As previously discussed, I have always hated the expression “women and minorities”. Now I understand why: a minority is always assimilable to the majority. Minority groups are in constant flux: they can grow or shrink — both in size and status — and they can, over time, revise the way they see and are seen by the majority.
This is not and never will be true of women: women are not assimilable. We are not and do not want to be considered assimilable to men — our claim to “equal rights” does not rest on any claim of sameness or types of comparison. We are — as are men — one of two complementary categories of the species we call homo sapiens.
Claiming humanity
I have always found this image (and others like) it from the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike in 1968 extremely moving. The claim is simple: I have the same dignity — and thus deserve the same rights — as a white man. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and following was simultaneously a moral crusade to demonstrate the common dignity of black Americans as well as a plea to the federal government to force recalcitrant states to comply with recent federal anti-segregation and other anti-discrimination laws.
Indeed, the deliberate, non-violent campaigns of the 1950s could only have originated in the certainty that the equality of races stemmed from a higher source than the legal promises of full citizenship granted almost 100 years prior via the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments of the US Constitution. It was not a request to be made to feel equal; it was a demonstration by black Americans that they already felt so. The moral power of the movement — for it wasn’t just laws that were changed, but hearts and minds, too — stemmed from the easy recognition of this common humanity, prompted perhaps most compellingly by television news. It was no longer possible for many white Americans to imagine their fellow black citizens as fundamentally “other”.
As such, it is easy to read this first stage of the civil rights movement as an announcement of a readiness to assimilate — by which I mean, to no longer be considered a special class of Americans, but just Americans. This notion, of course, makes me a “white supremacist” in the eyes of today’s progressives, who have followed the thread of the angry, proud, separatist Black Power movement to arrive at a position of permanent grievance, based (best I can tell), on two dubious (and contradictory) claims: first, that to assimilate to “whiteness” is undesirable; second, that all white Americans possess “white privilege” and black Americans are still oppressed by “white supremacy”.
While I am confident that many black Americans do not agree with either of these two claims, both of them seem to have found a ready home in the post-liberal progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Thus we see all sorts of federal policy now being guided by a belief that “racism” consists not in dissimilar legal rights or even personal animus, but disparate outcomes among racial groups.
The Democrats — who have yet to understand that people do not simply vote their race — are both stupid and cynical enough (the party seeks ultimately to perpetuate its own power) to double- and triple-down on this minority-group-based politics of grievance. They have no insight — they’d have to get out of the bubble of diversicrats that has infiltrated universities, corporations, and government — into the notion that many Americans of all races, religions, ethnicities and national origins love America because it allows them to assimilate into its culture.
It should be obvious, but I feel obligated to explain that assimilation does not mean abandoning one’s culture of national or family origin. It does not mean no longer taking pride in your racial or religious heritage. What it does mean, however, is feeling free to embrace the opportunities and legacy of this country — and of the West more generally — as your own. This is what Glenn Loury talks about, convincingly and passionately. Assimilation is not a disappearance of the self into some dull conformity (the “melting pot” of old) but rather a catalyst for an individual’s possibilities above and beyond any inherited identities.
It’s become incredibly unpopular on the left to say this, now, but I don’t think it is that uncommon a sentiment.1 Indeed, John McWhorter — no conservative — agrees with Glenn that assimilation — is the best path forward for black Americans.2 And as I think the midterm elections will prove, a party that frames its constituents as powerless victims rather than proud citizens will be a losing one. Eventually, I predict that the discounting of “exceptions” to Biden’s silent-part-out-loud “you ain’t Black” rule is no longer going to wash with the electorate.
Gay is okay
Reading Andrew Sullivan’s article from 2005, “The End of Gay Culture,” we can see how — at least to one writer — a similar path of assimilation seemed not just possible but inevitable for American gays and lesbians.
Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist—or that they won’t create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that “gayness” alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.
