On Classification
Alex Cruikshanks
I remember several years ago, the first time a Bosnian friend—let’s call him Mirko—told me of his anger and resentment at the fact that he was effectively barred from a major political career in his home country. Not that he particularly wanted one. He spoke of Bosnian politics generally in deeply derogatory terms but he was nevertheless affronted by the notion that he had no real choice in the matter. You see, Mirko is one of what are referred to in Bosnia-Herzegovina as Ostali, usually translated as “Others,” but literally meaning something more like “the remainders” or “those left over,” those Bosnians who are neither ethnic Bosniaks, Serbs nor Croats—the country’s three “constituent peoples.” As a result of ethnic quotas enshrined in Bosnia’s complex constitutional system established at the end of its 1992-1995 War, many of the country’s uppermost political offices are reserved for the constituent peoples: all three seats on the collective state presidency, all seats on the upper house of the state parliament, the Presidential and Vice-Presidential posts of both of Bosnian’s two autonomous entities, and all but one ministerial slot in each entity’s cabinet of ministers. Despite Jewish and Roma Bosnians bringing and winning a case that this constitutes institutional racism towards them at the European Court of Human Rights over a decade and a half ago, the system remains unchanged.
Technically, there is a loophole in all this. There’s no formal state codification of ethnicity in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the legal and constitutional system assumes you are whatever you say you are. So strictly speaking Mirko could run for a position reserved for Serbs simply by declaring himself a Serb. Some “Others” have done just that. Bosnia’s former Foreign Minister and current Ambassador to the United States Sven Alkalaj, a Sephardi Jew, has occasionally identified as a Croat (his mother’s ethnic background) for such purposes.
But that has its problems. At the purely personal level, it would require Mirko to lie, to declare himself to be something that he firmly believes he is not. But even if he didn’t care, he’d still encounter hostility. Declaring himself a Serb would mean being expected to align with mainstream Serb nationalist politics. Not doing so would mean coming under attack as a “fake Serb.” Indeed, Alkalaj himself has regularly been castigated as a “Bosniak puppet” by Croat nationalist politicians demanding he not be allowed to hold offices reserved for Croats. When rights in a society are determined by what group one is considered part of, aggressive attempts to police the boundaries of who “really counts” are almost inevitable. It is not enough to just be something, you must act like it too.
This sense of societal exclusion through existing outside “approved” identity pathways is something that I increasingly empathise with as I have come to terms with my trans/genderfluid identity. I never really felt comfortable as a man, but I’m not really sure I feel entirely comfortable as a woman either. It’s still something I’m trying to work out, I guess. My empathy with Mirko’s sentiment has come rushing back to my mind at a more personal level in recent months. Since April, to be precise, when the Supreme Court here in the UK functionally gutted the country’s Gender Recognition Act by ruling that trans people should not be recognised as their acquired gender even if they have been through the GRA legal process, despite that being the whole purpose of the Act in the first place. UK laws on gender recognition had never been the most liberal. The GRA, introduced in 2004, only enabled status change between two approved categories, and only through a lengthy, expensive, and highly gatekept process that many trans people considered not worth the effort. But now, even that two-decades-long window of limited gender self-determination is over. The state will tell you what you are, and you get no say in the matter. I remember the first time the effects of the Supreme Court ruling really bit home for me. I had arranged to meet with friends at a restaurant a few days after, and all of a sudden, I had to ring up the restaurant to ask if I’d still be able to use the toilet, feeling humiliated every second I was on the phone.
The drive for imposed classification is inherently an attack on personal autonomy. It’s an attack on not just the freedom to self-define what you are but on the freedom to choose how to dress, to behave, to live. You are required to follow the “right” way to be a member of the category that was imposed on you. The justification given by the states imposing such classifications and those in favour of them is invariably that they are merely recognising innate primordial and immutable biological essences that exist independent of human perception and which they are powerless to change. Indeed, the existence of such categories and the distinctions between them are typically held up as obvious “common sense,” something that “everyone knows.” People cannot move from one to another or exist between them, no matter how well they might “pass.” The Bosnian Serb author Lana Bastašić recalled of her childhood growing up in wartime Banja Luka that several of her non-Serb classmates converted to Orthodoxy and changed their names in an effort to become Serbs and thus escape the murderous Serb nationalist ethnic cleansing campaign. It did them no good. They “were bullied on a daily basis anyway,” while schoolchildren like Lana were taught “how to tell the difference between us and them” from their first day of school.
