Other: Race, Sex, and the Hidden Harms of Human Categories

By Angela Saini

A groundbreaking exposé of the hidden harms of race and sex data across medicine, education, politics and society at large

Daily we are asked – on government forms, at the doctor’s office, by schools and employers and even on social platforms – to mark our sex and race, with the tacit understanding that we are somehow contributing to the greater good. But, as Angela Saini shows in this gripping reassessment of data and identity, we have sleepwalked into a minefield.

OTHER takes us from the idealistic 1960s, when categories used to divide people were repurposed to administer equal rights, to today, when they have been twisted back to their original ends. Governments from the United States to Hungary have narrowed definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to curb reproductive freedoms; the pharmaceutical industry profits from myths about group difference; and right-wing campaigners are using race data to push back against equality efforts. Latin American countries are restoring once-abandoned race categories to their censuses, while India’s 2027 census will classify people by caste for the first time since 1931. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is being used to profile and track minority populations, determining race and sex from private data. 

Making an original case for moving beyond categorization, Saini asks what we lose when we are placed in a box – and what we might gain by escaping classification. Freedom, she argues, lies in recognizing that the only category that truly captures any of us is the final option on any form, the one that defies definition: ‘Other’.