Poll: There are only 2 genders....right?

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

Well if you think about it being genderless/agender in personality is a gender from identity stand point having no gender, which makes it a hard to grasp concept. As is Bigender which is actively identifying as both, then you have androgynous which identifies and projects as both and neither at the same time. The you have genderfluid people who switch gender identity internally not on a whim, but because suddenly their brain tells them they're female that day, or male, or really neither, or both. Genderqueer people who identify outside of established gender norms, despite their birth sex, and their gender identity is fluid and/or nonconforming. Genderneutral who consider all gender ideals to be equally valid for them, but that identity is not actively applicable to either sex in particular.

With gender being an active state of mind and identity, it can get very existential in concept. While the binary exists, many people fall outside the norms of the binary, even cisgender(gender identity matching biological sex) males and females don't always conform to all standards of their birth gender. Purely binary gender is a western concept, and it's strict in the sense that it allows no deviation from norms conforming to birth sex. Where as in many cultures around the world, and many through out history consider people who don't conform to be outside the sex binary, thus a third/fourth/etc gender.

I don't really see any of these as genders much as I don't see red with blue spots as a color.

It's a valid answer to the question what color your cup is. But it's not a color in and of itself. It's a mix of colors.

You only mention mixes of male and female, sometimes changing. Your own language reflects that. You only mention male, female, neither and both. There's no distinct third, let alone more.

Ah the color analogy is actually a applicable one here! You see the red and blue colors, but you're essentially ignoring the yellow, the green, the purple, the brown, and all the other colors of the spectrum. It's like they say, not everything is black and white, there are plenty of shades of grey, and all sorts of other colors. Hence why the rainbow analogy is often made when it comes to gender identity and sexuality.

I'll clarify by talking about cisgender as the standard, while it is the standard because the vast majority of people fall into male/man, or female/woman. So that's the standard of the binary, but if you deviate from that, you're suddenly outside the binary. Think of it not as a graph but as a sphere, where cisgender male and cisgender female represent the north and south poles, everyone else falls into neither pole and somewhere inside the rest of the sphere. I hope that clears up my position.

 

[Kardsymalone]

No because there are mutations where there are more than 2 sexes
There is XX XY XXY XYY sometimes even YY these "other" genders are considered hermaphrodites and do constitute as sexes
But most of this tumblr sexes thing is bullshit you could argue there's more than two genders but then you
re just arguing semantics

 

[Politrukk]

BUT WAIT

You were born a man, but you feel like a woman.
What does that make you then?

Well if you have a sexchange.
That makes you a woman.

Actually they are still a man. They just have had surgery to look like a woman. But they are still a man.

Well I believe if there's any case in which we're allowed to shift the goalposts a little it's in the surgery department, at least... unless we're waiting for the day where one can fully genetically or biologically engineer the sexes/gender.

 

[Politrukk]

Well if you think about it being genderless/agender in personality is a gender from identity stand point having no gender, which makes it a hard to grasp concept. As is Bigender which is actively identifying as both, then you have androgynous which identifies and projects as both and neither at the same time. The you have genderfluid people who switch gender identity internally not on a whim, but because suddenly their brain tells them they're female that day, or male, or really neither, or both. Genderqueer people who identify outside of established gender norms, despite their birth sex, and their gender identity is fluid and/or nonconforming. Genderneutral who consider all gender ideals to be equally valid for them, but that identity is not actively applicable to either sex in particular.

With gender being an active state of mind and identity, it can get very existential in concept. While the binary exists, many people fall outside the norms of the binary, even cisgender(gender identity matching biological sex) males and females don't always conform to all standards of their birth gender. Purely binary gender is a western concept, and it's strict in the sense that it allows no deviation from norms conforming to birth sex. Where as in many cultures around the world, and many through out history consider people who don't conform to be outside the sex binary, thus a third/fourth/etc gender.

I don't really see any of these as genders much as I don't see red with blue spots as a color.

