Enforcing Race and Gender as They Disintegrate

Donald Trump, at the National Association for Black Journalists, last week said this about Kamala Harris: “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.” In 2019, Harris had already felt the need to assert that, "I'm Black, and I'm proud of being Black. I was born Black. I will die Black, and I'm not going to make excuses for anybody because they don't understand."

At the same time, Algerian women's boxer Imane Khelif, competing in the Olympics, was derided and called a cheater and above all a "man," after an Italian fighter withdrew from a bout against her, saying that she'd never been hit that hard. Khelif felt compelled to say this, after she won a quarter-final bout to guarantee herself a medal: “I want to tell the entire world that I am a female, and I will remain a female."

Perhaps race and gender in themselves are multiple or appear as continuous spectrums. I'm not sure how many races or biological sexes there are, really, and I'm not sure there’s any very interesting or principled single answer to the question of how to count them. Also, there's no reason race and gender should be the very same sort of identity. Maybe race is social and sex is biological. Or maybe sex is social and race is biological. Or maybe each is both. Or maybe each is not really anything very clear or specific, though it sometimes seems as though our whole lives are configured around them.

The declarations of identity by Harris and Khelif are rich in implications, even if they seem forced, in a certain sense. They amount to declarations of loyalty or pledges of allegiance: black, or female, or black and female, unto death. They have a "My country, right or wrong" flavor. What might be sad is that their declarations aren’t enough to establish their identities. It doesn't matter what they say. How do "we" know that these declarations don't establish their identities, that they can't determine their own identities? We've got extremely sensitive identity detectors. We look at Khelif or at Harris, and they make us just a little uncomfortable, because we can't immediately see which side they're on. Harris and Khelif are visibly ambiguous.

"We" need race and gender, each of them, to have exactly two slots, and everyone to be clearly in one or the other. Who do I mean by “we”? I definitely mean me, and maybe Americans of a certain age (call it over 40), no matter their own race or gender. I don't want to do this, but do it automatically, whenever I see a human: male or female, black or white. And despite myself, I'm a bit uncomfortable when I don't think the answer is immediately apparent. I wouldn't be thinking anything like this explicitly, but it's as though my own identity as a white guy is threatened, whether I want it to be or not. My own identity is suddenly liquid and optional. This makes me uncomfortable.

Looking at Khelif does that to me. I can't see her gender, really. Harris, too, though I'm plenty used to multi-racial people. But it occurred to me to wonder as she ran for president in 2020 whether she was black. The moment I saw her, I wondered about her ethnicity. I wish that wasn't the case.

When there were apparently only two American races, "we" could take comfort in the fact that, for example, school integration was a relatively straightforward matter: some kids are white, some are black. Mix them together. Voila, justice. But if there are many races and some people have two or three, how can we engage in racial oppression, or in the amelioration of racial oppression? American history becomes impossible.

Fortunately, everyone will help us reinstate race as a dualism. Whatever Kamala Harris may be, we can agree that she's "non-white" and that she's "minority." This presidential election gives us a clear engagement with race and gender as a pair of pairs: the white guy against the woman of color.

Race and gender are treated differently in various regards. "We" do seem to recognize the possibility that one could "transition" from one sex to the other through hormones, surgery, and so on. "We" don't regard the possibility of racial transition in the same way, though it may be hard to say why. Perhaps all I need to say in this regard is "Dolezal." But plenty of people are denying that a gender transition is possible as well. This seems to be picking up momentum.

I doubt that JD Vance, for example, thinks that a genuine gender transition is possible. You're going to have to stay on the side we've assigned to you, and we have various direct ways of enforcing this. If you try to evade your assignment, you become a person without a race or a gender: an impossible person; not quite a person at all.

We're always negotiating around these issues, and the real flashpoints emerge at individual bodies that become the scenes of identity struggles, at least in the minds of others. All "our" thinking goes smoothly until all those ambiguous and multiple people start showing up. Then the enforcement mechanisms begin: the attacks, the disgust, the "what are you reallys," whether on the playground, the doping lab at the Olympics or on social media. Trump's remarks about Kamala, above all, show "our" continued confusion and discomfort.

Harris and Khelif try to calm us down and secure themselves by declaring their loyalty: "born an x, an x for life, will die an x." Trump and Vance don't have to say this: pledged for life as a white guy. Everyone knows who they are, recognizes them without effort as the sort of people they are. Khelif and Harris aren't so fortunate. We want to force them to choose, evidently, and we want to make the choice for them. "Female for life." I don't think people should have to say things like that.

I'm not sure how to slide out of this condition where we have the ability to count only to two, in which everything is one thing, or is the other. It's primitive, and it's not adequate to the data. The hopeful part is that it no longer seems possible to get everyone into one pigeonhole or the other. The rise of the mixed, of the both or many, might eventually be greeted as a relief by people who were forced their whole lives to be one or the other. "We," in short.

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell