Phylogeny, Bisexuality, & Why Fish Don't Exist
She said, imagine there's a lecture hall and the professor displays a slide showing a salmon, a lungfish, and a cow. The prof asks, Which two belong together? Which one does not belong? Most of the audience will say, the two fish belong together; the cow does not belong.
And that seems to make sense. Two fish and a cow? Pretty easy to sort out.
On examination, the facile answer falls short. A lungfish has lungs and an epiglottis, just like the cow. The cow's heart and the lungfish's heart are very similar. In fact, the cow and the lungfish have much more in common than the lungfish and the salmon.
Turns out that grouping them by "which ones are fish" does a disservice to our understanding and to our science. In fact, the author says, a better taxonomy would insist that "there are no fish".
It's a great interview about forcing order (and information structure) onto chaos and diversity. She says, forcing a taxonomy is an act of violence because it marginalizes the non-mainstream. She goes on to talk about how American eugenics led to Nazi race-cleaning, the dance of entropy and negentropy, the reification of bias in taxonomies. Fascinating author.
How would you categorize a new acquantance? For instance, would you say:
- Are you Jewish? Christian? Muslim?
- Would you say, Are you monotheist or multitheist?
- Would you say, are you Religious? Atheist? Agnostic?
But would you say, Are you Marion Christian? Orthodox Jewish? Sunni Muslim? Mennonite? Probably not, because those are sub-categories and the questions fail to embrace the full set of possibilities.
One might ask, are you Monotheist? Polytheist? Or you might ask, do you follow a philosophy or a theology? and then follow up with diagnostic questions. These examples demonstrate the utility of abstraction, making things vague enough to discuss them usefully.
But to repeat LuLu Miller, who says that bad taxonomies give way to unhelpful thinking and poor science: top-level taxonomies of People, Animals, Fish, and Birds is an unhelpful categorization. Although the groupings are readily apparent to a casual observer, on examination these groupings don't help us conceptualize and understand the world.
I believe this is a problem with Bisexuality - or more to the point, which is our structure of sexuality. We teach our school-children: there is a category called People (there are also Animals, Fish, and Birds). People are born with one of two genders and are split between Men and Women, and each person is one or the other. Men and women enter into relationships with the other gender and sometimes make more People; and our species continues. It's pretty straight-forward. We even support this world-view with American tax policy.
Then sophisticated observation leads to new datapoints and challenges to the Initial Wisdom. Some people are blamelessly born Intersex; some people such as Caster Semenya confound our categories, and we will banish good people rather than banish bad taxonomies; we will call them freaks and Others rather than embrace the real truth. Some people are beginning to accept that gender is not a binary; others consider than gender is a construct unrelated to anatomy. And so our taxonomy of gender needs a better taxonomy.
And then there are questions of patterns of sexual attraction: people observe that some Men like Men, and some Women like Women, and the assumption of Heterosexuality is flawed, an invalid normal. So we develop a category of Homosexuality and the taxonomy is considered Healed.
Except it's not Healed, and we are not Healed.
There are people of both Major Genders {Men and Women} who like both [Men or Women]. We called these people BiSexuals and in defense of the accepted Taxonomy, we tend to assume that they are criminally perverse, or fundamentally disordered, and in any event these Bisexuals are aberrations, freaks to be cast out, Others.
- Yes, we all hated Set Theory in school, and now we're living inside of a Matrix of poorly designed Sets.
- Yes, talking about Sets is less fun than talking about Sex
And then somebody (probably a grad student) observed, wait a minute, if gender is non-binary how can we say people are BiSexual? Isn't it more appropriate to say,
- There is a set of all people, including Men, Women, and all the increments of the gender spectrum (set theory again)
- People who prefer a person of a specific major gender are observable and can be categorized. They may have many partners over their lives, they may have many partners at once, but their partners come from One Major Gender group. We call them Straight or Gay
- Straights and Gays include Women who like Women, Women who like Men, etc, but mainstream people in our org-chart like Only One Type for their entire life, and we call these mainstream people Monosexual. They like one gender.
- This category provides the first fusion of Straight and Gay orientations into a unified higher-level taxonomy, into a more rarified abstraction.
- As this awareness evolves, Straights and Gays now have things in common, and actually seek to enforce their heirarchy against those outlying individuals that challenge their hegemony.
- People who prefer both/ either of the Two Major Genders challenge all the assumptions of people invested the 'Straights and Gays' view of the world. This behavior is not easily observable. We end up being asked to believe the people's self-assessment.
- And so our taxonomy now has a new top line of MonoSexuals and Bisexuals. Monosexual includes both Straights and Gays.
- Our newest scheme elides people who are not in the Two Major Genders, or who are attracted to those outside of the Two Major Genders. We call them Queer, or GenderQueer, or Gender-Fluid, and use other labels to render them as the newest Other, the outliers, the perverts, the people guilty of not fitting in to our org-chart.
- At the bleeding edge, there's an understanding that applying Bi- as a prefix to a non-binary attribute is inappropriate. Now we have the term Pan-Sexual to refer to persons who desire more than one gender, and embrace the spectrum.
It seems like so much word salad, so much picking apart of minor semantics. Yet it leads to violence, beatings, discrimination, economic impacts, torn relationships, hate, bitterness, and loss.