Many Factors Have Been Shown To Affect Reaction Times Including Age Gender Physical: Fill & Download for Free

No, you cannot treat women exactly like men. Because women aren’t exactly like men. The playing field isn't level. Treating women exactly like men is a euphemism for treating women unfairly.We have learned from so many mistakes in the past that women are at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence if they don’t have separate bathrooms. But men don't consider this or think about this at all. When men make policies women aren't even considered. Yet, those men believe they are being fair - that they are treating women equally.Women are invariably more likely than men to walk and take public transport. In France, two-thirds of public transport passengers are women; in Philadelphia and Chicago in the US, the figure is 64% and 62% respectively. A UK Department for Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perceptions of danger, finding that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, 60% are scared waiting on train platforms, 49% are scared waiting at the bus stop, and 59% are scared walking home from a bus stop or station. Delhi was ranked the fourth most dangerous public transport system in the world for women in 2014.The biggest problem is that men are blind to problems women face. For most of the twentieth century there were no female musicians in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. But then all of a sudden, something changed: from the 1970s on, the numbers of female players started to go up. And up. That something was blind auditions. Instituted in the early 1970s following a lawsuit, blind auditions are what they sound like: the hiring committee can’t see who is playing in the audition, because there is a screen between them and the player. The screens had an immediate impact. By the early 1980s, women began to make up 50% of the share of new hires. The hiring committees were not aware they were biased. They thought they were treating men and women alike.Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity, or a belief that you are not sexist, makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way.A 2016 study from the University of Sussex played a series of cries to parents (twenty-five fathers and twenty-seven mothers) of three-month-old babies. They found that although babies’ cries aren’t differentiated by sex (sex-based pitch differences don’t occur until puberty) lower cries were perceived as male and higher cries perceived as female. They also found that when male parents were told that a lower-pitched cry belonged to a boy, they rated the baby as in more discomfort than when the cry was labelled female.Men’s upper body strength is on average between 40-60% higher than women’s (compared to lower-body strength which is on average only 25% higher in men. Overall, 90% of the women (this time including untrained women) in the study had a weaker grip than 95% of their male counterparts. And yet every tool in the world is designed for men's hands. Car seats are designed for men and because they don't fit women, women are more likely to be injured in accidents than men. Men see those designs as treating women equally. But treating women "equally" usually means treating women like they don't exist or don't matter.On average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue. For every dollar of funding, female-owned start-ups generate seventy-eight cents, compared to male-owned start-ups which generate thirty-one cents. They also perform better over time, ‘generating 10% more in cumulative revenue over a five-year period’. And yet, virtually every man would tell you that men and women are treated equally in business ventures.Research has found that nurses are subjected to more acts of violence than police officers or prison guards. In Ontario in 2014, the number of workplace injuries that required time off work from the healthcare sector greatly outnumbered those in other sectors surveyed. A recent US study similarly found that healthcare workers required time off work due to violence four times more often than other types of injury. And yet if you look up the 'most dangerous jobs' healthcare is usually not even on the list. Because it's invisible to men - because it doesn't involve very many men. Virtually every man will tell you that men do all the dangerous jobs.Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom. Women are not scaled-down men. We have different muscle-mass distribution. We have lower bone density. There are sex differences in vertebrae spacing. But the crash test dummies are always male. Male is the default setting of the world. And men will tell you that that is fair, that women are given equality.The evidence that women are being let down by the medical establishment is overwhelming. The bodies, symptoms and diseases that affect half the world’s population are being dismissed, disbelieved and ignored because women don't have the same exact symptoms that men have. The problem may be the gender data gaps in their knowledge. Almost all medical trials and drug trials feature predominantly men. And in the few cases where women are taking part in the trials, the data resulting is not sorted by gender. Say for example, that an adverse drug reaction occurs in 3% of the people using the drug. Because they didn't sort the data by gender, they never realize that the 3% is entirely female. Women report of work-related musculoskeletal pain still being treated with skepticism despite accumulating reports that pain systems function differently among women and men.Only one in eight women who have a heart attack report the classic male symptom of chest pain. Autoimmune diseases affect about 8% of the population, but women are three times more likely to develop one, making up about 80% of those affected. Women develop higher antibody responses and have more frequent and severe adverse reactions to vaccines.Sex differences appear even in our cells: in blood-serum biomarkers for autism; in proteins; in immune cells used to convey pain signals; in how cells die following a stroke.According to the FDA, the second most common adverse drug reaction in women is that the drug simply doesn’t work, even though it clearly works in men.As women get older, their blood pressure gets higher compared to men of the same age, and elevated blood pressure is more directly linked to cardiovascular mortality in women than in men. In fact, the risk of death from coronary artery disease for women is twice that for men for every 20 mm Hg increase in blood pressure above normal levels.Other male-biased advice includes the recommendation for diabetics to do high-intensity interval training; it doesn’t really help female diabetics (we don’t really know why, but this is possibly because women burn fat more than carbs during exercise.Women who ingest pharmaceuticals in the US are dying