A large part of it is a conflict over language, approaches to language, and how that reflects real phenomena: gendered language can be thought of as being about boxes or categories that people fit in or are placed into, and there is a massive difference between how the right views those boxes (they see them as prescriptive, that is to say that someone is placed into a box and then must follow the norms and standards of that box) and how they're approached in more modern discourse (in which they are descriptive, that is to say that the boxes should reflect real groupings of gender manifestation and what box someone is in is defined by themselves, rather than being something imposed and which imposes upon them).
So the "only two genders" meme is more than just someone taking a technical stance, it is saying "everyone fits into one of these two boxes, I will be the judge of which one they are in, and they must behave accordingly," while people taking about additional genders are trying to describe already existing phenomena without unilaterally defining other people's identities for them.
It is worth noting that Jordan Peterson was very explicit about this. His opposition was ostensibly not to binary transgender people, but to anything non-binary.
The way he approached it was in terms of Jungian archetypes, claiming that if people try to define their identity outside of existing archetypes, they will have no way to conceptualize their place in society.
For Peterson the solution would be to force people into those archetypes; which are claimed to be instinctual, or even defined by God, rather than cultural.
This view also requires sexism, if people could be treated the same regardless of gender, there would be no problem to begin with.
But I think most conservatives are saying “only two genders” with the implication “everything else is a mental illness” and believe that on a descriptive level.
The simple denial by Blaire White that non-binary people experience gender dysphoria / dysmorphia should be enough to show their position is not merely prescriptive.
I would argue someone doesn't need to understand the argument they're making or have formal prescriptivist reasoning to be holding a prescriptivist view. Like, Jordan Peterson is an anomaly because despite being just a bafflingly ignorant blowhard on most things he was still a fairly educated person when it came to things like formal philosophical reasoning and language, an education he used to put on a passable act of knowing about topics that he very much knew less than nothing about.
Your average person doesn't have the education to articulate "I believe people should stay in the boxes my upbringing tells me they should" in formal language, nor do they necessarily understand that that stance is inherently an imposition on others and a declaration of how things should be, they truly believe that those boxes are immutable facts that people just naturally go along with and that anything that violates that "natural truth" is an aberration and an imposition upon them.
It's just like with language in general, where people who have no formal linguistics education and have never been exposed to the prescriptivism vs descriptivism conflict will still end up taking prescriptivist stances about "speaking proper" and if asked to explain would indicate that the "proper" way to speak is just how the language is, because their view is that the language itself is what must be described, not its usage. So it is with gender: people "describe" the concept of gender as taught to them by a repressive, patriarchal society as opposed to describing how people actually experience and manifest it, and believe that by doing so they are simply describing some natural truth rather than choosing to promote a fundamentally artificial standard and impose it on others.
Yeah, but the point is, both groups are trying to be descriptive, just one of them is failing at that. And in that failure they are adopting harmful prescriptive attitudes.
It is generally not the case that those being prescriptive† (with regard to gender or language) could give an accurate descriptive account of reality.
(self-reply)
I guess there is a difference with regard to some fascist and eugenicist ideologies; where those are overtly prescriptive and aim towards some kind of utopia.
The Biblical account could also be read as utopian and aiming towards the return of the kingdom of God.
But I consider those positions somewhat fringe; religious dogmatism is common, but the mainstream in increasingly liberal and receptive to secular ethics.
My point is that the efficient cause of most bigotry tends to be ignorance or misinformation, not some utopian ideals.
Most religious dogmatists are bigoted, but not just because of their religion; if they lose that religion, they are often still bigoted.
It is usually just those who reject religion in part because of the bigotry that come out the other end without it.