It's a valid answer to the question what color your cup is. But it's not a color in and of itself. It's a mix of colors.

You only mention mixes of male and female, sometimes changing. Your own language reflects that. You only mention male, female, neither and both. There's no distinct third, let alone more.

Ah the color analogy is actually a applicable one here! You see the red and blue colors, but you're essentially ignoring the yellow, the green, the purple, the brown, and all the other colors of the spectrum. It's like they say, not everything is black and white, there are plenty of shades of grey, and all sorts of other colors. Hence why the rainbow analogy is often made when it comes to gender identity and sexuality.

I'll clarify by talking about cisgender as the standard, while it is the standard because the vast majority of people fall into male/man, or female/woman. So that's the standard of the binary, but if you deviate from that, you're suddenly outside the binary. Think of it not as a graph but as a sphere, where cisgender male and cisgender female represent the north and south poles, everyone else falls into neither pole and somewhere inside the rest of the sphere. I hope that clears up my position.

I don't want to be mean but there's a fallacy in your reasoning.

See the colour spectrum starts with the spectrum of light.
Which in it's purest essence seems white but is a combination of three colours: Red/Yellow/Blue (there is some argument about that but let's just keep it at this one to keep it simple)

Aside from that there's what happens when we have a total absence of light : (what we perceive as) Black
A pure form of light: White
And everything inbetween : Gray/Colour


So there's the light spectrum and the colour spectrum which both have very defined limitations.

All colours for example the ones you named, stem from combinations of the original colour spectrum.

Red and yellow make orange
Blue and yellow make green
Red and blue make purple

And we build from there.


My point being and the point the person you're responding to is probably also making :

There is Red-Yellow-Blue

Those are the basics, there's not Xsamikon the entire new fangled colour that some people are discriminating against.
It's just simply not there, you know why?
Because I just made it up.

The same goes for biology.

You can have a certain set of reproductive organs and hormones.

Whilst these can influence your Sexuality they can not however influence your Sex/Gender.

Any gender/sex discussion we are having is based on the presence or absence of said organs and hormones.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

I don't really see any of these as genders much as I don't see red with blue spots as a color.

It's a valid answer to the question what color your cup is. But it's not a color in and of itself. It's a mix of colors.

But if you mix red and blue, you get purple, which is classified as a color of it's own.

[sub][sub]I'm not actually making a point here, just saying, maybe you should've said red with green spots, but even those mixed together make a sort of brownish muddy color, which is still a different color.[/sub][/sub]

 

[DANEgerous]

Objectively I would say there are no genders and two sexes which are not entirely binary due to flaws in biology. Subjectivity I would say there are only two genders that do not represent a binary and can be ignored.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

I don't want to be mean but there's a fallacy in your reasoning.

See the colour spectrum starts with the spectrum of light.
Which in it's purest essence seems white but is a combination of three colours: Red/Yellow/Blue (there is some argument about that but let's just keep it at this one to keep it simple)

Aside from that there's what happens when we have a total absence of light : (what we perceive as) Black
A pure form of light: White
And everything inbetween : Gray/Colour


So there's the light spectrum and the colour spectrum which both have very defined limitations.

All colours for example the ones you named, stem from combinations of the original colour spectrum.

Red and yellow make orange
Blue and yellow make green
Red and blue make purple

And we build from there.


My point being and the point the person you're responding to is probably also making :

There is Red-Yellow-Blue

Those are the basics, there's not Xsamikon the entire new fangled colour that some people are discriminating against.
It's just simply not there, you know why?
Because I just made it up.

The same goes for biology.

You can have a certain set of reproductive organs and hormones.

Whilst these can influence your Sexuality they can not however influence your Sex/Gender.

Any gender/sex discussion we are having is based on the presence or absence of said organs and hormones.

