Human beings — especially, but not solely, the simple-minded and the bureaucrat — like things … well … simple. Nuance is a sin for such people, as it requires judgment, assessment, information, compromise, complexity, and things that aren't bright line cases.
We see this all over. In foreign affairs, for example, people like to know that X are the Good Guys and Y are the Bad Guys. They get resentful when you note that Y has some good reason for complaint behind their actions and X has committed atrocities.
Its true on our personal lives, too. We like X more than Y, and when X and Y break up, it's a lot more comfortable just assume that Y was a horrible, abusive, no-good scumbag, and X was sweetness and light and reason and should never have been treated so badly. Even when we know better, that's the emotional trap we all into.
We used to have elaborate race laws in this country. Sure, there were black people who could pass for white, but even that sort of simplistic defense against casual racism fell before elaborate measures of how much of what race someone was (against, always, a baseline of ostensibly pure "white"). It was necessary to know such things so that the proper response could be gauged and executed.
There's an evolutionary basis behind this. Generalizations, simplistic assumptions, and snap judgments help us avoid danger. Nuance has advantages, but taking a while figuring out whether that striped thing is like or different from that other striped thing that killed your mate is a good way to get killed yourself.
But it is a shortcut, and it leads us to making a lot of mistakes by trying to oversimplify stuff. Us vs Them. This vs That. Black vs White. It leads to weird things like semi-apocryphal tales of state legislatures passing laws about the value of pi and the like. [1]
And it leads to crapola like this, where the Trump's Dept. of Health & Human Services is floating a proposal to wave their hands like King Solomon and define people as either male or female, based on genitalia at birth, and declare that to be that.
'The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.' [2]
Such a proposal [3] makes things simple in some ways, of course — or, as the text says, "administrable" — but also handwaves the existence of people with intersex conditions (where the development of genitalia is not the magic, simple, obvious, objective thing that rule suggests) or transgender individuals (who are basically ruled out of existence).
It's a classic case of making things simple for ease of not-thinking, coupled with a binary world-view and a healthy dollop of prejudice, leading to something that is easy, simple, wrong, and hurtful. Which, come to think of it, is just what I'd expect from Trump and his cronies.
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[1] https://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/localgov/Second%20Level%20pages/Indiana_Pi_Story.htm
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html
[3] https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/10/22/trump-administration-floats-policies-limit-civil-rights-transgender-americans/
Against a Federal Registry of Genitals
A report that the Trump administration plans to define gender based on the appearance of infants runs counter to developmental biology and individual privacy.
