Stories Told in Numbers: The Changing Classification of Humans

What I find extremely intriguing is the statistics of human demographics and censuses. I find the area of statistical demographics to be somewhat controversial now. For example, questions of ethnicity (race), gender, and sexuality have taken an extreme turn over the past decade. Statistical Demographics makes me think of Hacking’s theories about the classification of people. Hacking believes that humans create a classification system that puts people into categories. Hacking suggests that we need these categories to keep order in our world, that like baseball, statistics are necessary to predict what will happen next because mankind is in fear of the unknown.

Nonetheless, I feel like our classification system of humans (and therefore our forms of statistic demographics) is becoming blurred. With the rise of blending categories, such as transgender (or not identifying with a gender), mix-races, LGBTQ sexualities, cross-cultural identification, and more, our need for this basic information like gender, sex, or ethnicity is becoming hard to identify. We cannot organize our populations into rigid categories anymore; instead we have a more fluid population. I am not sure if now there are new ways to categorize people, if we invent more categories if it will make sufficient impact on the data that is collected, or if demographic statistics need to be modified to fit a certain area. Also, does this factor that we now can no longer fit people into rigid numbers (or classes) something we should be afraid of? Or is the grey area of unknown mean that we have progressed as a society to be adaptable and accepting? Obviously this does not apply everywhere, but the changing nature of human demographics makes for an interesting case. And then of course you have the futuristic dystopian societies that revert back into this idea that in the end, everyone is just a number and only few can change this.