Actually color spectrum is based on wave length of light, the reason Red, Blue, and Yellow are primary colors that need to mix for us to perceive them as different for a reason that has nothing to do with the mixed colors just being a mix. It's a perception based on the limitations of biology, because the cone cells in our eyes come in red, blue, and yellow detection. That does not make different colors the same just because they're a mix. Besides it's all photons travelling as light speed waves, so technically all color and light is the same thing.

Still you missed the point fantastically. I apparently need to state this again because people just ignore it; Gender and sex as terminology are NOT the same thing. This is due to the fact that humans are basically the only fully sentient species on earth. No other animal has a real concept of gender, because gender is a construct of human social behaviour. They have a concept of sex is apparent to animals, but mostly through the reproductive drive, humans on the other hand are not consumed with reproduction to the point of it being compulsory. That makes it a choice, since we have the power to make active choices about such deep primal instincts, we can make choices other animals cannot. That also means that as with such an advanced social structure we can active label things and make choices with those things, even if those things only exist as a social concept.

So since sex is biological and gender is a social existential concept the presence or absence of any organs is moot in regards to gender. Also gender identity and sexuality are entirely separate from each other, this is why homosexuals exist. Transgender is not a sexuality as gender identity is not directly linked to sexual preference. So don't throw accusations of flawed logic then respond with ignorance.

 

[wizzy555]

Gender is nothing and everything, gender is the alpha and gender is the omega, gender is in the infinite and the numinous, gender proceeds and preceeds essence.

 

[kasperbbs]

Biologically there are two, nothing else really matters.

 

[THM]

Well this is going to turn out good, isn't it? Like covering yourself in honey and hoping for a bear NOT to attack you.

Hey, don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

OT: Definitely an interesting subject to look into - complicated, but interesting.

 

[MonsterCrit]

In the race to be politically correct... society has overcomplicated things.

I mean OP COnsider the scenario.
I am a man who feels like a woman that likes to crossdress as a man. WHat gender am I really?

Though to be pedantic. there are only 3 sexes. Gender is a combination of self-identity and societal role. You can say you're a man that feels like a woman. But what do you really know about women anyway? Is it just that you identify more with the opposite gender than your own?

Then you bring into the mix that these states need not be fixed. I can feel like a woman trapped in a mans body this year or a man trapped in a woman, trapped in xcross dressers body next year. Since it's more an expression of psychology than physiology and psychology being what it is, people can change this many times in their lives.

So basically I just go by... what equpiment you were born with. Did you have a uterus, a pair of ovaries and fallopian tubes when you were born? You're female. If not.. you're male. If you were born with both sets. You're a hermaphrodite. (yes that does occasionally happen).

That determines your sex. As for gender I just make a rule that the more complex someones gender identity is, the less I should probably be spending around them. If you can't sum it up with an most 2 words, you need to see a shrink.

 

[Phlap]

From a biological standpoint, there are 2 sexes. One with 2 X chromosomes, and 1 with an X and a Y.

If someone identifies as a man or a woman, regardless of their biological sex, I'll respect that, and refer to them as he or she as per their preference. I'll even go a step further and add that if they don't feel comfortable fully identifying with either sex, that's OK with me too. (Not that I believe anyone needs my approval.)

From a Tumblr standpoint, there are more genders than there are Pokémon.

I will not take anyone seriously if they start referring to themselves using "genders" they've just made up on the spot, or start issuing me a list of "Fe/Fi/Fo/Fum" pronouns to use. The fact that I'm starting to see this kind of thing pop up in actual classes at university worries me.

This sort of thing didn't exist 10 years ago, and it's just being pulled out of thin air by people with nothing better to do with their time than invent nonsense on the internet to make themselves seem interesting.

I try to be tolerant and understanding, I really do. But I draw the line at "Magigender" and other similar terms invented by over-imaginative teenagers.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

From a biological standpoint, there are 2 sexes. One with 2 X chromosomes, and 1 with an X and a Y.

If someone identifies as a man or a woman, regardless of their biological sex, I'll respect that, and refer to them as he or she as per their preference. I'll even go a step further and add that if they don't feel comfortable fully identifying with either sex, that's OK with me too. (Not that I believe anyone needs my approval.)