because the people who test them test men, not women. Some drugs used to break up blood clots immediately after a heart attack can cause significant bleeding problems in women. Other drugs that are commonly prescribed to treat high blood pressure have been found to lower men’s mortality from heart attack – but to increase cardiac-related deaths among women.Common preventative methods may also not work as well in women. Acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) has been found to be effective in preventing a first heart attack in men, but a 2005 paper found that it had a ‘nonsignificant’ effect in women aged between forty-five and sixty-five. A more recent study from 2011 found that not only was aspirin ineffective for women, it was potentially harmful ‘in the majority of patients’.Research from the UK has found that women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack (rising to almost 60% for some types of heart attack. The reason is that doctors are using diagnostic tools for men. Women (particularly young women) may in fact present without any chest pain at all, but rather with stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea and fatigue. The tests doctors use to determine what’s wrong with a patient are also contributing to women’s higher death rates following a heart attack. Standard tests like the electrocardiogram or the physical stress test have been found to be less conclusive in women. For example, a heart attack is traditionally diagnosed with an angiogram, which will show where there are obstructed arteries. But women often don’t have obstructed arteries, meaning that the scan won’t show up any abnormalities. The point here is that if women are treated exactly like men, women die.Studies from the 1980s and 90s which found that while men who reported pain tended to receive pain medication, women were more likely to receive sedatives or antidepressants. A 2014 study which required healthcare providers to make treatment recommendations for hypothetical patients with lower back pain similarly found that female patients were significantly more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than men. Several studies over the past decades have shown that women are more sensitive to pain than men (which sheds a particularly cruel light on the finding that women are less likely to receive painkillers). Even if they are treated for their pain, women routinely have to wait longer than men to receive that treatment. A US analysis of 92,000 emergency-room visits between 1997 and 2004 found women had longer waiting times than men, and a study of adults who presented to a US urban emergency department between April 2004 and January 2005 found that while men and women presented with similar levels of pain, women were less likely to receive analgesia and women who did receive analgesia waited longer to receive it. US Institute of Medicine publication on chronic pain released in 2011 suggested that not much has changed, reporting that women in pain face ‘delays in correct diagnosis, improper and unproven treatments’, and ‘neglect, dismissal and discrimination’ from the healthcare system. In Sweden a woman suffering from a heart attack will wait one hour longer than a man from the onset of pain to arrival at a hospital, will get lower priority when waiting for an ambulance, and will wait twenty minutes longer to be seen at the hospital.A 2013 paper that examined trends in US mortality rates from 1992-2006 in 3,140 counties reported that even as mortality decreased in most counties, female mortality increased in 42.8% of them.Following the 2008 financial crash, the UK has seen a mass cutting exercise in public services. Between 2011 and 2014 children’s center budgets were cut by £82 million and between 2010 and 2014, 285 children’s centers either merged or closed. Between 2010 and 2015 local-authority social-care budgets fell by £5 billion, social security has been frozen below inflation and restricted to a household maximum, and eligibility for a carers’ allowance depends on an earnings threshold that has not kept up with increases in the national minimum wage. The problem is, these cuts are not so much savings as a shifting of costs from the public sector onto women, because the work still needs to be done. It just becomes more unpaid labor for women.Money continues not to be shared equally between couples, and money controlled by women continues to be more likely to be spent on children than money controlled by men. In studies conducted in Rwanda and Malawi, children from female-headed households were healthier than children from male-headed households – even when the male-headed households had higher incomes. Cutting public services hurts women more than it hurts men. Yet men consider those policies to be equal.In the US, nearly all married couples file a joint tax return. Men would say that that is fair. It isn't. It unfairly taxes the lower income earner, which is nearly always women. When a couple gets money, the male almost always controls it and most of it gets spent on the male. The women and children lose out.Women are disproportionately affected by armed conflict. In modern warfare it is civilians, rather than combatants, who are most likely to be killed. Domestic violence against women increases when conflict breaks out. In fact, it is more prevalent than conflict-related sexual violence. Women are also more likely than men to die from the indirect effects of war. More than half of the world’s maternal deaths occur in conflict-affected and fragile states, and the ten worst-performing countries on maternal mortality are all either conflict or post-conflict countries. Here, female mortality is on average 2.5 times higher, and this is partly because post conflict and disaster relief efforts too often forget to account for women’s specific healthcare needs.The Washington Post reported that two of the three largest outbreaks of Ebola ‘involved transmission of the virus in maternity settings’. The fact that Ebola decimated healthcare workers (themselves mainly women) made the risk even higher for women.Again, the point of all this is that the playing field isn't level.What feminists want is a level playing field, inclusion in the world, to be seen and heard and to participate equally in policy.(this information was taken from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. She gives references for all of it.)

