The Tennis Ball

A tennis ball can be described as yellow, though the manufacturers call it optic yellow and some people insist it is closer to green, and the disagreement is not about the ball but about the categorical boundary between two colour terms that human colour perception does not draw in the same place as the language does.

The ball can be described by its diameter, its internal pressure, its felt surface, its bounce coefficient, its age, its manufacturer, its intended use on clay versus grass versus hard court, its condition after a match, its condition after six months in a cupboard, its relationship to the racket that has hit it and the court that has received it. Each of these descriptions is accurate. None of them is the ball. The ball preceded all of the descriptions and will remain itself, to whatever extent a tennis ball is itself, after all of the descriptions have been applied and found wanting in various ways.

The ball does not mind being described. It does not have a relationship to the category. This is the first and most important difference between the tennis ball and the person.

 

The person who is described as gay has been placed inside a category that organises a specific dimension of their experience—the direction of their erotic and romantic interest—and uses that organisation as a primary identifier. The identifier announces itself as a description of the person. It is a description of one aspect of the person, refracted through a categorical boundary that the language has drawn around a particular cluster of attractions, and the boundary is not as stable or as universally agreed upon as the categorical label implies.

The gay man who once had sex with a woman has had an experience that the category of gay does not straightforwardly accommodate. The category’s logic requires that he re-examine his category membership, or that the experience be explained in terms that preserve the category—he was experimenting, he was performing, the experience was not genuinely desired, the category had not yet been fully established when the experience occurred. These explanations are available and some of them may accurately describe some people’s experience. The point is that the category requires the explanation. The person required only the experience, which was what it was, and which the category must work to absorb.

The question of whether this person is really gay is a question about the category rather than about the person. The person is whoever they are, with whatever history they have, with whatever range of experience and desire the history contains. The category is a boundary drawn around a subset of that experience, designated as the defining subset, and used to produce an identifier that the culture then treats as a primary description of the person. The question of whether the category is correctly applied is a question about the mapping between the category’s boundary and the person’s experience, and the mapping is never perfect because the person’s experience is more continuous and more various than the category’s boundary can accommodate.

 

Sexuality, in its broadest range, is one of the dimensions of human experience most resistant to categorical containment, which makes it particularly instructive as an example of what categories do and cannot do. The Kinsey scale attempted to render the continuous variation in sexual attraction as a numbered range from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, with gradations in between. The scale was an improvement on the binary that preceded it, but it was still a reduction of continuous variation to a limited set of positions on a single axis. The actual variation in human sexual attraction includes the direction of attraction, the intensity of attraction, the relationship between attraction and behaviour, the relationship between attraction and identity, the cultural and historical context in which attraction is expressed or suppressed, and the way all of these change across a lifetime in ways that may or may not correspond to the categorical identity that was applied at an earlier point.

Labelling someone gay, or bisexual, or heterosexual, or lesbian, says something about the categorical position the culture has assigned to their reported attraction. It says very little about the actual texture of their erotic and emotional life, the specific people they have loved, the specific experiences they have had, the specific ways that attraction has expressed itself and been shaped by circumstance and time. The label is the system’s way of managing the information. The information that the label was supposed to manage is the person, who exceeds the label in every direction.

 

Race is the example that makes the categorical problem most starkly visible, because race is a category that was constructed to perform a social function—the organisation of populations into hierarchies that could be managed and exploited—and that was subsequently presented as a natural description of human biological variation. The biological variation is real: populations that developed in different geographic and climatic conditions over long periods developed different physical characteristics, different disease susceptibilities, different genetic profiles. The variation is real and it is continuous—it does not divide neatly into the discrete categories that racial classification systems require. The human genome does not have a boundary between Black and white, between Asian and European, between any of the categories that racial classification has produced. The categories were drawn on continuous biological and cultural variation by people who needed the categories for purposes that were not primarily descriptive.

The term race, in the biological sense, does not describe something real about human populations. There are humans, with regional, historical, and cultural variations that have produced differences that are real and that the category of race crudely approximates. The approximation has been treated as the thing itself, and the treatment has produced consequences that are still being negotiated, because categories, once established, produce the social realities that confirm them. The person who was categorised as a race and treated according to that categorisation has a history shaped by the category even if the category describes nothing real about their biology. The category was not real. Its effects were.

 

Neurodivergent is the category that most explicitly acknowledges its own constructedness while still performing the function of all categories—drawing a boundary around a subset of variation and treating the boundary as though it describes something more natural than it does. The category was coined to challenge the pathologising framework that treated neurological variation as deficit, and to reframe the variation as natural human difference. The reframing is useful. The category that performs the reframing is still a category, with all of a category’s limitations.

The question of to what degree the label defines a person as non-typical contains the category’s paradox within it. The label defines the person as non-typical by placing them in a category defined by their deviation from the typical. The typical is the neurotypical, which is itself a category defined by the absence of the conditions listed under neurodivergent. The two categories define each other by mutual exclusion, and neither describes anything more than a position relative to the boundary that someone drew between them. The person whose neurological variation is significant enough to be categorised as neurodivergent is not more or less a person for the categorisation. They are a person whose variation has been captured by a category that was designed to protect them from a crueller category, and who may find the protection useful in some contexts and reductive in others.

 

Age is perhaps the most interesting category of all because it appears to describe something unambiguous—the number of years a person has lived—and then immediately becomes ambiguous when it is used to infer anything beyond the number. I have lived a certain number of years. This is a fact. The inference that I am therefore old, or that my body should be behaving in ways associated with that number, or that my wisdom should be proportional to the number, or that my sexual life should have concluded at an earlier number, or that my capacity for learning has peaked and begun declining—none of these inferences follows from the number. They follow from the categories that have been built around the number by people who observed population tendencies and converted them into expectations.

The person who is wise at twenty and the person who is unwise at ninety are not anomalies. They are people whose specific configurations of experience, attention, and reflection produced outcomes that the categorical logic of age did not predict, because the categorical logic of age was built from population averages and does not predict individual outcomes. The twenty-year-old did not receive early wisdom from a previous life. They received the particular experiences and the particular quality of attention that produced wisdom, at an age at which those experiences and that attention were available to them. The ninety-year-old did not fail to accumulate wisdom. They accumulated years without accumulating the specific kinds of experience and reflection that wisdom requires. The category predicted neither.

 

A system required to map all potential labels to all potential persons in order to describe any individual fully would collapse under the weight of the categories before it came close to the person. The tennis ball can be described from many angles and the description grows more precise with each additional angle without ever arriving at the ball itself. The person is more various than the tennis ball in every relevant dimension.

The categories that describe one aspect of the person say nothing reliable about the other aspects. The intersection of all the applicable categories—the gay diabetic neurodivergent sixty-year-old freelance Australian—is not a person. It is a list of positions within categorical systems, some of which were constructed yesterday and some of which have been in use for centuries, and none of which was designed with this specific person in mind.

This is not an argument against categories. Categories allow decisions to be made at scale more quickly and more consistently than individual assessment does. The efficiency is real and the efficiency has value, particularly in systems that need to allocate resources across large populations in limited time. The efficiency is purchased at the cost of the specific person, who is processed as the category rather than encountered as themselves, and who accumulates in the gap between the category and the reality as the residue that the efficiency produces.

The category is the map.

The person is the territory.

The map is never the territory.

The territory keeps exceeding the map.

The map keeps being updated to account for the excess.

The update produces a more detailed map.

The territory exceeds it again.

The territory is not performing this to frustrate the cartographer.

The territory is simply what it is.

The categories are what we do with it.