From a Tumblr standpoint, there are more genders than there are Pokémon.

I will not take anyone seriously if they start referring to themselves using "genders" they've just made up on the spot, or start issuing me a list of "Fe/Fi/Fo/Fum" pronouns to use. The fact that I'm starting to see this kind of thing pop up in actual classes at university worries me.

This sort of thing didn't exist 10 years ago, and it's just being pulled out of thin air by people with nothing better to do with their time than invent nonsense on the internet to make themselves seem interesting.

I try to be tolerant and understanding, I really do. But I draw the line at "Magigender" and other similar terms invented by over-imaginative teenagers.

On that last point I'm inclined to agree. Varied and fluid gender identities are one thing, and they cover any reasonable identities. But when it comes to something like wanting random pronouns, and to be identified by something that has no referential basis... That actually damages the transgender community, and it makes us look bad and crazy.

Every person like you who at least tries to understand, respects our wishes, and at very least tolerates if not accepts us for who we are, it... Restores a bit of my faith in humanity, and helps me write off the intolerant and ignorant people that seem to be around so much.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

I have always been unsure about this idea of other genders. Like what exactly is gender without any reference to one's body supposed to even be? I can understand feeling that one's body should be of the opposite sex and thus saying one is of another gender. But outside of feeling suited to a specific sex, what is gender supposed to be? I can even get how gender fluid etc makes sense in this. But what is anything utterly outside of male and female supposed to mean? For myself gender means nothing except that I'm comfortable in my male body. It doesn't mean to me that I have certain traits beyond that. Like I could like wearing dresses and looking female (I don't but hypothetical), but so long as I'm fine with my body I don't see how I'd be anything but male because male doesn't mean 'wants to look manly' or any such thing

 

[Hagi]

Ah the color analogy is actually a applicable one here! You see the red and blue colors, but you're essentially ignoring the yellow, the green, the purple, the brown, and all the other colors of the spectrum. It's like they say, not everything is black and white, there are plenty of shades of grey, and all sorts of other colors. Hence why the rainbow analogy is often made when it comes to gender identity and sexuality.

I'll clarify by talking about cisgender as the standard, while it is the standard because the vast majority of people fall into male/man, or female/woman. So that's the standard of the binary, but if you deviate from that, you're suddenly outside the binary. Think of it not as a graph but as a sphere, where cisgender male and cisgender female represent the north and south poles, everyone else falls into neither pole and somewhere inside the rest of the sphere. I hope that clears up my position.

You're still left with two defining poles. Male and female.

There's no third pole in your story.

Which is my point.

I get that male/female as simple, restrictive, mutually exclusive concepts are insufficient to describe human gender. But that's just not how I see male/female. To me, they're complex, dynamic concepts that can be expressed in many different ways and can coexist in the same person. And, in that form, I think they're sufficient to describe human gender and have not seen, read about or heard about anything that'd require a third concept to be introduced.

 

[Olas]

People here are saying that sex is a biology thing, while gender is a cultural thing, but it's still a cultural thing based on biology.

In roughly the same way a movie like Rudy or The Amityville Horror is "based on" a true story, perhaps.

What's that supposed to mean?

It means that just as a movie can plausibly claim to be "based on a true story" with a bare minimum of factors having actually occurred in real life (there was a guy named Rudy who played in a Notre Dame football game; there is a house in Amityville), cultural gender definitions can be claimed as "based on biology" from very minimal, broad standards (a tendency towards different muscle distribution, capability of childbirth).

And both tend to be claimed for manipulative reasons, movies because being "based on a true story" drums up more interest than its own merits, and genders being tied to biology in order to claim their essentialist status. Not accusing you of this, of course, but "biology" tends to be claimed by people who believe it to be an equal or near-equal to culture as an influence on gender, while either not realizing or ignoring that even the definitions of "femininity" and "masculinity" vary widely depending on the time period and group of people examined.