Why We Shouldn't Compare Transracial to Transgender IdentityUnlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice.“Call me Caitlyn.” With this phrase, emblazoned on Vanity Fair’s June 2015 cover, Caitlyn Jenner revealed her transgender identity to the world. But these words were not only a revelation; they also were a demand. Most obviously, they demanded that others call Jenner by a new name. But even more importantly, they demanded that others recognize Jenner as having a certain identity: woman.Reactions to this demand were predictable. Jenner was warmly embraced and lauded by many for her decision to—as Jenner put it—live as her “authentic self.” Transgender activist and writer Laverne Cox wrote that Jenner’s “courage to move past denial into her truth so publicly . . . [is] beyond beautiful to me.” President Barack Obama, retweeting Jenner’s announcement, praised her “courage to share [her] story.” Hundreds of thousands of others left encouraging comments on Jenner’s social media. Within these reactions, an idea repeatedly surfaced: Jenner’s demand for recognition as a woman is legitimate because Jenner is a woman.Both positive and negative reactions to Caitlyn Jenner manifested a single theme: persons’ claimed identities should be recognized when and only when they really are what they claim to be.Not everyone agreed. In fact, some disagreed with notable incivility. Right-wing blogger Matt Walsh called Jenner a “mentally ill crossdresser,” and likened her gender identity to his two-year-old son’s claims to be a Tyrannosaurus rex. Walsh was joined by a small group of feminists, including Germaine Greer and Elinor Burkett. Furious that Jenner was one of Glamour’s 2015 Women of the Year, Greer commented, “I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that doesn’t turn me into a f**king cocker spaniel.” And, in a controversial New York Times editorial, Burkett argued that what makes someone a woman is an accrued experience of sexism and misogyny—an experience that Burkett did not believe Jenner possessed. Within these reactions, we see an idea that in many ways mirrors the previous one: Jenner’s demand for recognition as a woman is not legitimate because Jenner is not a woman.In other words, despite deep disagreements, both positive and negative reactions to Jenner manifested a single theme: persons’ claimed identities should be recognized when and only when they really are what they claim to be. Jenner’s demand for recognition as a woman was seen as legitimate by those who viewed her as a woman and as illegitimate by those who did not. But all sides understood the question “Should someone be recognized as a woman?” to be settled by first answering the question “Is that person really a woman?”In the same month that Vanity Fair published “Call Me Caitlyn,” another controversy broke concerning Nkechi Amare Diallo (née Rachel Dolezal). Her parents publicly stated that Diallo—at the time, president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP—was passing as Black. In response, Diallo said that despite her lack of Black ancestry, she genuinely self-identified as Black. Public reactions to Dolezal were swift, and in many ways they mirrored reactions to Jenner. Vanity Fair ran an article by Allison Samuels charging Dolezal with “dishonesty about her race” and calling her a “white woman” who had her “cover blown.” NPR’s Denene Millner agreed, calling Dolezal a “white lady with fussy hair and a bad tan” and pointing to unique social and cultural experiences—experiences Dolezal did not have—as the heart of Black identity. Samuel and Millner were joined by thousands of articles and social media posts calling out Dolezal as a white woman pretending to be Black.Most reactions to Dolezal—and more recently, to former George Washington University professor Jessica Krug—manifested the very same assumption taken for granted in reactions to Jenner. Once again, most people assumed that a claimed identity should be recognized when and only when someone really is what they claim to be. They believed that the question “Should someone be recognized as Black?” would be settled by first answering the question, “Is that person really Black?” And, in the court of public opinion, the correct answer in the case of Diallo (or anyone else lacking Black heritage) was “No.”All sides understood the question “Should someone be recognized as a woman?” to be settled by first answering the question “Is that person really a woman?”We want to put our cards on the table: we think that there is a deeply important asymmetry between Jenner’s claim to be a woman and Diallo’s claim to be Black. We also think that, as a result of this asymmetry, transgender identities deserve social uptake and so-called “transracial” identifications as Black almost always do not. (We leave space for unique circumstances in which someone who has deeply invested in a Black community and been forthcoming about their racial history is nevertheless accepted within that community as Black.) In other words, we think that transgender women and men should be recognized and treated as women and men (respectively), but that persons should not be recognized and treated as Black solely on the basis of self-identification.But we also think that it is a mistake to base this asymmetry on notions about who “really is” a woman or who “really is” Black. The social world is a dynamic and ever-changing place. Some people think that the social rules that govern what it takes to be a woman or to be Black have never changed—that these rules are fixed and naturally determined, and thus unchanging and unquestionable. We think that’s wrong: the rules of gender and race are always changing. And given this, the question that really matters isn’t whether individuals like Diallo and Krug are in fact Black given our present rules of racial classification, but whether they should be.Let’s recap. The loudest reactions to both Jenner and Diallo were based on two ideas. The first often is stated somewhat explicitly: there are generally accepted rules about who is a woman and who is Black. The second idea is often unstated: these rules are fixed and legitimate. That is, whether we should recognize and treat someone as a woman or as Black always is and should be determined by these rules.We think the second idea is false. To see why, let’s see how this reasoning breaks apart in other cases. For example, before the Twenty Sixth Amendment was passed in 1971, eighteen-year-olds couldn't vote in some elections. Should someone in 1970 have concluded from this that eighteen-year-olds should not be recognized and treated as voters? Prior to the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act of 2008, bone marrow cancer was not legally considered a disability. Does that mean it should not have been counted as a disability? And today, intelligent life forms like octopuses are considered food. But this hardly settles whether octopuses should be considered food. In short, rules about what belongs to social categories like “eligible voters,” “legal disabilities,” or “food” are not fixed. Neither are they guaranteed to be legitimate: in many cases, commonly accepted rules for social classification have been deeply unjust.We think that the categories “woman” and “Black” are similar to categories like “eligible voters” or “food” in the sense that currently accepted rules about gender and race classification are