Does the Government Need to Know Your Sex?* Laurie Shrage Philosophy, Florida International University I. LEGAL SEX I N Seeing Like a State, James Scott claims that legibility is an integral part of modern statecraft. Modern states gather, arrange, and simplify information about their subjects in ways that facilitate state projects and the enforcement of state policies. 1 Scott writes, Where the premodern state was content with a level of intelligence sufficient to allow it to keep order, extract taxes, and raise armies, the modern state increasingly aspired to ‘take in charge’ the physical and human resources of the nation and make them more productive. These more positive ends of statecraft required a much greater knowledge of the society .... Although the purposes of the state were broadening, what the state wanted to know was still directly related to those purposes. The nineteenth-century Prussian state, for example, was very much interested in the ages and sexes of immigrants and emigrants but not in their religions or races; what mattered to the state was keeping track of possible draft dodgers and maintaining a supply of men of military age. 2 As subjects of modern states, we should examine how we are known and categorized by state officials, and whether such knowledge serves legitimate state purposes. For a variety of reasons, the United States has been very interested in the race, as well as sex, of its subjects for most of its history. Over the past half century, however, there have been substantial changes in how state officials collect and classify information about a person’s race, and incorporate this information into records and identification documents. 3 These changes reflect revolutionary alterations in the legal rights and privileges that attach to a person’s race, as well *I would like to thank my colleagues at Florida International University, the University of Calgary Philosophy Department, and the political philosophy blog Public Reason for opportunities to present earlier drafts of this article and receive challenging questions and helpful suggestions. I am also very grateful for the comments I received from the editors and reviewers for The JPP. 1 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 2–3. 2 Ibid., pp. 51–2. 3 See C. Matthew Snipp, “Racial measurement in the American census: past practices and implications for the future,” Annual Review of Sociology, 29 (2003), 563–88. Also see, Charles Hirschman, Richard Alba and Reynolds Farley, “The meaning and measurement of race in the U.S. census: glimpses into the future,” Demography, 37 (2000), 381–93. The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 20, Number 2, 2012, pp. 225–247 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2010.00379.x