In other words, it's technically true, but doesn't say nearly as much as it's trying to imply.

I think you're bringing up gender politics that isn't really part of my original point. All I was saying was that our concept of gender very clearly has it's roots in the biology of sex, not something else. So to say that biology is irrelevant seems like a stretch.

There are lots of dichotomies we can apply to people that aren't based in sex, like introversion/extroversion, pessimistic/optimistic, timid/courageous. To say that the concepts of femininity and masculinity are equal to these in their influence from sex, I think we can agree, is intellectually dishonest. The fact that the cultural implications of these ideas are fluid doesn't alter the fact that their basis is essentially sexual.

I find the movie comparison a bit inadequate, simply because there we're talking about a very specific story where manipulating essential details can completely alter the meaning. Whereas with gender and sex, or at least gender, we're talking about a notion that is vague by nature and has never been presumed to be perfectly 1:1 with it's source. The notion that men can act girlish, and that women can act manly is as old as recorded history.

 

[Padwolf]

I have no strong opinion one way or the other. Nah, I just accept people are who they are these days. But yes, I guess there are 2 different sexes.

 

[AgedGrunt]

"Man" and "woman" are words humans invented to describe certain groups of people.

Man and woman are words used to define matured human males and females. Animals aren't called men and women; they can have their own names. The nouns are used to distinguish creatures by their sex. Unlike them, what humans have done is advance technology, allowing people to change what we see as identity. Doesn't mean our words were invented for any different purpose than that of other species; it's about biology.

But we have defined what manhood and womanhood look like. These are superficial things and personality traits that anyone can change. But biology doesn't change, so that's why there's discussion; no trans person has a complete sex transition because that's currently impossible. Until there's anatomical conversion, there will be problems in thinking of biology as a fluid thing we can change, like hair color.

You can be biologically essentialist about this if you want, but you have to understand that "man" and "woman" as words and concepts carry far much more weight than just "was born with a penis/was born with a vagina". It'd be disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

I think most people understand there's far more to man and woman than biology. What I don't think enough people understand is that, while there's a lot of stuff that doesn't have to be gendered (e.g. careers, hobbies), anatomy doesn't work the same.

 

[Politrukk]

From a biological standpoint, there are 2 sexes. One with 2 X chromosomes, and 1 with an X and a Y.

If someone identifies as a man or a woman, regardless of their biological sex, I'll respect that, and refer to them as he or she as per their preference. I'll even go a step further and add that if they don't feel comfortable fully identifying with either sex, that's OK with me too. (Not that I believe anyone needs my approval.)

From a Tumblr standpoint, there are more genders than there are Pokémon.

I will not take anyone seriously if they start referring to themselves using "genders" they've just made up on the spot, or start issuing me a list of "Fe/Fi/Fo/Fum" pronouns to use. The fact that I'm starting to see this kind of thing pop up in actual classes at university worries me.

This sort of thing didn't exist 10 years ago, and it's just being pulled out of thin air by people with nothing better to do with their time than invent nonsense on the internet to make themselves seem interesting.

I try to be tolerant and understanding, I really do. But I draw the line at "Magigender" and other similar terms invented by over-imaginative teenagers.

On that last point I'm inclined to agree. Varied and fluid gender identities are one thing, and they cover any reasonable identities. But when it comes to something like wanting random pronouns, and to be identified by something that has no referential basis... That actually damages the transgender community, and it makes us look bad and crazy.

Every person like you who at least tries to understand, respects our wishes, and at very least tolerates if not accepts us for who we are, it... Restores a bit of my faith in humanity, and helps me write off the intolerant and ignorant people that seem to be around so much.

This sounds like a jab at me combined with your earlier response although I'm very accepting of the concepts to a limited boundary (I draw my lines at gender fluid, the rest was just a genuine question to get the discussion going and learn about the views others have).

 

[Rogue Trooper]

Yeah a human being can only either be male or female. Sex and gender are the same thing.