If you watch a little kid with a pile of stuff, you’ll often see them sorting. They’re putting some things together and separating others. On Sesame Street they sing “Which of these things are not like the other … “, it’s the first step towards developing a sense of discrimination … and also the first step towards discriminating. Still, it seems like a fairly basic human activity, even when categories are contested. Therefore, I was amused to read two stories recently about eliminating these divisions:
In conservative Nepal, authorities recently granted an official citizenship document to 40-year-old Chanda Musalman which lists “him” as both male and female:
With elections approaching, government teams are currently touring the country issuing certificates of citizenship. One team came to Chanda’s village in western Nepal. Chanda, who has had no sex-change surgery, asked the officials to erase the words male and female, listed under gender. They obliged, and ascribed Chanda’s gender as “both”… It is unclear how this unique legal status will play out in practice - for instance, how it will affect Chanda’s marriage rights. [Link]
A similar desire to eliminate pigeonholes is sounded in the opinion column of the NYT today, by an author who calls for the abolition of racial categories on the census:
There seems to be an emerging consensus that the system of racial classification that has dominated national politics and the census for nearly two centuries is so fraught with imprecision — and so tainted by racist ideas that have been disproved by science — that it should eventually be dropped altogether.
This view has been percolating among census historians for years. But it has gained traction since the 1990s, when there was a pitched battle over a proposal that would have added a “multiracial” category to the 2000 census. A compromise allowed people to check more than one box for race. But that change only fueled the debate by revealing a conflict between the fixed racial categories that have long dominated American life and a different sense of identity that’s clearly on the rise among younger Americans. [Link]
My family has been caught betwixt and between racial categories before. Back in the early 1970s my mom cut her hand and had to go to the hospital. The two nurses there started to argue about whether to denote her as white or black on the intake form. The white nurse pointed out that my mom is light (she needs sunscreen, unlike me), while the black nurse argued that since she isn’t really white, she must be black. Finally my father demanded that they admit her right away, telling them that they could put her in whatever category they wanted once the doctor saw her. Still, this story doesn’t argue that there should be no categories at all, just that categories should be useful (and that classification should be secondary to medication). So personally, I don’t get the argument for the abolition of racial categories altogether as long as they remain socially relevant.
Still, maybe the anti-checkbox forces have a point. Any effort to define will lead to an effort to subvert. One of my favorite Amar Chitra Katha comic books told the story of Prahalad, the son of the Asura King Hiranyakashyap. 
Lord Brahma had given … [Hiranyakashyap] the blessings that no known man or animal born in the natural process could kill him, that he could not die in the day or in the night, on earth or in heavens, either by fire, water or by any weapon.
It was to kill such a tyrant and to remove him from the earth that Lord Vishnu assumed the form of Narasingh which was neither man nor animal, came out of a broken pillar, laid hold of the demon king by its teeth, put him up on his thighs and tore him up in the middle by his claws. It was evening time (twilight) - neither day nor night. [Link]
As a kid who was never into coloring within the lines, it just tickled me no end that there was an avatar of Vishnu devoted to the subversion of categories. So while I have no problems checking boxes (Male, SouthAsian) I have a little bit of sympathy for those who want to play Narasingh and mash them up.
