Can LGBT-Inclusive Vernacular Stimulate Policy Analysis? The Conditional Probability of Identity and

It was Monday, January 8, 2017. A group of well-rested McCourters entered Healy 103 ready to review basic regression material before the start of Quant 2 with McCourt’s Professor Schone.

This past semester, I completed my class observations for the Apprenticeship in Teaching Program with the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship — and of course I chose to observe Professor Schone’s Quant 1 class. So, the start of this review session began like her classes with the question everybody wanted her to ask: What are your worries about X things regarding Quant?

We did touch on other aspects of Quant 1 in the review session besides basic regression. But, what students didn’t know — and may still not know — was that Professor Schone was going to plant a seed of knowledge that would fundamentally challenge our assumptions about sex- and gender-based variables.

We arrived to this discussion topic when a fellow student asked how Professor Schone knew a female sex variable was a dummy variable. Sex or gender are often coded in binary terms (male/female or man/woman). Professor Schone highlighted, though, that as policymakers, we have to start considering our core assumptions about what “sex” and “gender” mean. These two things are changing — as social constructions do throughout region and time.

I followed up with Professor Schone after the lecture to express interest in writing this article. In her reply, she wrote, “I wrote a paper last year that addressed sex differences in health, and this was one of the first occasions where I thought about sex and gender identity in any depth. Most researchers who are not focused on those issues don’t think about them carefully, and I think that is unfortunate.”

Professor Schone’s paper “Understanding Differences in Mortality and Morbidity by Sex: The Role of Biological, Social, and Economic Factors” reports on the sex-based differences in health across economic, social, and biological characteristics. Professor Schone writes, “As a starting point, it is helpful to begin by thinking about definitions of sex versus gender. The World Health Organization…defines sex as ‘… the biological and physiological characteristics that define women’ and defines gender as ‘… the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.’ It is clear that mortality and morbidity depend on both sex and gender.”

I challenge everyone at McCourt to reevaluate their assumptions about sex and gender. This is obviously a daunting task, but sociological theory is helpful. I should make note that while our discipline of public policy is by nature economical and empirical, all public policy rests on a theory. There is no such thing as policy without perspective, remedy without reason, or treatment without theory.

Perhaps the greatest contribution, in my view, of sociological theory is the theoretical framework of intersectional theory. The core proposition of intersectional theory is that no identity or feature exists independently. Think of it in terms of probability: The event, our life, is composed of many sub-events, our identities. Each identity is a conditional probability. The probability of the effect of your race on your lived experiences can only be understood in terms of your gender, sex, age, religion, i.e., the probability of your race (A) given some other identities (B, C, D…, Z).

With this framework, I challenge individuals at McCourt to start thinking about the social and scientific intersects of biological sex and sociological gender. My hope is that we at McCourt could enlighten policy process frameworks and methods through a more robust and precise understanding of these two identities.

Do individuals that experience life outside of the conventional binary understanding of sex and gender require different policy remedies? Are current survey methods inadequate because of the information they fail to collect? Only through careful consideration and proper debate can we begin to answer these questions.