What Sullivan describes in this article is the process by which homosexual culture went from one defined by its “distinctive gayness” to one that is as diffuse and various as the individuals within it. This change was initially necessitated by circumstance — the AIDS crisis — but ultimately, the connections between the gay population and society at large that fighting the disease forged created a world not only in which HIV was no longer a death sentence, but also one in which a cohort of gay kids and teens could grow up where homosexuality itself was no longer a taboo subject.
The new emphasis was on the interaction between gays and straights and on the diversity of gay life and lives. Movies featured and integrated gayness. Even more dramatically, gays went from having to find hidden meaning in mainstream films—somehow identifying with the aging, campy female lead in a way the rest of the culture missed—to everyone, gay and straight, recognizing and being in on the joke of a character like “Big Gay Al” from “South Park” or Jack from “Will & Grace.”
Sullivan has an open preference for this result.
It is indeed hard not to feel some sadness at the end of a rich, distinct culture built by pioneers who braved greater ostracism than today’s generation will ever fully understand. But, if there is a real choice between a culture built on oppression and a culture built on freedom, the decision is an easy one.
“Oppression” is of course the key word here, as in the nearly two decades since Sullivan penned this piece, the rights of a same-sex-attracted minority once held apart from society by law and custom has now been replaced by an identity group that is distinguished by its “marginalization” from the majority, from “power”. Whereas Sullivan was celebrating the existence of openly gay legislators, today’s Very Online activists are fretting about LGBTQIA+ erasure and even genocide. Sullivan was already characterizing the rainbow flag as a “tired emblem of the past;” you certainly wouldn’t know it by the current flagstravaganza, and not just in June.
You have to wonder if Sullivan’s appreciation for the possibilities of gayness defined by freedom has anything to do with his conservatism; whether having that philosophical bent simply predisposes him to view these cultural developments — all essentially during his own lifetime, no less — as representing a shining example of human progress. While I don’t think it is a coincidence that both Sullivan and Loury both seem more persuaded by a narrative of self-determination than that of forever marginalization, I also do not believe that this attitude has political boundaries. Indeed, I recently came across a wonderful short documentary, “Caro Comes Out,” that celebrates, simply but meaningfully, the act of declaring one’s homosexuality aloud — not as a political statement of any sort, but rather as a kind of love letter to her family.
To use Sullivan’s analysis, Caro Hernandez’s film reflects the freedom that assimilation provides, that “internalized a sense of normality, of human potential, of self-worth.” Interestingly, Sullivan is careful to distinguish this generational possibility among gay youth from the way cultural transition works among other minorities — because, as he points out, “homosexuals and lesbians… are born and raised within the bosom of the majority”. In contrast:
Black children come into society both uplifted and burdened by the weight of their communal past—a weight that is transferred within families or communities or cultural institutions, such as the church, that provide a context for self-understanding, even in rebellion. Gay children have no such support or burden. And so, in their most formative years, their self-consciousness is utterly different than that of their gay elders.
Sullivan’s argument here is easily criticized by the simple observation that a child’s self-understanding is most influenced by her immediate family — such that many gay children still grow up in extremely homophobic environments even in the midst of a larger, more tolerant culture. In that sense, it may not matter at all that gay marriage is (for now) a constitutional right in the United States; the legal and the cultural are related but not by any means interchangeable.
Indeed, the relationship between law and culture is at the root of the transformation in both these “minority” stories. In his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan (himself a former slaveholder, no less) ruled that the Constitution simply didn’t permit racial distinctions in law — no matter what the culture felt or expressed about racial differences.
The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
Historically, Harlan’s dissent is often viewed as a forerunner of Plessy’s reversal in Brown v. Board of Education, which returned to the view that the enshrinement of racial distinctions in law is expressly forbidden by the post-Civil-War amendments to the Constitution. And to a certain degree, such an interpretation makes sense. Harlan does call the Louisiana statute decreeing racial segregation in railway carriages “a badge of servitude,” and he correctly predicts that these kinds of laws will “render permanent peace impossible and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.”
