{"id":383764,"date":"2018-11-05T10:59:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T09:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/forced-classification-biological-determinism-and-sad-chapters-from-our-nations-history\/"},"modified":"2018-11-05T10:59:50","modified_gmt":"2018-11-05T09:59:50","slug":"forced-classification-biological-determinism-and-sad-chapters-from-our-nations-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/forced-classification-biological-determinism-and-sad-chapters-from-our-nations-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Forced Classification, Biological Determinism, and Sad Chapters From Our Nation\u2019s History"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n

October was LGBTQ History Month, a moment to reflect upon the history of the LGBTQ movement, but also how it interacts with our nation\u2019s broader civil rights history.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Trump Administration seems to have treated last month as simply another opportunity to push our nation backward.\u00a0 Like so many of my peers, I read with dismay the press accounts of the most recent move by the Trump Administration to roll back civil rights protections for transgender people.\u00a0\u00a0According to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a>, the leaked memo demonstrates an intent to define sex \u201cas either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with\u201d and to require any disputes about sex to be clarified through genetic testing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Apparently, the Trump Administration\u2019s plan is to use this new definition to restrict rights in areas such as equal access to health care, education, and housing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a former Obama Administration lawyer who worked on LGBTQ issues, and who witnessed the painstaking effort and detailed factfinding that informed guidance documents and rulemakings at the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services,\u00a0 I am saddened that so much progress can be casually replaced by policy formed contrary to medical opinion, federal court decisions, and human rights principles.\u00a0 As a student of American civil rights history, I am dispirited by how policy can be formed at odds with the lessons of our country\u2019s past.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the Civil War, our young and fragile nation was forced to grapple with the ways in which the Declaration of Independence\u2019s promises of liberty were broken when it came to African Americans.\u00a0 The resulting Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, drafted and adopted in what many historians refer to as our nation\u2019s \u201cSecond Founding<\/a>,\u201d were an attempt to fulfill these unkept promises by elucidating clear principles of equal protection, due process, and citizenship.\u00a0\u00a0 These Reconstruction Amendments form a critical part of our collective story of Constitutional progress, which trends toward inclusion. We know, however, that the story has had twists and turns.\u00a0 The Reconstruction Amendments signaled a movement toward equality, but that movement was met by resistance and the emergence of Jim Crow laws and other state and local laws and policies aimed at preserving segregation and racial subordination.<\/p>\n

An example from a state bordering our nation\u2019s capital city proves instructive.\u00a0 In 1924, Virginia passed SB 219, The Racial Integrity Act.\u00a0 The Act was motivated by fear of racial self-definition and mixing, and aimed to prevent a blurred racial landscape that would have made the subordination of African Americans more difficult.\u00a0 The Act required a racial description of each resident at birth, placing people in one of two categories: white or colored.\u00a0 This latter category included African Americans and most Native Americans.\u00a0 (The absence of Latinos and Asian Americans in the legislation signals not a tolerance for, but rather a relative ignorance of, their existence.)\u00a0 According to the Act, race was defined using the \u201cone-drop rule,\u201d defining persons with any African or Native American ancestry (no matter how removed) as \u201ccolored.\u201d\u00a0 According to the statute\u2019s twisted logic, one drop of colored blood made one colored, but one drop of white blood did not make one white.\u00a0 The Act went further by confirming and expanding Virginia\u2019s ban on interracial marriage, making criminal any marriage between a white person and a colored person.\u00a0\u00a0 The United States Supreme Court\u2019s 1967\u00a0Loving v. Virginia\u00a0decision struck down Virginia\u2019s interracial marriage ban (along with interracial marriage bans in several other states), rightly finding it an unconstitutional violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th<\/sup>\u00a0Amendment.\u00a0 However, it wasn\u2019t until 1975 that the remainder of the Racial Integrity Act was repealed.<\/p>\n

What propelled the Racial Integrity Act was not the joy of classification; rather the Act was needed because discriminatory systems depend upon clear definitions of \u201cthe other.\u201d\u00a0 Virginia\u2019s racial subordination system was challenged by people who might defy easy classification, by people who might engage in self classification, or by actions (such as interracial marriage) that blurred classes altogether.\u00a0 The Act, by requiring racial classification at birth, and by grasping at purportedly accurate biological ways of making the classification (the one drop rule), sought to prop up the old system, assuring a supply of the necessary inputs.\u00a0 If the old system were to be considered a factory, with racial subordination its ultimate product, then clearly raced humans (raced at birth and not by their own self-description) were necessary raw materials.<\/p>\n

As both a person of color and a member of the LGBTQ community, I\u2019m cautious about easy equations between race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression.\u00a0 However, that wariness pales in comparison to my suspicion of forced classifications and strained appeals to biological determinism.\u00a0 Neither has served our nation well in the past.\u00a0 Just as racial subordination systems require a clear sense of who is a racial \u201cother,\u201d sexual subordination systems require a clear sense of who is a sexual or gender minority \u201cother.\u201d\u00a0 Self-definition and identities that defy simple classification pose challenges to these systems.\u00a0 So perhaps it should not surprise anyone that at a moment when our nation was making progress toward understanding how the Constitution\u2019s Equal Protection Clause (embedded in one of the Reconstruction Amendments, the Fourteenth Amendment) applies to the LGBTQ community, such systems would strike back, and that they would aim first at the community\u2019s most vulnerable members, our transgender, non-binary, and intersex family.<\/p>\n

In the coming days, weeks, and months, as we learn more about the Administration\u2019s plans to implement its proposed changes to civil rights laws and regulations, attention will rightly focus on the ways such plans could harm the lives of our nation\u2019s\u00a01.4 million transgender people<\/a>.\u00a0 Attention will also rightly focus on how the plans categorically erase intersex individuals, whose lives challenge the gender binary and crude appeals to biological determinism.\u00a0 Discussions will also cover the ways in which the plans harm children who do not conform to gender stereotypes.\u00a0 We might also spare some concern for how such plans evoke the sadder portions of our national journey and how they represent a detour from the path to constitutional progress.\u00a0 We ignore history at our own peril.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Via Common Dreams<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October was LGBTQ History Month, a moment to reflect upon the history of the LGBTQ movement, but also how it interacts with our nation\u2019s broader civil rights history.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Trump Administration seems to have treated last month as simply another opportunity to push our nation backward.\u00a0 Like so many of my peers, I read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":383765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-383764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}