neither fixed nor guaranteed to be legitimate. Hopefully we all agree that the 1970 rules for who counted as “eligible voters” did not settle who should be counted as eligible voters—these rules were changed to accommodate the political interests of young adults. Similarly, we think that there is room to question whether currently accepted rules about who counts as women or as Black ought to be changed in the interests of gender or racial justice.The malleability of gender and race classifications suggests to us that the typical conversations about transgender identities and Black transracial identities are the wrong conversations.Maybe you get off our boat here. Maybe you think that “woman” and “Black” are importantly different from categories like “eligible voters” or “food.” The rules determining what makes someone a woman or Black, you might say, are given to us by nature, whereas rules about “eligible voters” or “food” are what philosophers would call “socially constructed”—that is, they are a matter of social, political, and economic practices and institutions. We can change which animals are food as we learn more about different life forms and their cognitive and affective capacities, and we similarly might change which people are eligible voters given commitments such as gender, race, age, or immigration justice. But, you might think, we don’t settle the rules about who is a woman or who is Black—those rules are determined by the world, not society.In philosophy, this view is called essentialism. It is the idea that the rules for gender and race classification are grounded in eternal truths—rules that we can only discover, not revise, and therefore rules that we cannot question. Even those who think about gender or racial categories as social constructions frequently nosedive into essentialist logic as soon as transgender or transracial identities arise: while holding that gender and race categories are human inventions, they simultaneously appeal to rules for gender and race classification as if these rules forever settle the question of who ought to count as a woman or as Black.But essentialism fares poorly against the historical record. Gender essentialists typically insist that there is a single, fixed trait—biological sex—that always has and will determine gender. But not only have rules for gender classification substantially changed over time, binary categories of biological sex (i.e., female and male) resist definition in terms of a single—much less fixed—trait.As Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna observed in 1978, “There are [no features] that always and without exception are true of only one gender.” As scientists continue to learn more about the complexities of sex—down to the fact that a single person can have different chromosomal sexes across cells—this forty-year-old observation becomes ever more well-founded. And yet, as medical anthropologist Katrina Karkazis pointed out in The Lancet last year, the facile search for a definitive trait of biological sex continues:For a century, scientists studied an array of human characteristics that inform our ideas of what makes someone a woman or a man, seeking to pin down a single, definitive biological indicator. Bodies troubled these schemes and led to socially untenable categorizations. If gonads were understood as the essence of sex, women who were phenotypically female but who had testes were men. This didn’t make sense, so scientists proposed yet other traits. Even as they debated which biological trait signaled its essence, scientists understood sex as biological and involving multiple, if contested, factors.Despite this dead end, commitment to sex essentialism persists. But the prospect of finding a biological trait that all and only women (or men) share in common doesn’t look promising. This is just because, for any candidate biological trait (e.g., having XX chromosomes, having female reproductive organs, producing female gametes) there are people who lack that biological trait, and yet many of us (gender essentialists included!) would say that those people are women. Furthermore, even just within the last 150 years, concepts of biological sex have fluctuated in response to the discovery of hormones and chromosomes, growing medical knowledge of intersex variations, and changing social opinions that split sexuality from sex and moved toward accepting the possibility of altering one’s sex. As such, there is growing support for the idea that gender classification is not simply a matter of biology, but rather is the result of complex and ever-shifting interactions between culture and biology.Racial classification displays similar malleability. As sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, a “selection of . . . particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process.” Once we adopt a historical perspective, we find that racial categories and rules for race classification enormously vary across time and context.Just consider the history of the U.S. census. People who took the first census in 1790 were asked to sort themselves and the members of their household into one of three categories: “white,” “all other free persons,” and “slave.” The category “Black” did not appear on the census until 1850, when people were asked to classify themselves as either “Black” or “mulatto,” a category which was supposed to include anyone who was not Black, but had “any perceptible trace of African blood.” Two decades later, the 1890 census distinguished between “Blacks,” “mulattos,” “octoroons” (someone with “one-eighth or any trace of Black blood”) and “quadroons” (someone with “one-fourth Black blood”), categories that reflect what is commonly known as the “one-drop rule.”Even those who think about gender or racial categories as social constructions frequently nosedive into essentialist logic as soon as transgender or transracial identities arise.Anyone who took the census this year knows that things have changed. At present, the census acknowledges five racial categories: “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Black or African American,” “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander,” and “White.” If the racial categories recognized on the U.S. census are a reliable guide to racial categories recognized in society more broadly, then it’s clear that quite a lot about U.S. race classification has changed since 1790.In sum, essentialism flies in the face of evidence that both gender and race classifications are changeable and challengeable, not fixed and inevitable. Someone deeply committed to essentialism will be unflappable in the face of this evidence. For devout essentialists, essentialism is unfalsifiable—no amount of evidence will convince them to give it up. The fact that various cultures and communities differ in gender and race classifications will not deter the essentialist, who will insist that gender and race