Beyond the Binary Box: The Messy, Radial Truth of Human Categorization
- One Love Energy
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
Cake, Categories, and the Cosmos: Why Leibniz Got the Spreadsheet Wrong
Right. So. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. 17th-century German philosopher, mathematician, and a man who definitely owned a wig so massive it had its own gravitational pull.
Leibniz came up with this idea that we live in the "best of all possible worlds." He looked at the universe and decided that God, acting as a sort of supreme, divine middle-manager, had looked at all the blueprints for reality and picked the most mathematically optimized one.
According to Leibniz, the universe operates like a flawless spreadsheet. And in this spreadsheet, everything belongs in perfect, objective, classical categories.
Rule 1: Everything is a binary.
Rule 2: Categories are perfect little Tupperware containers. You’re either in the box, or you’re out of the box.
Rule 3: No messy overlap. No fudging the numbers. Just pure, disembodied rationality. Ping!
But if you’ve ever actually lived on Earth for more than five minutes, or tried to assemble a bookshelf, you know this is absolute rubbish.
Enter George Lakoff (and a Dangerous Fire Woman)
Fast forward a few centuries, and cognitive linguist George Lakoff comes along, waving a book called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and says, “Gottfried, mate, you’ve got it all wrong. Humans don’t think in spreadsheets.”
Lakoff points to the Dyirbal language, spoken by Aboriginal Australians. They have a category—just one word, balan—that includes:
Women
Fire
Dangerous things (like certain venomous snakes)
Water
Now, to a Leibnizian objectivist, this is chaos. "Where is the mathematical link between a campfire, a lady, and a very angry snake?" Leibniz is standing there with his clipboard, sweating profusely.
But Lakoff explains that this is a radial category. It’s based on human experience. Women are connected to the sun in myth, the sun is hot, fire is hot, fire is dangerous, snakes are dangerous. It’s a chain! It’s a beautifully messy, deeply human web of meaning. Human reason isn’t a disembodied computer program; it lives in the body. It’s muddy, it’s kinesthetic, and it makes intuitive sense.
The Great Gender Bake-Off
So, how does this relate to transgender and queer humans? Well, it blows the bloody doors off the classical categories, doesn’t it!
The conservative, traditional view of gender and sexuality is Leibniz’s spreadsheet in action. It wants human biology and identity to be a light switch. On, off. Male, female. Heterosexual, homosexual. You go in this Tupperware box, or you go in that Tupperware box, and if the lid doesn’t snap shut properly, you’re an "anomaly."
But humans are not light switches! We are incredibly complex, bimodal, radial dimmer switches with mood lighting and a disco ball attached!
When you look at transgender, non-binary, and queer humans through Lakoff’s cognitive linguistics, they aren’t breaking the rules of reality—they are proving how reality actually works. Gender is a radial category.
It has physical prototypes, yes.
But it also branches out into hormones, social presentations, clothes, makeup, and the deeply felt, internal map of the brain.
A trans person is just someone whose embodied reality—the actual, lived experience of being inside their physical form—is at odds with the tiny little binary box society tried to shove them into. Transitioning, gender expression, and queer existence are just ways of aligning the physical self with the deeply complex cognitive map in the brain.
The Actual Best World
Leibniz wanted us all to be perfectly sorted math equations. He wanted a universe where you could just tick a box on a form and be done with it. “Yes, I am a standard-issue human, thank you very much, I’ll have the chicken.”
But if that’s the "best of all possible worlds," it sounds incredibly boring.
The real world—the one Lakoff describes, the one where human brains connect women to fire, the one where queer and transgender people live their glorious, fluid, infinitely varied lives—isn't mathematically optimized. It’s chaotic, it’s bimodal, it’s radial, and it’s deeply, wonderfully human. And frankly, that is a much better world to live in. Ciao!
Passports, Purgatory, and the Invisible Line of Doom
Right. So, we’ve established that gender and human biology refuse to fit into Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s tidy little 17th-century spreadsheet. But what happens when we apply that exact same objectivist obsession to geography? What happens when you try to sort literal human bodies into classical categories based entirely on where they happen to be standing?
You get the modern immigration system. And honestly, Leibniz would have loved it.
If there is anything that represents the ultimate, terrifying pinnacle of the Objectivist Myth, it is the concept of the border and the passport. The immigration system is a desperate attempt to force the chaotic, radial reality of human movement into perfectly mutually exclusive Tupperware containers.
The Spreadsheet of Sovereignty
In the classical, Leibnizian view of the world, a nation is a fixed container with a hard edge. You are either inside the container, or you are outside the container. And the way we determine your category is through the magic of bureaucracy.
Box A: Documented. Legal. A citizen. A recognized human with the correct stamps in the correct booklet.
Box B: Undocumented. "Illegal." An anomaly in the system.
Think about how incredibly bizarre this is from a cognitive standpoint. We have created a system where a biological organism—a bipedal ape with hopes, dreams, and a circulatory system—can be classified as "illegal." Not that they committed an illegal act, but that their very spatial existence is somehow a violation of the universe's spreadsheet.
It is the ultimate Leibnizian fantasy: "I have drawn an invisible line in the dirt. If you step over the line with the correct piece of paper, you are a valid entity. If you step over the line without the piece of paper, you are suddenly a completely different category of being!"
It’s madness! It’s like saying a badger is only a badger if it has a badger license, and otherwise, it’s just a furry crime.
Borders as Classical Categories vs. Embodied Reality
Now, let’s bring George Lakoff back into the room. Lakoff looks at this border-spreadsheet and points out the obvious: borders are not objective, naturally occurring phenomena. They are conceptual metaphors that we have collectively hallucinated into existence.
Human beings do not experience the world as a series of strictly defined geopolitical zones. We experience the world through Embodied Reason. We are physical creatures moving through a physical environment.
When you look at human migration through the lens of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, the radial categories make perfect sense:
The body needs food.
The body needs safety from violence.
The body seeks community and shelter.
Migration is an experiential chain. Famine is linked to movement. Danger is linked to fleeing. Survival is linked to crossing a river or walking across a desert. This is not an anomaly; this is the deeply embodied, historical reality of our species.
The Tupperware Lid Doesn't Fit
The crisis of documented versus undocumented immigrants is what happens when the Leibnizian spreadsheet violently collides with human embodiment.
The system tries to apply necessary and sufficient conditions to human survival. "Did you wait in the queue? Did you fill out Form 8B in triplicate? Did you prove you have sufficient economic value to the state?"
But survival doesn't care about Form 8B. A mother fleeing a warzone with a child in her arms isn’t stopping to think about whether she meets the classical categorization requirements for a H-1B visa. She is operating on the fundamental, cognitive, and physical reality of keeping a human body alive.
When we label undocumented immigrants as "aliens" or "illegals," we are using language to strip away their complex, radial humanity just so we can jam them into the "anomaly" column of the spreadsheet. We are pretending that the invisible lines drawn by guys in wigs two hundred years ago are more real than the flesh-and-blood humans standing right in front of us.
So, no, Leibniz. We don't live in the best of all possible worlds. We live in a world that is obsessed with categories, passports, and imaginary lines in the dirt. But the humans crossing those lines? They are proving that life, movement, and survival will always spill out of the boxes we try to trap them in. And thank goodness for that.
