Imagine if we have gender-neutral policy, based on a commitment to classical/political liberalism with its universalism that seeks to divorce the significance of socially-arbitrary/irrelevant social categories, and thus do not use the concept of gender in any legislation or regulation/policy, and don’t acknowledge/look at/notice/document gender when researching outcomes and policy problems and solutions. Thus, when we looked at income distribution and income inequality, to investigate its legitimacy/whether its ok or not/how it’s caused/etc., we would simply see women’s incomes alongside men’s/the rest of the population’s/the general population’s, and would not be able to see/recognize their disparity as a class, as something they experience for similar reasons and in a common way. Thus, we wouldn’t be able to analyze it for its nature, justification/legitimacy, its causes and solutions.
—So this looks like my ending thought about gender critical feminism and the abolition of gender:
-we can reject and end the use and maintenance of the categories/social classes of gender…RRC may want to abolish gender as a social class, abolish all social classes based on biology/sex, but she is sure to create the category again to discuss the material problems that all vagina-having people share.
-we may try to implement Liberal Universalism all the way and fully empty the arbitrary/morally-irrelevant categories of people of all social significance//practical implications/significance, but that will blind us to/can potentially blind us to possible ways that people can be oppressed for their identities.
(((**This sounds like the question that Butler was addressing in Gender Trouble: can you do feminism without a concept of woman? If the concept is the means of oppression, can you abolish it without losing the ability to recognize and analyze the systemic oppression that affects all similar people in the same way because of the same causes?** [http://lauragonzalez.com/TC/BUTLER_gender_trouble.pdf])))
—In this way, emptying these arbitrary categories of social signifiance/practicel implications is a CAP—which is just what Noah Smith observed before of being colorblind in action/treatment/policy.
Either we can be non-(gender-neutral/colorblind) and allow for and accept/tolerate racially unequal outcomes that result from certain contingent facts
One option is we can be (gender-neutral/colorblind) and allow for and accept/tolerate racially unequal outcomes that result from certain contingent facts operating within our neutral system.
The other option is we can recognize these empirical facts that disadvantage certain people (physical differences like in terms of reproductive role for the subjection of women; psychological facts with some socialized, but at least some innate; for example, categorization, likeness and in-/-outgroup dynamics, bias, cross-race identification, etc.) and realize that they would result under a regime of gender-neutral/colorblind policy in an unjust outcome.
A large class of people with a common characteristic, an arbitrary, morally-irrelevant fact about their identity that they did not choose and do not control, are experiencing life outcomes worse than they otherwise would/could be through no fault of their own.
Even if it’s not dependent solely on the facially neutral system, but in fact requires also the other facts—and in fact would not exist under the same (facially) neutral system if these empirical facts were otherwise—once you know about the outcome(s) and why and accept it, you are responsible for the outcome yourself.
So, instead of the neutral system, you craft one recognizing and taking into account those empirical facts, and craft it to avoid those potential injustices. The outcome is more just.
But you have also crafted policy that presupposes and depends on certain empirical facts, including people being racist.
(This is like what XXX argued to me when I suggested that maybe a “punch up, not down” rule could account for the rationality/reasonableness/plausibility of/coherence of/internal inconsistency of/consistency of a certain social phenomenon he accused of hypocrisy: adopting this rule would require defining which groups are up and which are down, which literally requires defining a hierarchy of classes).
——
But if I’m right here in identifying the value of identity politics, there is no identitarian deference called for.
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