have hidden essences—even if essences that we have yet to discover.While we cannot offer a full response here, we think the primary reason to accept essentialism would be an explanatory reason. If social and historical facts about the imposition of gendered and racial signification on various bodies were unable to explain boundaries of gender and race classification, or physical, psychological, or behavioral inferences based on those classifications, then perhaps there would be a need to appeal to hidden essences. But we are convinced by gender and race scholarship that no such appeal is needed; we can explain all that we need to explain about gender and race without hidden essences.Let us take stock. The malleability of gender and race classifications suggests to us that the typical conversations about transgender identities and Black transracial identities are the wrong conversations. Almost without fail, these conversations focus on whether people like Jenner “really are” women, or whether people like Diallo and Krug “really are” Black. It is not hard to see why these conversations so often take this sort of question as the central one: it is supposed to have an easy and objective answer, one that resolves the dispute for us. But in fact, these ontological questions do not have fixed and natural answers. As a result, we think a far more interesting and important question is should we change the rules for gender classification? for race classification? In particular, should rules for gender classification accommodate transgender persons like Jenner—that is, count someone as a woman just because they self-identify as a woman? And should the rules for race classification be altered to accommodate people like Diallo and Krug—that is, to count someone as Black just because they self-identify as Black? (We focus here only on Blackness; we don’t assume these considerations apply to all race classifications.)Essentialism flies in the face of evidence that both gender and race classifications are changeable and challengeable, not fixed and inevitable.Asking these questions helps to set the conversation in a more productive direction. Different answers are possible. For our part, we think that the reasons in favor of trans-inclusive gender classification outweigh the reasons against it, and that the reasons against transracial-inclusive race classification outweigh the reasons for it. We won’t provide a complete case for this view here. Rather, we want to make a more limited argument in defense of two claims that help to support this view.First, there is at least one strong reason to avoid transracial-inclusive rules for the category “Black”—a reason previously overlooked in controversial philosophical treatment of this subject. Second, and moreover, this reason does not apply in the case of gender classification. In other words, a powerful argument against changing race classification to accommodate persons like Krug and Diallo cannot be used against changing gender classification to accommodate persons like Jenner.Let us make one methodological comment at the start. When considering whether to revise rules for gender or race classification, we think that there are important considerations at both the population level and the individual level. While it is important and good to value a person’s autonomy and respect their identifications, we also think this good must be weighed against the population-level effects of revising our classifications. In cases where revising a classification would have a negative sociopolitical impact that outweighs the good of respecting how an individual identifies, we think that the classification should not be revised. And we think that revising the rules of race classification to accommodate transracial identification into Blackness is a case like this.To see why, consider a different case: the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Between the years of 1879 and 1996, 30 percent of children of the Indigenous peoples of Canada were forcibly enrolled in the Canadian Indian residential school system (IRS). These boarding schools were created in order to both assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture and remove them from the cultural influences of their home communities. Children enrolled in these schools were separated from their families, forced to learn English and French (often at the cost of losing their native language), and experienced significant amounts of abuse. In the years since, it has been shown that the IRS had lasting effects on Indigenous communities. The IRS has been linked to the prevalence of sexual abuse, alcohol abuse, drug addiction, violence, mental illness and suicide in Indigenous communities.In the winter of 2006, the Canadian government recognized the damage inflicted by the IRS and established a $1.9 billion compensation package for all former IRS students. This agreement between the Canadian government and 86,000 survivors of the IRS, termed the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), was set up to dispense monetary reparations to individuals who were enrolled in the IRS. Importantly, it is not enough to simply identify as someone who was enrolled in the IRS—in order for someone to claim reparations from the government through the IRSSA, that person must have been enrolled in the Canadian Indian residential school system. We hope you share our intuition that this is the right classification rule: self-identification should not be sufficient for claiming these reparations, because the goal of the program is to concretely assist those who were harmed by a historical injustice.There is a deeply important asymmetry between Jenner’s claim to be a woman and Diallo’s claim to be Black.Now return to race. Being Black in the United States is similar to being a person who qualifies for IRSSA reparations in at least one important respect: being Black isn’t simply a matter of internal identification; it is also a matter of how your community and ancestors have been treated by other people, institutions, and governments. Given this, we think that race classification should (continue to) track—as accurately as possible—intergenerationally inherited inequalities. More directly, we need conceptual and linguistic tools for identifying those who are entitled to reparations for racial wrongs, where by “reparations” we mean institutional correction of intergenerational inequality. These might include, but are not limited to: affirmative action in employment and education; compensation for past economic and personal exploitation; debt-cancellation for affected populations; medical, home buying, and college aid; institutional apologies for past harms; and the creation of a standardized curriculum which explicitly addresses the role of racial oppression in state-building.Central to this argument, then, is the observation that in the case of Blackness, inequality accumulates intergenerationally. For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women born in the United States are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. What explains this? Arline T. Geronimus, public health researcher and professor at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, has argued using a series of empirical studies that the intergenerational effects of racism explain a number of decreased health outcomes for Black Americans, including lower birth weights and higher rates of pregnancy-related complications for Black women. Geronimus famously termed this phenomenon “weathering,” a term that refers to the idea that “Blacks experience early health deterioration as a consequence of the cumulative impact of repeated experience with social or economic adversity and political marginalization.”Differences in the birth weights of children born to recent Black immigrants and the children of U.S.