I disagree, I don't see any evidence that someone needs clearly bounded categories of deviance to target someone as deviant, a cline of deviance that gradually melts back into majority practice can do job just as well. I already illustrated this with the example of how some cultures discriminate against individuals for being too dark skinned when there isn't a cut and dry boundary between light and dark skin color. As for getting rid of the taxonomy, you never follow out how far this would have to go to get this to work. Suppose you somehow how erased the taxonomy of "light" and "dark" from the minds located in these cultures, they would still have both their visual frame of reference and the ability to abstract patterns which allows for the recreation of the light/dark understanding and the potential to resume the discriminatory practice. You also ignore that categories can be built out of simpler categories, even without the higher-level concept of "gay," I could use my categorical knowledge of "intercourse" and "sex" to arrive at the definition of "intercourse between the same sex." And to follow the example out, even if my culture was made up mostly of people who engaged in some amount of homosexual behavior, preventing me from discretely applying the label "gay," I could discriminate against any outlier who leaned closer toward one of the poles of heterosexuality and homosexuality, i.e. my example of targeting someone as "too gay."
For your solution to work you have to go further than getting rid of social labels, it would require either imposing a complete uniformity on the diversity that draws the discrimination or a radical reconstruction of human perceptual/conceptual system. Both of these possibilities, if even still desirable, seem far too detached from the scope of reality. As long as humans can perceive differences, whether discretely or along a spectrum, these differences are potential targets for discrimination. The real solution seems to be to hold people accountable for discrimination.
>> Your solution certainly doesn't stand for just "getting along," it
actually
>> asks us to accommodate the world of view of bigots by blurring out the
>> distinctiveness of the groups they want to persecute so they're unable to
>> act on their prejudice. What kind of non-politics is this, getting
society
>> to accept diversity by making diversity imperceptible?
>No, the world view of bigots is that there are sexual deviants who
>engage in immoral sexual behavior. My proposed solution completely
>undermines their world view, because it refuses to connect sexual
>behavior to stable sexual categories.
Your solution does nothing to undermine their world view, it doesn't force acknowledgement of the inherent immorality and irrationality that the view contains, instead you, at least in the abstract argument, prevent the bigots from acting on their world view by taking pains to obscure what you believe sets off their prejudicial impulses. How is this not accommodation?
There are good reasons to questions social labels, to give expression to those who feel unrepresented by the labels or to get the public to question how meaningful/less the labels are. However I find this idea, that questioning labels is some sort of political strategy that will upend the possibility of prejudice, to be an ill-informed dead end for activism against discrimination.
Arash