Edit: that said, in many cases it not quite that either, but mere 'disgust', but the origins of that are complicated and for the most part culturally determined.
when you ask people to explain why they're disgusted, they'll respond with moral language. ask them to unpack the implications and they'll go right back to disgust. (this is easiest to show with something like beastiality where there generally aren't human costs to any particular course of action.) because of this, I'm not sure it makes sense to separate their positions from the prescriptivist ones, when they describe human actions as unnatural or disgusting.
moreover, the actual task of education in these cases is to inspire empathy, patiently encouraging the bigot to recognize the subjectivities of those they judge, rather than objects to be categorized. that is, no litany of facts can convince the transphobe that someone assigned male at birth may well and truly be female, as that consignment is an immutable fact of the other person, objectified.
note: this is not merely a description of the person. the knowledge that the person they view was assigned male (by whom? why? questions that are never asked) will change their perception, and frequently the categorization, of the person so considered. the mere introduction of this knowledge will change how they gender the person they view. when their expectations don't align with what they view, they slip into the moral language of disgust, and become prescriptive in their words/actions to put the world aright.
conversely, once shown an empathetic view of the targets of their bigotries, taking into consideration their subjectivity, bigots almost always cease to be bigots. consequently, I think this bigotry is fundamentally prescriptive. if it were merely descriptive, they would not choose to act to reassert the category. the subject/object designation is key to when description becomes prescription. your view of prescription almost eliminates it entirely and I don't think that's quite correct as the very moral language people use to describe their intent ceases to make sense.
no litany of facts can convince the transphobe that someone assigned male at birth may well and truly be female,
well, in terms of truscum, MRI studies seem to do that; but there might be some motivated reasoning going on there, as it's just as easy to find differences between cis- and trans- counterparts as it is to find similarities.
I've had some odd success changing online reactionaries minds by framing transsexualism as 'intersex of the brain' or even a 'birth defect'†; although it gets them past the moral objections, they start frothing at the mouth with eugenicist zeal.
† wouldn't use those terms in general, but you sometimes gotta meet them at their level for any conversation to be possible.
when their expectations don’t align with what they view, they slip into the moral language of disgust,
that is an interesting point. (instead of updating their views they become oppositional)
once shown an empathetic view of the targets of their bigotries, taking into consideration their subjectivity, bigots almost always cease to be bigots.
yeah, but I'm not sure that empathy is really doing the legwork here; because these subjective accounts often contain new information.
an empathic subjective account of bestiality is probably not going to shift that many opinions. I mean yeah, that dachshund was totally asking for it, but still, what the fuck.
if it were merely descriptive, they would not choose to act to reassert the category.
but in the case of say Peterson, his position is that non-binary gender identification either is symptomatic of (or inevitably results in) mental health issues.
from that descriptive position, a prescriptive move against non-binary identification could simply be a utilitarian or consequentialist one.
I am not at all dismissing that there is a prescriptive element to "only two genders", that is almost invariably the case, but I object to the notion that our side alone is being descriptive.
the subject/object designation is key
but I know how to empathize with fascists, seeing them as subjects, understanding how they got so messed up; but that doesn't at all stop me from hating, opposing, or objectifying them either.
If we look at for example KF (an online harassment, doxing, and primarily observation for the lulz form), I don't think it is entirely honest to say they must lack subjective insight, their position is sadistic not objectifying.
Even the worst of the TERFs are more intent on inflicting harm sadistically than on putting the world right. But at that point we're dealing with psychopathology, not ordinary bigots.
your view of prescription almost eliminates [subject/object] entirely
we are but atoms in the dance of nature. my want for an icy popsicle is merely a fact about my brain, my choice to open the freezer is merely an event in time out of reach. /s
but you're right that subject/object is not of primary importance in how I think about these things; I'm not convinced that it should be.
I mean, even like the KKK, there is no sense in which you can throw a brick through someone's window without having a subjective account of how it affects them; the whole point of terrorizing people is using that subject view towards objective ends.
So for me, the objective aspect will always have primacy. I don't believe there is a failure to empathize, but a failure to understand, which leads to inaccurate or badly contextualized subjective accounts.
Everybody knows that BLM are unhappy, afraid, desperate for change; a subjective view into what it is like to be Black in America can amount to "sucks for them", it doesn't imply self-pitying white voters are going to help.
The way capitalist healthcare massively harms people isn't enough to budge many conservative voters either; they seem perfectly content with Social Darwinism.
Beyond that, people can be indifferent to the subjective altogether; as in the slogan "fuck your feelings" which to me is not avoiding the subjective, but discounting it as irrelevant.
They way in which the alt-right revels in lib-left misery seems to me quite the opposite of objectification.