-born Black women have been cited as further support for this weathering hypothesis. In particular, the birth weight distribution of first generation Black immigrant women is closer to that of White women, but subsequent generations of Black immigrant women have lower birth weight distributions, closer to that of U.S.-born Black women who are not recently descended from immigrants. The idea is that this shift in health outcomes can be explained by the adversity Black immigrant women and their daughters faced upon arriving in the United States.In addition to gaps in health outcomes, wealth gaps between Black and white households also widen intergenerationally. As taxation scholar Lily Batchelder has noted, “White households are twice as likely as black households to receive an inheritance. Moreover, receipt of an inheritance is associated with a $104,000 increase in median wealth among white families, but only a $4,000 increase among black families.” Economists Darrick Hamilton and Sandy Darity argue that such intra-familial, non-merit transfers of wealth “account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socioeconomic indicators.” While many white families accumulate wealth across generations, Black families often have little to no wealth for intrafamily transfer. This gap is not decreasing: in fact, gaps in median wealth (wealth at the middle of a distribution) between Black and white households are larger today than thirty years ago.Notice that this argument does not apply in the case of gender and gender inequality. Gender inequality, unlike racial inequality, does not primarily accumulate intergenerationally, if only for the obvious reason that the vast majority of households are multi-gendered. While parents often are responsible for ingraining patriarchal ideas and rigid gender norms in their children (it is extremely difficult to avoid!), this is not a “passing down” of socioeconomic inequality itself but, rather, of a socialization that perpetuates gender inequality.We think that the reasons in favor of trans-inclusive gender classification outweigh the reasons against it, and that the reasons against transracial-inclusive race classification outweigh the reasons for it.This is not to say that gender inequality is ahistorical. To the contrary, gender inequality is rooted in historical and continuing manifestations of sexism and misogyny, from policies that economically exploit women and undermine their reproductive autonomy to social practices like sexual harassment and rape culture. Young girls inherit the same sexism and misogyny that their mothers faced as young girls, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender. But importantly, all women inherit the historical accumulation of societal sexism. This marks a central difference between transgender-inclusive classification in the category “woman” and transracial-inclusive classification in the category “Black.” While transracial individuals like Krug and Diallo eschew much of the weight of anti-Black oppression and white supremacy, trans women and cis women alike are burdened by the legacy of patriarchy.Feminist icon Catharine MacKinnon recently said, “Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.” We take MacKinnon to be pointing out that, contrary to what anti-trans activists such as J. K. Rowling claim, the experience of gender discrimination and misogyny is not limited to cisgender women—in many cases, transgender women experience more extreme forms of misogyny than do cisgender women. There are certain forms of misogyny that trans women are less likely to face than cis women (e.g., menstruation stigma); there are forms of misogyny that cis women are less likely to face than trans women (e.g., transmisogyny). However, there are no universal truths about experiences of misogyny: individual experiences of misogyny are deeply impacted, not only by sex assigned at birth, but also by socioeconomic class, race, age, ethnicity, ability, body type, and geographic location. While we think all women should reflect on their respective social positions—particularly when claiming to speak for other women—we think it is a mistake to enter into debate over whether trans women or cis women experience more misogyny. Unfortunately, there is plenty of misogyny to go around, and as transfeminist author Julia Serano argues, it all is rooted in the deeply entrenched social assumption that “femaleness and femininity are inferior.”Given this, the fact that gender classification is used to track the recipients of sexism and misogyny does not provide a population-level reason to exclude trans women from classification as women. In fact, there are both population-level and individual-level reasons to form transgender-inclusive gender classifications: such classification give us conceptual tools for better identifying those targeted by sexism and misogyny while also respecting trans persons’ self-identifications.In the case of Blackness, unlike for gender, inequality accumulates intergenerationally. It is inherited independently of what persons might hope, believe, or desire about themselves, or even how they present themselves.Someone cannot make themself more likely to experience the intergenerational health and economic impact of systemic racism simply by identifying as Black (much less, as philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah observes, simply by refusing the word “white”). This intergenerational inequality is inherited independently of what persons might hope, believe, or desire about themselves, or even how they present themselves. Given the severity of this inequality, we need conceptual and linguistic tools that illuminate populations that inherit this inequality, and are thereby entitled to reparations. We believe the importance of preserving these tools vastly outweighs the good of respecting Diallo’s or Krug’s racial self-identification. Moreover, this logic cannot be wielded against transgender-inclusive gender classification for the simple reason that gender inequality is not accrued intergenerationally and that it affects both transgender and cisgender women. Put simply, then, we think that transracial-inclusive race classification would undermine our ability to track racial inequality, and for reasons that are irrelevant in the case of transgender-inclusive gender classification.Of course, there is room for debate. But we hope to have convinced you that essentialism will not settle it. Gender and race classifications are historical and always changing. What currently accepted rules say about the gender or race we each “really are,” then, cannot tell us which classifications will best balance the goal of respecting self-identification with the goal of achieving racial and gender justice.