Two things, however, belie the idea that such classifications are obvious and immutable. The first is simply the huge and sprawling bureaucratic apparatus that is inevitably required to implement them. In Bosnia, the practice of allowing people to determine their own ethnic identity has not gone unchallenged. In September 1992, early in the Bosnian War, the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, the main international peace mediation body in the Balkans, considered an alternative “objective classification” model, envisaging “the establishment of a governmental authority… to make the determination” of ethnicity based on a set of established ethnic distinguishing criteria. Paul Szasz, the ICFY official who drafted the proposal, explicitly described the idea as “reminiscent of South African racial boards” under apartheid. Those boards had been set up following insistence by White politicians that racially distinguishing people was an obvious and straightforward matter, only to discover they needed an increasingly larger and more invasive class of officials to deal with never-ending sources of ambiguity. By the late 1980s, the number of people racially reclassified annually ran into the thousands. Trying to impose a universal sex-at-birth classification on all trans and gender-nonconforming people in the UK poses a similarly gargantuan task; even more realistic supporters of the Supreme Court judgement acknowledge that over 100,000 people have changed their sex on at least one legal document, and that forcibly undoing this would be near-impossible. But even this doesn’t go far enough for some of the most extreme and prominent elements in the British anti-trans movement, who are increasingly turning their ire on intersex people, demanding that prominent cis intersex women who they deem to have been “incorrectly registered at birth” be forcibly reclassified as men—something that, to be enacted as general policy, would require mass nonconsensual bodily examinations.
This leads into the second problem with the idea that such classifications represent objective, innate characteristics: conformity of appearance and behaviour is still demanded all the same. You may be told you can’t change your birth category, but you can be damned sure you’ll be excluded from that too if you don’t “look like you’re supposed to.” The darkest incarnation of this has been the treatment of intersex children, those born with some level of ambiguity of bodily appearance that was neither typically male nor typically female. As I write this, just days ago UK newspaper The Guardian published accounts from several intersex adults emotionally discussing bodily surgeries that were performed on them as children, without their consent or even knowledge, in an attempt to force them “back to normal,” often causing lifelong health problems and mental trauma.
There are no known “out” intersex people in Bosnia, and neighbouring Croatia and Serbia have just one each. The latter, a man named Kristian Ranđelović, became known in the English-speaking world around a year ago when he told his story to Radio Free Europe, describing a very similar experience to those in The Guardian’s accounts, though given an even more on-the-nose and revealing name—“Sex Normalisation Surgery.” As Kristian’s surgery was performed when Serbia and Bosnia were still both Yugoslavia, it seems certain that there are Bosnians with a similar experience, and indeed he has commented that “cultural and religious resistance to any axis of human difference” in the region has been a major aspect of “the effects of war.” To this day, he still has never been told exactly what happened to him, which of his body parts were taken away without his knowledge.
Set against this horrifying practice, other examples of forced conformity with one’s imposed classification can feel rather churlish to complain about by comparison. But they do nevertheless follow a similar pattern. In Bosnia, for instance, each “constituent people” is closely associated with a particular religious denomination; not being religious is thus a surefire way to have the authenticity of your ethnic identity called into doubt. In an astonishing statistic revealed in the most recent Bosnian census in 2013, the Ostali make up less than 3% of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s overall population, but nearly 60% of its atheists and agnostics.
Aggressive policing of sex classification purity, by contrast, has most often focused on a that banal thing that everyone needs but no one is particularly enthusiastic to talk about—toilets. One of the most astounding aspects of the UK Supreme Court ruling was its opinion that trans men should not only be barred from using men’s toilets due to being “biologically female” but also from using women’s toilets due to “gender reassignment process [having] given them a masculine appearance!” For all their insistence that trans people are “really” their birth-assigned sex and that they merely advocate for “sex-based rights,” anti-trans campaigners in the UK openly welcomed this, declaring, “If you make extreme efforts to look like a man don’t be surprised if you are denied entrance to the ladies.” As feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed presciently wrote even before the ruling, such a position is in fact a policy of “gender normativity through the back door,” not just for trans people but for all gender nonconforming people, a threat that all people categorised as “biologically female” must “look like women, or else.” Sadly Ahmed has been proven right: gender non-conforming cis women have increasingly reported being abused in toilets and changing rooms since the ruling.
A few months ago, a Bluesky follower of mine commented on the seemingly conflicting impulses of these aggressive attempts to police the boundaries and conformity of imposed classifications: “the assertion that you can always tell, and the fear that you can't.” And indeed it does at first glance seem a contradiction in terms. But they appear much more in alignment if you understand “we can always tell” a person’s sex or ethnicity as being not an observation but an instruction, a statement of intent. “We will make it so we can always tell.” It represents a standard conservative discomfort with a society lacking a “natural” distinct social hierarchy, and a response of trying to impose one anyway, by making defiance of its classifications either impossible or invisible. An attempt to will the Remainders into nonexistence.