I'm sure that many, many, people have gone from ignorance via empathy to holding better political opinions; but if that were really enough I don't think there would be many conservatives left.
I suppose my view of human nature is darker than most.
Anyway, some of this has gotten rather abstract, and I might have misunderstood what you were getting at, and there is far too much to be said on all these topics, but I can feel events transpiring in my brain such that *post*
Fuck, I walked away for a moment and when I came back the auto-update had eaten my reply.
Yeah, but the point is, both groups are trying to be descriptive, just one of them is failing at that. And in that failure they are adopting harmful prescriptive attitudes.
It is generally not the case that those being prescriptive† (with regard to gender or language) could give an accurate descriptive account of reality.
I mean yeah, that's basically what I said in the first followup: they have their ideas of what "is" that are informed by them being socialized in a chauvinist, patriarchal society. What I'm getting at is that cleaving to those ideas and declaring them to be facts is necessarily a prescriptivist stance, even if they earnestly believe them to be some natural and fundamental part of the human condition.
I suppose I should probably to amend the assertion that they believe “everyone fits into one of these two boxes, I will be the judge of which one they are in, and they must behave accordingly” to include the caveat that they may not formally believe that specifically, but rather that that is a description of how their worldview and actions intersect, and that what exactly that worldview is is going to be different for a truscum chud like Blaire White than for your run of the mill cishet gamer chud even if fundamentally how it relates to reality and how it seeks to impose archaic ideas unilaterally on others (knowingly or not) is the same.
To be completely honest, even though this is apparently an established explanation and argument I just had the realization that there was a parallel between the prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing and the two separate approaches to talking about gender while trying to think of a way to explain the gender discourse to OP, and decided to see if I could coherently elaborate on and build off that thought. After being made to defend it and thinking on it further, I do still believe that it's fundamentally accurate but as you've made clear it is incomplete and needs a bunch of caveats and further elaborations to be accurate and clear.
I don't mean to discard the 'prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing' altogether, it's a great way of thinking about it; and it was new to me in this context.
In general my view of models/analogies is that they are as illustrative and useful in how they differ from what they aim to describe as how precisely they can match up.
but I do tend to be anal about those caveats, to the extent that I self-replied to my own arguments above. *cringe* lol
this is a really good response. I was going to say the same thing but first take a roadtrip through "what is gender" so I could talk about gender as object categorization and gender as subjective experience, but you nailed it in a much more comprehensible way.
There are multiple different traits that we associate with gender and/or human sexual dimorphism. These traits tend to have a bimodal distribution. People exist in practically any combination of those traits, such that they can be masculine in some but feminine in others.
There are infinite variations of what we might classify as gendered traits. Gender is socially constructed in the sense that we create the categories into which we try to fit this variation. We could compare it to the social construction of race, where one society might categorize as Black and White, but another society categorizes into maybe 50 different shades of color.
As with race, other traits that are tangential to race itself (such as class, culture, other markers of ethnicity) can become entangled in these social constructs. Similarly, in the social construction on gender, things not directly related to sexual dimorphism get involved; like education, sports, media, cosmetics, clothing, etc.
The distribution of gendered traits is similar to the distribution of traits related to intelligence; where people can be extremely gifted at some things, but terrible at others. There is still a general trend in intelligence that if you are smart at one thing, you're more likely to be smart in all other areas too, this is known as general intelligence or the G factor.
In gender, if somebody has masculine traits in one domain, they are likely to be masculine in other domains too, but not necessarily.
(edit: also similar to intelligence, gendered traits are not necessarily fixed, people can change over time)
I would consider there to be infinite genders, but that's mostly because I refuse to play the game of counting or categorizing genders.
The proliferation of language that people use to self-describe is useful; but it is similar to people self-describing their tastes in music, not worth trying to count the number of different musical tastes people could have.
Well, it's interesting to look at the anthropology of gender. There are lots of cultures that have conceptions of gender that aren't just man and woman. This includes third genders like the hijra in India and surrounding countries, the fa'afafine in Samoa, the mahu in Hawaii, two-spirit people, a general term for nonbinary genders in North American indigenous people, among others. There are even cultures with four genders, like the Navajo, or five, like the Bugis.
