Intersectionality is impractical

The argument

Intersectionality is the idea of accounting for discrimination taking into consideration the whole of your identity. This means that broad labels we use to talk about discrimination, such as gender, sexuality, social background, etc. are interlinked and all contribute to each person's experiences. This position does not dispute that description. It accepts the theory and asks whether anything workable can be built from it. But it is not enough to know the theory. Two questions follow immediately, and neither has been settled: how many different labels can we find for discrimination, and how do we account for all of them and give these different groups a voice? The first is a question about where the list stops; the second is about what anyone is supposed to do once it does. A framework that identifies every relevant axis of identity generates categories faster than institutions can respond to them, which leaves the practical work — the policies, the remedies, the representation — still to be defined. These points have no easy answer, and the difficulty is structural rather than a matter of insufficient effort. Regardless of how narrow we make our labels, we will still find people falling through the cracks unheard, because any finite set of categories will fail somebody whose position falls between them. These people will continue to feel unrepresented, at the bottom of the caste system if you will — and a scheme intended to end hierarchy will have produced another one, sorted by how closely a person's circumstances match an available label. So while the theory should promote equality for all, we still do not have a way to accurately identify and correct discrimination in a wide range of cases.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Intersectionality and raising awareness are a good first step. We need to start somewhere, and acknowledging that there are many things we don’t understand and many factors that need to be accounted for will build on future policies and understanding.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The framework does not require enumerating every dimension of identity. It is an analytical claim that forms of disadvantage interact rather than simply add, and applying it means attending to the interactions that bear on a particular case. [Rejecting P2] It is already applied in practice — in anti-discrimination law recognising combined grounds of discrimination, and in research that disaggregates outcomes by more than one characteristic — so the claim that no workable method exists overlooks the methods in use. [Rejecting P3] Incompleteness is not failure. Every analytical framework leaves cases unaddressed, and the alternative on offer, single-axis categories, leaves more people unaccounted for rather than fewer.