But when Harlan talks about the law being “colorblind,” I don’t think he means it the way the Warren Court will, over 50 years later, justify the overturning of school segregation. Indeed, it is possible to read the Brown decision as a precursor to today’s anti-racism obsession, in the sense that the Court’s reasoning that separate schools could never be equal was based on an analysis of the psychological stigma that segregation conferred on American blacks. Dismantling state-sanctioned segregation would, in contrast, allow for an equality of educational outcomes. In this way, Brown provides a first link between feelings of white supremacy and the problem of disparate outcomes.
For Harlan, a colorblind law is neither a measure nor a mandate of social equality. This is an interesting argument, truly, because while Harlan correctly anticipates the social consequences of laws that mandate legal inequality on racial grounds, he dismisses the majority’s attempt to use social inequality to justify the statute’s constitutionality.
This question is not met by the suggestion that social equality cannot exist between the white and black races in this country. That argument, if it can be properly regarded as one, is scarcely worthy of consideration; for social equality no more exists between two races when traveling in a passenger coach or a public highway than when members of the same races sit by each other in a streetcar or in the jury box, or stand or sit with each other in a political assembly, or when they use in common the streets of a city or town, or when they are in the same room for the purpose of having their names placed on the registry of voters, or when they approach the ballot box in order to exercise the high privilege of voting.
I would call Harlan’s argument here assimilationist; he does not pretend that unsegregated conveyances will perform some magical function of removing social distinctions between the races — in the same way he does not presume that whites exercising the same civil rights makes them all social equals. Instead, he is attempting to draw a distinction between human differences that are created in law and those that are created beyond it. Harlan and his contemporaries lived in a way we probably cannot imagine the dissolution of the legal principle that enslaved black Americans could not be citizens — they witnessed the Constitution amended. This was a legal reality whose social implications were for the large part, in 1896, still very nascent. But to Harlan, the observation of this new legal framework was critical no matter what social realities were still observable or even desired. In this sense, Harlan seems to be aware of some very visceral difference between “race hate” (his words) that motivated laws like the one Plessy upheld and social/class divides. Although I doubt he would recognize America today if he saw it, I sense that he knew more directly, and more honestly, the true power of possibility between making former slaves the legal equals of their masters. To be an assimilationist means that you believe a minority can be invited into the customs and protections of the majority.
By the time of Brown, multiple generations of Jim Crow had dampened if not destroyed the potential of post-bellum promises. And the Warren Court, not withstanding the correctness of its ruling, really couldn’t see that legally mandating integrated schools was no longer sufficient to undo the race hate that had formed the culture in many American places. Indeed, desegregation sometimes forced black children into schools where the white teachers and students hated them, thus making a mockery of the idea that integration was a key to black self-esteem. Indeed, it is not hard to draw a line between the disappointments of desegregation efforts to the emergence of a more psychologized and separatist Black Power movement that essentialized real shortcomings into a heady, impractical attitude that progress was imaginary or even impossible.
And so the promises of assimilation sour into the militancy of marginalization. We have a half-black, half-Indian daughter of immigrants as our Vice President, and yet the progressive credo is now one of pervasive “systemic” racism. Now no one can be judged by the content of her character, but rather must be tokenized by her intersectional identities, and rewarded spoils according to her rating on the oppresso-meter. And as the Exxon Valdez of progressive thought has run aground, spilling moral repugnance all over the liberal landscape, the same essentialization has formed around homosexuality, except that it’s now called “LGBTQIA+”, because it no longer denotes any meaningful human cultural grouping but rather a claim, like those based on race, for more Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, Belonging, and Justice. This is a stance of a movement whose purpose is now opposite of its own history: civil rights and gay rights sought the customs and privileges of the majority, while this perverse progressivism refuses the possibility of assimilation in order to justify its privilege as that owed to permanently marginalized “communities”.