And the whole "X number of genders thing" comes I think from websites like facebook giving 58 options for one's gender, but a lot of them seem redundant or very similar, it's just giving people options on wording, unless there's some nuances I don't know about between options like "Female to Male" and "FTM". But there's additions like two-spirit for indigenous people, which is good imo.
Here's the mind-bending shit for yas. I'm not trans, I'm not NB, I'm just really extra and it's a great interest for me.
Gender is a fuck. In the US, and in most of the West, there are two genders. There's arguably now more genders, but the whole x number of genders thing is a reference to something a spunky trans YouTuber said that was taken as gospel by a bunch of bullying cunts.
I had a beautiful article that I now of course can't find where a biologist talked about sex-determining chromosomes and she described that we actually have as many sexes as we do people on earth, but that those sexes can be categorized MOSTLY into two buckets, but a spectrum is a better way to depict that too. In the West it's mostly been that gender and sex are largely aligned (but not entirely!) while elsewhere in the world it's been pretty different.
I'm neither trans nor nb, but my understanding is more that there's a gender spectrum, with most people being on either end, rather than so many distinct genders
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A large part of it is a conflict over language, approaches to language, and how that reflects real phenomena: gendered language can be thought of as being about boxes or categories that people fit in or are placed into, and there is a massive difference between how the right views those boxes (they see them as prescriptive, that is to say that someone is placed into a box and then must follow the norms and standards of that box) and how they're approached in more modern discourse (in which they are descriptive, that is to say that the boxes should reflect real groupings of gender manifestation and what box someone is in is defined by themselves, rather than being something imposed and which imposes upon them).
So the "only two genders" meme is more than just someone taking a technical stance, it is saying "everyone fits into one of these two boxes, I will be the judge of which one they are in, and they must behave accordingly," while people taking about additional genders are trying to describe already existing phenomena without unilaterally defining other people's identities for them.
It is worth noting that Jordan Peterson was very explicit about this. His opposition was ostensibly not to binary transgender people, but to anything non-binary.
The way he approached it was in terms of Jungian archetypes, claiming that if people try to define their identity outside of existing archetypes, they will have no way to conceptualize their place in society.
For Peterson the solution would be to force people into those archetypes; which are claimed to be instinctual, or even defined by God, rather than cultural.
This view also requires sexism, if people could be treated the same regardless of gender, there would be no problem to begin with.
But I think most conservatives are saying "only two genders" with the implication "everything else is a mental illness" and believe that on a descriptive level.
The simple denial by Blaire White that non-binary people experience gender dysphoria / dysmorphia should be enough to show their position is not merely prescriptive.
I would argue someone doesn't need to understand the argument they're making or have formal prescriptivist reasoning to be holding a prescriptivist view. Like, Jordan Peterson is an anomaly because despite being just a bafflingly ignorant blowhard on most things he was still a fairly educated person when it came to things like formal philosophical reasoning and language, an education he used to put on a passable act of knowing about topics that he very much knew less than nothing about.
Your average person doesn't have the education to articulate "I believe people should stay in the boxes my upbringing tells me they should" in formal language, nor do they necessarily understand that that stance is inherently an imposition on others and a declaration of how things should be, they truly believe that those boxes are immutable facts that people just naturally go along with and that anything that violates that "natural truth" is an aberration and an imposition upon them.
It's just like with language in general, where people who have no formal linguistics education and have never been exposed to the prescriptivism vs descriptivism conflict will still end up taking prescriptivist stances about "speaking proper" and if asked to explain would indicate that the "proper" way to speak is just how the language is, because their view is that the language itself is what must be described, not its usage. So it is with gender: people "describe" the concept of gender as taught to them by a repressive, patriarchal society as opposed to describing how people actually experience and manifest it, and believe that by doing so they are simply describing some natural truth rather than choosing to promote a fundamentally artificial standard and impose it on others.
Yeah, but the point is, both groups are trying to be descriptive, just one of them is failing at that. And in that failure they are adopting harmful prescriptive attitudes.
It is generally not the case that those being prescriptive† (with regard to gender or language) could give an accurate descriptive account of reality.
