categorised into subgroups for better achievement of social justice goals in India?
Modernity celebrated individualism as a higher level of social evolution, and communities that bind individuals to social norms, faith and traditions came to be viewed as regressive through its lens. The building blocks of modern, secular communities, and nations, are supposed to be atomised individuals who share their belief in atomised individualism with other atomised individuals. The individual participated in politics and market as the fundamental autonomous unit of humanity. The individual was indivisible, indestructible.
Sex categories, male and female, are (at least used to be) a rare point of agreement across religious faiths, political ideologies, and science. In fact, western creationists in recent years began citing British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in support of their position that humans are divided into male and female. Prof. Dawkins has argued that categories in general do not hold because the natural world is a fluid continuum, but sexes are a remarkable and undeniable exception. It is the union of clearly differentiated male and female reproductive cells that makes procreation possible. He notes intersex individuals exist, but that only proves the rule of sexual binaries. What has muddled this rare point of universal agreement of faiths and science is the relatively new idea of sex as choice, guided by gender perception.
The new idea as ‘choice’
According to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, “sex refers to a set of biological attributes” and “gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions and identities.” “…sex is usually categorized as female or male”, while “gender exists along a continuum and can change over time”. Sex is what one is, and gender is what one feels. The question becomes contentious over translating the feeling into being — gender affirming sex transition. Should that be allowed? If yes, what is the age of consent in this regard? Should public schools and public health systems facilitate this? These questions are pulverising the U.S. in this election season.
That an individual is their thought is not a new thought. The individuality of a person has been about their thoughts and feelings, and not their bodies. The mind changes over time. People move from one faith to another, or from one line of political thinking to another, without altering their bodies, generally speaking. The mind determines an individual’s relationship with others. Individualism is about the inviolability of the individual — body and mind. The mind seeks to preserve the physical body — its liberty, safety, and nourishment. The integrity of the physical body was taken for granted and considered sacrosanct; surgeries and interventions that modernity made possible were to restore the normative features and functions of the body; not to alter them.
Gender affirming sex transition changes that relationship between an individual’s mind and body. It does not undermine the sexual binary, as it is often misrepresented. In fact, it reinforces the binary — a person who wants to transition is in fact seeking medical intervention to achieve the normative anatomical features of one of the sexes. In the previously familiar universe, when there was conflict between the body and the mind — being and feeling — feeling had to yield to being. Feeling could have been fleeting, after all. That the body, not the mind, should change is the new idea. Individual autonomy elevated to this level, paradoxically, disaggregates the individual into components, and reconstitutes them into a new biological entity. The mind is fluid, and assuming that the body should keep pace with the fluidity of the mind, is a radically mind-bending idea. This throws out of the window one of the longest held, and universally shared truths — that there is man and woman. That there is nothing permanent about an individual being a man or woman is a bewildering post-truth. It is post-individualism; individualism devouring itself.
Also read | Vatican blasts gender-affirming surgery, surrogacy and gender theory as violations of human dignity
This paradox mirrors the bigger dilemma of liberalism itself. Liberalism, by virtue of self-identification, has to tolerate all types of illiberal ideas. For instance, liberalism has to accommodate religious and cultural practices, which in turn are oppressive towards its own followers. Liberalism thus undermines itself. Individualism and conflicting group claims have already caused disorienting social fragmentation. Sex transition makes fragmentation inside the individual self, which was considered composite.
Science and evidence
Proponents and opponents of gender affirming care try to bolster their argument using data and science. Technology has given humanity the immense capacity to enforce categories by digitally profiling and labelling each individual. But, simultaneously, by choice and under duress, individuals increasingly defy categories by crossing geographical and social borders. Sex categories are the new frontier for human mobility. That the body should fall in line with the mind’s feeling is an idea. Ideas usually precede the technological know how that translate it into reality — for instance, flight. Science will more likely enable that idea, rather than prove or disprove anything about it. Science and technology do not just discover existing reality but also create new ones. As new technologies shift medical interventions from restorative to transformatory, the body is set lose its normative form anyway. Sex could follow gender, and as all other matters of the mind, it will be about a choice that one makes. One’s mind is accessible to another only to the extent that it is articulated, which means, a person can only be what they claim. Gender ideology has set the U.S., and the West in general, on a course of collective cognitive dissonance. One part of these societies seek to hold on to their last truth, while the other is dismantling the notion of the inviolable individual that built them.
varghese.g@thehindu.co.in