The Tyranny of Taxonomy

from linnaeus to (john) money to the "NGO industrial complex" (cw: colonialism)

Tag yourself in the comments! This image was generated by DALL·E 3.

Humans have a pathological urge to categorize. On one hand it is useful. By grouping things together, you can identify what they have in common. On the other hand, categorization under one umbrella negates all the differences between them.

For example, gender is a major way people categorize themselves. But, everyone expresses their gender differently - even people who identify as the same gender. Further, gender categorizations don’t present a full picture the people being described. A lot of identities and characteristics are left out (race, class, age, etc.).

At its core, categorization is a way to divide people. That division carries power if enforced by coercion or culture. Division can be a blunt tool for anyone seeking power. “Divide and conquer,” anyone?

we need to talk about carl (linnaeus)

In biology, the way living organisms are categorized is called taxonomy. Modern taxonomy of a Latin genus/species name emerged in the mid 1700’s through the work of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Essentially, the system contains 8 ranks of classification that could be used to describe every type of organism. At some point you may have had to memorize these ranks for a biology class. (Remember “Dear King Phillip Came Over For Green Soup”?¹) So in order to not dredge up any more negative memories, let’s focus on two major flaws in Linnaeus’ system. (But, I made an illustration in case you want a refresher.)

First, Linnaean taxonomy presupposes a hierarchical and theological relationship between species. Linnaeus was a botanist by trade, but he influenced by Christian hegemony in science and society. His father was Lutheran minister, and Linnaeus himself published in Latin. (Latin was not a vernacular language at time as it was reserved for the Catholic Church and European scholarship. In particular, botanists often retained the use of Latin as a signifier of intellectual cachet.)

As such, Linnaeus was heavily influenced by the idea of scala nautrae or “the great chain of being”. This theory was originated by Aristotle but was repurposed by Christianity. It posited that all beings (or organisms) are ordered with the Christian God at the top, followed by (in order): angels, humans, animals, plants, and minerals.

The order matters because it translates to a “distance from God,” and being closer to God is (obviously) better. Since humans are atop all other earthly creatures, we can do what we want with them, including create taxonomies of them or exploit them for personal gain. In this way, Linnaeus’ taxonomy provided a unified scientific and theological basis for the “great chain of being” and the permission structures it creates.

Which brings us to the second major problem with the taxonomy: Linnaeus was racist. It was Linnaeus who created the false scientific authority to divide humans by skin color. To Linnaeus, humans are actually four discrete subspecies separated by geography and race. (To be clear, this is not true.) White Europeans (as the primary practitioners of Christianity at the time) are the closest to God and can therefore dominate the other human races. In short, Linnaeus used his biological taxonomy to justify white supremacy through its alignment with Christian theology.

Linnaeus first published his taxonomy of humans in 1758. By this time, most of North and South America were under European colonial rule. Over the next century, Europeans would expand their empires through brutal subjugation of native communities in Africa and Asia. To justify imperialism, European (and eventually American) states could point to Linnaeus’ union of science and theology that placed White people atop a faux racial hierarchy.

For his part in white supremacy, Linnaeus has largely avoided scrutiny. His taxonomic system is still in use today, but the racial and theological implications of his work are glossed over. For many scientists, the usefulness of taxonomy to describe and categorize species outweighs any inclination to seriously address its flawed foundation.

It’s not that the taxonomic system (stripped of its racial and theological inspirations, as taught in schools) is otherwise perfect. For example, Linnaeus’ system explicitly does not explain how new species are generated (due to his staunch creationism).² It’s simply that scientists want the utility of the taxonomy, so Linnaeus’ model remains in use including its perpetuation of a dead language otherwise spoken primarily within the Catholic Church.

But the failure of a broad reckoning with Linnaeus’ white supremacy is not for lack of trying. In 2020, Lovette Jallow, an Afro-Swedish anti-racist activist, called for the removal of statues and monuments to Linnaeus in retribution for his foundational contributions to racist science. The Swedish scientific establishment largely responded by clutching their pearls, and the Linnaeus monuments remain in public spaces.

sex/gender as an imperial taxonomy

White colonizers’ taxonomic mandate led to the nonconsensual imposition of European culture, morality, and medicine on colonized peoples and their ways of living. As Europeans advanced their colonial ambitions, they began to encounter native species that were not present in Europe. Excitedly, these “natural scientists” used Linnaeus’ taxonomy to classify these species in Latin - erasing any names for the species held by indigenous populations. This erasure aided in the elimination of the knowledge and culture of native non-White communities across the world.

