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Notes -
I'm unaware of any particular importance asssigned to hair color aside from a couple of jokes and maybe a few genuinely obsolete beliefs about gingers, yet we still have language to distinguish hair colors.
Well, I certainly don't endorse Haslanger's argument, but I think the most charitable interpretation is probably that we would still have words like "male" and "female" (and still use them in most of the contexts where we tend to use those particular words today) but that the words "man" and "woman" (and in racial contexts, the words "white" and "black") are packed with social meaning we must discard if we're ever going to live in an egalitarian society.
And to be blunt: I think this is absurd, and Haslanger's having written the words I quoted substantially decreases my ability to take her seriously in other ways. But this is the kind of thing you find when you dig into all the "critical theory" schools, be that gender or sexuality or race or whatever. The best I can do to steelman such arguments is to acknowledge that if we ever do have the technology to move our minds into manufactured bodies, then concepts like "race" and "gender" and "sexuality" are likely to in fact face annihilation. But since we do not have such technology, almost nothing said by these people makes any sense if their goal is to apply it to the world we actually inhabit.
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