That there exists differences in outcomes between people with darker and lighter skins is very clear to me.These differences deserve serious, and unbiased, investigation, which jumping to a conclusion of “white privilege” short-circuits. I do not believe that at this time we can fairly attribute the cause to racism.That explorations other-than-white-racism are silenced as per se “racist”, demonstrates that we are not allowing a serious, intellectual search for truth, but are instead embroiled in a political battle for dominance, favoritism, and money. In the short term, this may reward a few demagogues; in the long term it will inflict large costs on the very population they purport to champion.Differential Assessment of Physical Safety by Light-DarkPaging through the Quora discussions of “white privilege”, we get numerous examples of light-dark differences in outcome, but we do not see proof that its cause is some sort of secret “privilege” that whites give to whites only because of their white skin.For example, here is one of the most popular Quorans, Habib , describing “suffer(ing) indignities because of the color of our skin”:Getting the cops called on you because your white neighbors assume someone like you couldn’t afford to live in their rich neighborhoodDo I believe that police will be called more often on a black man than on a similar white man walking in a predominantly white neighborhood? Absolutely!Is this, as Habib contends, an indignity for the person who is suspect and then challenged, especially if he is innocent of any intention of criminality? Yes!But is this only because of “white privilege”? Is there some “special immunity” that whites give other whites simply for being white, and then churlishly refuse to extend to blacks? Or could this be explained, for example, simply by rational risk assessment?Are You Race-Neutral About Physical Risk?I use a simple test to determine whether the person I am talking to is serious or silly on this subject.You exit a subway station at night. Your goal is simply to get home safely. On the left you see a group of young black men about a block away. On the right you see an equal number of old Asian women a block away. Turning left or right is equal in every other way (e.g., distance, view, familiarity, lighting, etc.). Which direction do you turn to walk home?You would not believe the number of (white, progressive) people who will insist that they would be indifferent to the choice of direction!Gender-Neutral Risk Is Okay!What is interesting is that I can offer the same scenario restricted to gender, and I will get an immediate admission that they would prefer the direction away from the men and towards the group of females.That would be an example of a rational decision, based on a proper assessment of the known, empirical risk. If you are risk neutral, then given a scenario that varies only by gender, you should be nine times more willing to turn in the direction of the females, because females kill at a rate about 1/9th that of males[1]. {1085/9085}Age-Neutral Risk Is Less OkayOddly, I seem to get some reluctance to choose a direction based on age difference only: people hesitate indicating a preference to turn towards a group of elderly people rather than young people.If people were risk-neutral based on age, they would choose the direction of the elderly 27 times more — to match the empirical 27 times greater likelihood of a youthful vs. elderly murderer.[2]{37.5/10.6/1.6/12.3}.Race and Risk is not Okay!But race brings in a whole new level of irrationality.If we have a 20 times greater likelihood of being murdered by a black than by an Asian[3]{10.2/0.5}, then — if everything else were equal and if you were race-neutral and risk-neutral — you should have a 20 times greater preference to turn right than to turn left. Yet, using just race in the scenario, few people will admit a 20X preference for direction.In my go-to scenario, I conflate race with age and gender. So irrational is the reaction that this conflated scenario does not bring out the admission of preference that gender alone does, even though the conflated scenario includes the gender difference that people will willingly admit preference.Yet, if you were neutral across age, race, gender, and risk, you should have a 56 times greater preference to turn right rather than to turn left, so that you could match your behavior to the 56 times greater likelihood of being murdered. {9+27+20, assuming independent variables}When pressed, many respondents will eventually concede that they would choose the direction of the elderly Asian women, but insist that they do so only because of gender or age, not because of race.PC Is Not Race-NeutralWhich is where we started out.I don’t believe political correctness trumps empirical facts. I don’t believe we should start with a conclusion, ignore contrary facts, so that we can end with the same conclusion. And I don’t think that we should reinforce our bias with prejudicial terms like “racism” and “white privilege”, when those conclusions are not yet proven and we can only defend them by shouting down empirical facts.These respondents were indicating to us that they were not race neutral; they had a bias in favor of blacks. They would rather accept a many fold increase in their risk of being murdered than acknowledge the fact that skin color is differentially correlated with murdering. (Think about it. If you knew there was a 50% increased risk of being murdered, and it cost you nothing to eliminate it, would you not take the precaution? Yet, here we are at 5,600% increased risk of being murdered, and the respondent refuses to concede a preference.)Now, there is nothing “wrong” with a personal preference, and people are free to prefer one race over another if they want and to accept whatever risk ensues.What I object to is their self-righteous condemnation for other people not sharing their personal, and irrational, bias.Unfair to the Majority of Nonviolent Blacks?If one is peaceful and kind, then it is unfair to be lumped together with a small number of scumbags simply because you share physical characteristics.But the question I would ask is whether the unfairness is being done to you by the people who are trying to protect themselves or by the scumbags.For example, I have noticed that women cross the street when I approach, look over their shoulders when I am behind them, sit away from me when I am already seated. This could be because I am particularly hideous looking, but I also suspect the factor that I am male, and we males are empirically more dangerous than females. (Grrr. <Scary face!