This attempt at making non-White cultures legible to White imperialists included regulation of what we today consider “gender” (even though the concept of gender wasn’t articulated until the mid-1900’s). As Jules Gill-Peterson traces in her new book A Short History of Transmisogyny, a “global trans panic” emerged around 1850 in the British-ruled Indian subcontinent. There, colonizers forced the native hijra population into the Western, binary taxonomy of sex/gender which read the hijras’ femininity (and male assignment) as evidence of sodomy. As Gill-Peterson writes, “the conflation of femininity with sodomy was rooted in [the hijras’] clothing and presence in public, both of which flouted British norms and could therefore be read as a threat to imperial sovereignty.”

In reality, hijras serve a specific cultural and religious role that involves sacred infertility and ascetic discipleship. Hijra identity is primarily rooted in spirituality, and hijras consider themselves to be neither male nor female.³ Yet, these aspects of hijra identity were overwritten by White colonizers attempting to maintain imperial control.

As Gill-Peterson recounts, concurrent panics around gender non-conforming people can be found around the world - including in the United States government’s subjugation of indigenous populations. The mechanics of the panic were the same:

Colonial states used trans panic as a pretense to secure political and economic power. What was trans about the panic was not that the people being targeted themselves were inherently trans women, but that they were trans-feminized by the conflation of male femininity with immoral sodomy and sex work.

transgender as a western medical taxonomy

The modern conception of gender as distinct from sex was a creation of Western sexologists. In fact, this usage of the word “gender” is credited to John Money who first used it in a 1955 publication. Notably, its root is the Latin “genus,” one of the taxonomic ranks delineated by Linnaeus.

For Money, gender represented another taxonomy to describe human expression. This categorization had a utility in its combination with someone’s sex. The two taxonomies provided clinicians with a standard by which to assess patients, eventually leading to the medical model of trans identity (i.e. when one’s sex assigned at birth and gender did not align). This model emphasizes White bourgeois notions of gender rooted in passing and medical intervention. It also prefigures the word “transgender” as individuals cross the boundary between sex and gender as articulated by Money.

Transgender itself became yet another taxonomy in the early 1990’s. This taxonomy sought to sever the historical connections between “transgender” and “gay/lesbian” by separating gender and sexuality into distinct categorizations. Armed with this distinction, social service organizations identified high-risk populations of gender non-conforming people as “transgender.” However, these organizations never considered that the people they were serving had different conceptions of themselves. In fact, poor femmes of color interacting with these organizations often identified as “gay” because their experience of gender and sexuality were not neatly separable. As Gill-Peterson notes,

As a result, the femmes on the street became even more illegible than they had been before. Transgender arrived for many girls on the street not as an activist cry but as an institutional word to abstractly separate gender identity from sexual orientation. By refusing to ratify that separation, these largely poor trans women of color were cast as backward, suffering from an “outmoded” belief system.

Over time, the taxonomy of transgender caught on due its potential as a political organizer for gender non-conforming folks and as a gatekeeping mechanism for the aid brought by social service workers. Yet, the work of resurfacing alternate constellations of sex, gender, and sexuality is just beginning.

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A common thread running through these taxonomies of Linnaeus, Money, and the “NGO industrial complex” (to use Gill-Peterson’s phrasing) is that each is imbued with the assumptions and value systems of their creators. Each forced these cultural constructs onto people through assignment in the taxonomy. This process erased any autonomous understanding that the assigned population had of themselves.

Again, taxonomies may be useful, but it’s always worth asking who is (not) doing the categorizing and why. We can push back against taxonomies that we do not consent to. Everything from the box labeled “sex” on the intake form at your doctor’s office to surveillance capitalism’s targeted ads. If you don’t want to be swept away by a taxonomic hegemony, resist. You probably aren’t the only one who feels that way.

For more on Gill-Peterson’s book, A Short History of Transmisogyny:

A Love Letter To The Dolls

1. Or “Dear Kevin Please Come Over For Gay Sex” if you are a Community fan like me.

2. Of course, our modern view of species emergence (i.e. evolution) wasn’t articulated until 1858 by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species.

3. To be clear, blithely using the Western gender designations of “trans” or “non-binary” to describe hijras perpetuates their historical flattening that began under British colonialism.