Imagine a world where everything was on a spectrum (biological sex included).

This past semester in college I decided to take Feminist Philosophy. I went in not knowing much about feminism despite the fact that I took an Intro to Women’s Studies class and a Sexualities class prior to this class. One day during class we talked about Nominalism, which in this context refers to the belief that aspects of humanity should exist on a spectrum rather than separate groups (i.e. sexual orientation, race, sex).

This was particularly eye-opening for me because I always struggled with the concept that separate groups can be treated as equal even when society don’t view them as the same. For example: If whites and blacks were given the same rights and freedoms, can we just assume that people will eventually stop discriminating and making comparisons of the two races? Wouldn’t we always see skin color and thus allow us to group people into neat categories to place general characteristics on? I personally think that assumptions about groups of people will continue to occur as long as groups exist. But if we all lived on a spectrum of characteristics, then that may change things. 

First, how do we go about doing such a thing? Well for starters, interracial relationships have already led to a growing spectrum of races. And race is socially constructed so categories such as “Black”, “White”, “Asian”, and “Hispanic” don’t really hold much value besides the fact that it’s how humans decided to categorize themselves. Sexual orientation is often believed to be on a spectrum as well as opposed to be completely gay or completely straight. Sex is probably harder for most people to conceptualize as something that can exist on a spectrum but I disagree.

Obviously most males have a XY sex chromosome pair and most females have a XX sex chromosome pair. However, there are also plenty of people that have other types of sex chromosome combinations such as XXY, XXX, XYY, etc. Also, those that are intersex may have a XY or XX sex chromosome pair but possess sex organs that fall outside the norms of male and female sex organs. Then if we take into account of hormonal differences that males have compared to other males and females have compared to other females, we can see that not all males are the same and not all females are the same. We are already faced with the problem of those that are intersex not fitting our sex dichotomy but it’s also evident that members of each sex group aren’t completely similar to those of the same sex just because they share a similar sex chromosome pair.

We are obviously far of having an accepting society for those that are intersex, let alone a sex spectrum. And it isn’t guaranteed that by just creating a spectrum for human characteristics, discrimination will end. India and Brazil’s racism issues are a good example of that. However, I think it’s interesting concept that can be considered in the future. One solution for sex equality may be to just eliminate the two categories of sex.