>)I am quite sad when it happens. And truth be told, I do get irritated at the woman’s inability to immediately discern my sterling and noble qualities.But I put my big boy pants on. It is not her fault that she could be attacked. She does not have an infinite amount of time to interview every male she passes by, nor would interviews be absolute proof. (I may be so much of a scumbag that I not only would rape and kill her, but I might also lie during her interview!) So she cannot be blamed for playing the odds, using the information she has at her disposal, and crossing the street.The people on whose shoulders the blame resides are the scumbags. And as a male, it is in my interest to stop such attacks so that my gender is less of a threat in the future, and I suffer less associative fear because of a physical characteristic.Cannot Have a Frank ConversationThe problem I and other thoughtful whites have is that we are not allowed to have a frank conversation about race in America because people are denying facts and blaming victims.Like most whites, I would like to see the observed racial differences disappear. But we cannot possibly get rid of dark-light differences if we mis-attribute their cause and then shut down any other exploration.I believe that were we to fairly explore these important questions, we would find out that racism is not the controlling factor. But that’s just my guess.What is absolutely clear to me right now is that fear of racism prevents us from exploring these problems with any chance of success.Even black leaders rarely talk about this frankly.There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved— Jesse Jackson, 1993[4]Fun With NumbersBut instead of careful analysis and frank discussion, we get hysteria and obfuscation.For example, Snopes “analyzed” an anti-BLM claim that more whites than blacks were killed by police. To disprove this, they corrected for the number of whites and blacks in the general population, and concluded chidingly that per capita blacks were killed by police 2.7 times more frequently than whites[5], and thus the true fact that more whites were killed than black was actually misleading.But notice what Snopes, which bases its entire reputation on finding “the truth”, failed to do — it did not correct for differential rates of criminality. This is amazing given that police will naturally interact, and are thus much more likely kill, criminals. And the gigantic differential in white-black criminality is well known (although often discounted).For example, if police kill black murderers 2.7 time more often than they kill white murderers, police would be killing white murderers at a much higher rate than they kill black murderes, given that blacks murder not 2.7 times more than whites, but 7 times more than whites[6] {10.2/1.4}. If Snopes wanted to more fairly assess the veracity of the underlying point, we would see similar corrections — in the opposite direction that Snopes decided to correct the gross numbers — for robberies, drugs, rapes, beatings, etc.I’m not going to re-do Snopes’ analysis for them. This is just one Big Lie amongst a tsunami of lies; so many that we who are concerned about understanding what’s really happening and thus try to be fair about such things have only enough time to eye-roll before hit with the next one.But I wanted to give you an example (which I ran into just while I was writing this essay) of this constant fun-with-numbers — committed even by a site that purports to be “fair”. It is this type of systematic dissembling that makes frank and honest discussion of these serious, important issues impossible.How Might We Approach Empirical Differences?Let’s say that one day a powerful black leader found a way to reverse the murdering rates and America experienced a decade in which blacks murdered at 1/7th the rate of whites!I could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that we would see a reversal of what we see today — people would then be looking over their shoulders about seven times more frequently when a white versus a black was following them.In this future, it would be erroneous to refer to white people’s relief when they realized that it was a black person behind them as “black privilege”.Nor would it be correct to call it racism against whites.The proper call would be for an analysis of why whites are killing at such a higher rate, and can we do something about it (perhaps as the black leader has shown us?)And we whites who become irritated that we were being scrutinized so much more than blacks, should blame our differential treatment — not on the victims, who are just trying to stay safe — but on the murderers.Until we start being fair, open, curious, and frank, and we stop all the political gamesmanship and hysterical shouting-down, we won’t be able to focus on the real problems.Given my role as an observer, as a person who wishes we could start to heal the real problems (whatever they turn out to be), and as an occasional victim of unfair allegations, I can only shake my head when I hear the demagogues — who should know better — further misdirect the gullible with “white privilege”.See related:Problem with RacismWhy is the US more dangerous than any other western country?Is American capitalism racist?Would a libertarian society have affirmative action?Is affirmative action a form of racism?What are the different types of racism?What racial problems do black athletes’ protests underscore (e.g., #TakeAKnee)?Open ExplorationWhy scientific inquiry about IQ across ethnicities should be permitted?Does freedom of speech mean right to offend?Is free speech hate speech?How is political correctness a bad thing?Solutions to RacismWhy should the Libertarian Party replace the Democrat Party.How do libertarians stand against racism?How do libertarians solve discrimination?Should Swedish women who fear Muslim rape ban all men from their music festival?Why does the left focus on race, class, and gender?→ Essays on <Prejudice: Racism, Agency, IQ> by Dennis→ Return to the <Table of Contents> for Dennis’ Libertarian EssaysFootnotes[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_3_murder_offenders_by_age_sex_and_race_2013.xls[2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf[3] Race and crime in the United States - Wikipedia[4] In America; A Sea Change On Crime[5] FACT CHECK: Do Police Kill More White People Than Black People?[6] Race and crime in the United States - Wikipedia