Even with homophobia, many homophobes conceptualize gay sex and marriage as mere choices because they are themselves somewhat bisexual.
In the UK less than half of those under 24 describe themselves as exclusively homosexual.
(† defining "do whatever you want" as not prescriptive for sake of simplicity)
(self-reply)
I guess there is a difference with regard to some fascist and eugenicist ideologies; where those are overtly prescriptive and aim towards some kind of utopia.
The Biblical account could also be read as utopian and aiming towards the return of the kingdom of God.
But I consider those positions somewhat fringe; religious dogmatism is common, but the mainstream in increasingly liberal and receptive to secular ethics.
My point is that the efficient cause of most bigotry tends to be ignorance or misinformation, not some utopian ideals.
Most religious dogmatists are bigoted, but not just because of their religion; if they lose that religion, they are often still bigoted.
It is usually just those who reject religion in part because of the bigotry that come out the other end without it.
Edit: that said, in many cases it not quite that either, but mere 'disgust', but the origins of that are complicated and for the most part culturally determined.
when you ask people to explain why they're disgusted, they'll respond with moral language. ask them to unpack the implications and they'll go right back to disgust. (this is easiest to show with something like beastiality where there generally aren't human costs to any particular course of action.) because of this, I'm not sure it makes sense to separate their positions from the prescriptivist ones, when they describe human actions as unnatural or disgusting.
moreover, the actual task of education in these cases is to inspire empathy, patiently encouraging the bigot to recognize the subjectivities of those they judge, rather than objects to be categorized. that is, no litany of facts can convince the transphobe that someone assigned male at birth may well and truly be female, as that consignment is an immutable fact of the other person, objectified.
note: this is not merely a description of the person. the knowledge that the person they view was assigned male (by whom? why? questions that are never asked) will change their perception, and frequently the categorization, of the person so considered. the mere introduction of this knowledge will change how they gender the person they view. when their expectations don't align with what they view, they slip into the moral language of disgust, and become prescriptive in their words/actions to put the world aright.
conversely, once shown an empathetic view of the targets of their bigotries, taking into consideration their subjectivity, bigots almost always cease to be bigots. consequently, I think this bigotry is fundamentally prescriptive. if it were merely descriptive, they would not choose to act to reassert the category. the subject/object designation is key to when description becomes prescription. your view of prescription almost eliminates it entirely and I don't think that's quite correct as the very moral language people use to describe their intent ceases to make sense.
well, in terms of truscum, MRI studies seem to do that; but there might be some motivated reasoning going on there, as it's just as easy to find differences between cis- and trans- counterparts as it is to find similarities.
I've had some odd success changing online reactionaries minds by framing transsexualism as 'intersex of the brain' or even a 'birth defect'†; although it gets them past the moral objections, they start frothing at the mouth with eugenicist zeal.
† wouldn't use those terms in general, but you sometimes gotta meet them at their level for any conversation to be possible.
that is an interesting point. (instead of updating their views they become oppositional)
yeah, but I'm not sure that empathy is really doing the legwork here; because these subjective accounts often contain new information.
an empathic subjective account of bestiality is probably not going to shift that many opinions. I mean yeah, that dachshund was totally asking for it, but still, what the fuck.
but in the case of say Peterson, his position is that non-binary gender identification either is symptomatic of (or inevitably results in) mental health issues.
from that descriptive position, a prescriptive move against non-binary identification could simply be a utilitarian or consequentialist one.
I am not at all dismissing that there is a prescriptive element to "only two genders", that is almost invariably the case, but I object to the notion that our side alone is being descriptive.
but I know how to empathize with fascists, seeing them as subjects, understanding how they got so messed up; but that doesn't at all stop me from hating, opposing, or objectifying them either.
If we look at for example KF (an online harassment, doxing, and primarily observation for the lulz form), I don't think it is entirely honest to say they must lack subjective insight, their position is sadistic not objectifying.
Even the worst of the TERFs are more intent on inflicting harm sadistically than on putting the world right. But at that point we're dealing with psychopathology, not ordinary bigots.
we are but atoms in the dance of nature. my want for an icy popsicle is merely a fact about my brain, my choice to open the freezer is merely an event in time out of reach. /s
but you're right that subject/object is not of primary importance in how I think about these things; I'm not convinced that it should be.