And now, women
My thesis here is that women are not a grouping of society that can ever be in the “minority” position, and not simply because they are, in fact, slightly more than half of humanity. The reason, as I will use Ivan Illich’s Gender to describe, is that of the nature of the “difference” between women and men. It is not, like other differences of majority/minority status, a question of excluding the “minority” group from the customs and privileges of the “majority”. (I have to put those terms in quotes, don’t I, since the numbers don’t work!)
But, you say, and correctly — there’s no doubt that women are oppressed, that they get the short end of the stick in some way in all places. “Sexism” is alive and well — it’s why (some argue) we have so few female CEOs, it’s why women have second-class legal/cultural status in many countries, it’s why so many women are the victims of male violence. And all this is true. But Illich has a novel take on why this is so — and to understand this take, we’ll have to (try to) re-understand the terms “sex” and “gender” that have become so key to the current gender ideology debate.
For Illich, the first thing to understand is that the two terms represent a historical divide, namely, that between pre-industrial society and industrial/post-industrial society. In the former, gender was a “duality… too obvious even to be named”. Gender
designate[s] a distinction in behavior, a distinction universal of vernacular cultures. It distinguishes places, times, tools, tasks, forms of speech, gestures, and perceptions that are associated with men from those associated with women. This association constitutes social gender because it is specific to a time and place. I call it vernacular gender because this set of associations is as peculiar to a traditional people (in Latin, a gens) as is their vernacular speech. (3)
These “gender-teams” (as we might call them to indicate Illich’s meaning) weren’t something subsequent to the formation of society — they were constitutive of the society. It was simply self-evident that these two teams existed, and this obviousness pervaded every aspect of everyone’s life. Nor was this duality understood as one of a mere power dynamic, the way we ascribe “minority status” to women to represent their “oppression”. This not to say that women were never subordinated to men in traditional cultures, and this is perhaps the hardest aspect of Illich’s argument to understand. His point is that our understanding of gender has been so distorted by our post-industrial perspective that we are no longer capable of understanding its duality in its proper context, one of total, given complementarity. “Gender bespeaks a complementarity that is enigmatic and asymmetrical. Only metaphor can reach for it” (4).
What has erased gender is the modern concept of sex, which we might call sex-type, by which Illich means
the result of a polarization in those common characteristics that, starting with the late eighteen century, are attributed to all human beings. [I]t polarizes the human labor force, libido, character or intelligence, and is the result of a diagnosis (in Greek, “discrimination”) of deviations from the abstract genderless norm of “the human.” (4)
In other words, sex-type is the opposite of gender; rather than a given but enigmatic complementarity, it is in an invented, unambiguous scientific distinction that not only redefines individuals going forward, but also then projects itself back through historical time to claim that it has always existed. In this way, sex-type is not just the opposite of gender-team, but also the invention that erases the latter.
The mechanism of this erasure is industrialization, which ushers in what Illich calls “a regime of scarcity.” He doesn’t mean material poverty, directly, but rather the reconceptualization of survival based on wage labor rather than subsistence; this transition thus creates competition between laborers to secure sufficient wages to meet their needs. This transition away from a subsistence economy and the erasure of gender is not at all coincidental:
An industrial society cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs. And the assumption of scarcity, which is fundamental to economics, is itself logically based on this unisex postulate. There could be no competition for “work” between men and women, unless “work” had been redefined as an activity that befits humans irrespective of their sex. The subject on which economic theory is based is just such a genderless human.
Illich’s theory is a direct repudiation of so much of modern feminism, which believes implicitly in sex-based oppression via the means of “gender,” namely, sex-based social expectations. But Illich has turned this upside-down (or right-side up) by saying that the notion of “the second sex” is not so much evidence of “discrimination” against women as it is the marker of the invention of sex-type, which, as it erases the gender-teams, cannot do other than disadvantage women. Sexism isn’t a bug in the industrial world, it’s a feature.
To the extent that de Beauvoir and others were fighting for the dismantling of sex-based roles (especially, among the privileged, that married men worked outside the home while their wives didn’t), they were already hiking up the wrong hill: “The carrier of the sex role is tacitly assumed to be a plastic individual having a genderless existence that is more or less shaped by ‘sex’” (83). Indeed, the very goal of feminism — equal treatment — Illich dismisses as a “pipe dream”:
I now see that an industrial economy without a sexist hierarchy is as far-fetched as that of a pre-industrial society without gender; that is, without a clear division between what men and what women do, say, and see. (17)
I won’t claim that it is easy for most people to step out of the contemporary understandings about sex and gender — sex as “biology” and gender as “expression” — and into Illich’s terminological world. But I find it fascinating because — and remember he wrote this in 1982! — his understanding of gender-teams and sex-types effortlessly explain why the egalitarian fight has gone off the rails in third-wave feminism. “Blow jobs are real jobs”? If that’s not economic sex talking, I don’t know what is. “Trans women are women”? What better evidence than that to prove the market treats us all essentially as neuter?
Relentlessly, economic institutions transform the two culturally embedded genders into something new, into economic neuters distinguished by their disembedded sex. A characteristic but quite secondary bulge in the blue jeans is now all that differentiates and bestows privilege on one kind of human being over the other.
Oh, the irony — now you can even buy the bulge… if children wearing knitted “packers” doesn’t scream the disembedding of gender (and the commoditization of the sex-type itself), I don’t know what does.
Even better, though, Illich’s notion of gender helps explains why radical feminists and other fellow-traveling TERFs are struggling to push back against the erasure of “sex” and its replacement by “gender identity”. It’s quite simply because we are trying to fight a fire with oxygen — we are trying to claim that women represent a unique, given social grouping but we are trying to do so in the terms of sex-type, rather than gender-teams. And to the extent that we continue to do this, we will continue to fail.
We will fail because gender-teams express a closure, a limit, whereas sex-type — despite the biological fact of sexual dimorphism, which is far older than homo sapiens — cannot do what Illich’s gender does:
Gender… closes the world in on ‘us,’ however ambiguous and fragile this closure might be. Sex, on the contrary, implies unlimited openness, a universe in which there is always more. (81)
And only a limit will do, really, in support of the claim that a man can never become a woman. And yet sex cannot provide this limit, most especially when sex-type itself is the invention of the human that has no limits, merely “discriminations” between one type and another. In short, to say “sex discrimination” is itself redundant: both words reflect the invention of the genderless human — a human for whom indeed the categories of man and woman were probably destined to be eventually championed as arbitrary, for they no longer define a meaningful social reality.
It’s difficult, I know, to imagine a gender-team in the pre-industrial way that Illich means it — it is almost inevitable that images of burka-clad women denied rights and education pop into mind. But Illich emphasizes (the short book is well worth a full read) that this sort of sexism — arrangements predicated on the regime of scarcity — results from the loss of vernacular gender, rather than being constitutive of it. What we have been taught simply always was — women being oppressed by men in a regime of scarcity — is a projection of the present into the past. This takes a leap of faith, undoubtedly, but if there is any time to take one, it is now. For our current tools aren’t adequate to this fight: without gender-teams, women cannot meaningfully exist. Moreover — as I will discuss in a later essay — they will never have full discretion over the domain of creating new life, a discretion that was only questioned with the advent of sex-type.
What it means, then, to say that women are not assimilable, is to reject the notion of the genderless human, the one invented by industrial society to fulfill its peculiar needs. While we can admire the progress of an American post-industrial society that no longer excludes a priori racial or sexual minorities from economic and social opportunities, I agree with Illich that we cannot expect to ever see similar results for women. Gender, in the constitutive sense, is something that industrialization erased — and thus it will never be something that such a society can restore, not even through the powerful process of assimilation. Because women are not assimilable.
We have, alas, been fighting for “rights” — when what we should be fighting for is a world where women — and men — are simply a given.
My grandfather would agree with Glenn: his service in WWII so cemented his American identity that even many decades later he elected to be buried in a military cemetery rather than a Jewish one.
Trust me, they did say this — if I ever manage to find the link to where, I’ll add it.