I mean, even like the KKK, there is no sense in which you can throw a brick through someone's window without having a subjective account of how it affects them; the whole point of terrorizing people is using that subject view towards objective ends.
So for me, the objective aspect will always have primacy. I don't believe there is a failure to empathize, but a failure to understand, which leads to inaccurate or badly contextualized subjective accounts.
Everybody knows that BLM are unhappy, afraid, desperate for change; a subjective view into what it is like to be Black in America can amount to "sucks for them", it doesn't imply self-pitying white voters are going to help.
The way capitalist healthcare massively harms people isn't enough to budge many conservative voters either; they seem perfectly content with Social Darwinism.
Beyond that, people can be indifferent to the subjective altogether; as in the slogan "fuck your feelings" which to me is not avoiding the subjective, but discounting it as irrelevant.
They way in which the alt-right revels in lib-left misery seems to me quite the opposite of objectification.
I'm sure that many, many, people have gone from ignorance via empathy to holding better political opinions; but if that were really enough I don't think there would be many conservatives left.
I suppose my view of human nature is darker than most.
Anyway, some of this has gotten rather abstract, and I might have misunderstood what you were getting at, and there is far too much to be said on all these topics, but I can feel events transpiring in my brain such that *post*
Fuck, I walked away for a moment and when I came back the auto-update had eaten my reply.
I mean yeah, that's basically what I said in the first followup: they have their ideas of what "is" that are informed by them being socialized in a chauvinist, patriarchal society. What I'm getting at is that cleaving to those ideas and declaring them to be facts is necessarily a prescriptivist stance, even if they earnestly believe them to be some natural and fundamental part of the human condition.
I suppose I should probably to amend the assertion that they believe “everyone fits into one of these two boxes, I will be the judge of which one they are in, and they must behave accordingly” to include the caveat that they may not formally believe that specifically, but rather that that is a description of how their worldview and actions intersect, and that what exactly that worldview is is going to be different for a truscum chud like Blaire White than for your run of the mill cishet gamer chud even if fundamentally how it relates to reality and how it seeks to impose archaic ideas unilaterally on others (knowingly or not) is the same.
To be completely honest, even though this is apparently an established explanation and argument I just had the realization that there was a parallel between the prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing and the two separate approaches to talking about gender while trying to think of a way to explain the gender discourse to OP, and decided to see if I could coherently elaborate on and build off that thought. After being made to defend it and thinking on it further, I do still believe that it's fundamentally accurate but as you've made clear it is incomplete and needs a bunch of caveats and further elaborations to be accurate and clear.
I don't mean to discard the 'prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing' altogether, it's a great way of thinking about it; and it was new to me in this context.
In general my view of models/analogies is that they are as illustrative and useful in how they differ from what they aim to describe as how precisely they can match up.
but I do tend to be anal about those caveats, to the extent that I self-replied to my own arguments above. *cringe* lol
this is a really good response. I was going to say the same thing but first take a roadtrip through "what is gender" so I could talk about gender as object categorization and gender as subjective experience, but you nailed it in a much more comprehensible way.
There are multiple different traits that we associate with gender and/or human sexual dimorphism. These traits tend to have a bimodal distribution. People exist in practically any combination of those traits, such that they can be masculine in some but feminine in others.
There are infinite variations of what we might classify as gendered traits. Gender is socially constructed in the sense that we create the categories into which we try to fit this variation. We could compare it to the social construction of race, where one society might categorize as Black and White, but another society categorizes into maybe 50 different shades of color.
As with race, other traits that are tangential to race itself (such as class, culture, other markers of ethnicity) can become entangled in these social constructs. Similarly, in the social construction on gender, things not directly related to sexual dimorphism get involved; like education, sports, media, cosmetics, clothing, etc.
The distribution of gendered traits is similar to the distribution of traits related to intelligence; where people can be extremely gifted at some things, but terrible at others. There is still a general trend in intelligence that if you are smart at one thing, you're more likely to be smart in all other areas too, this is known as general intelligence or the G factor.
In gender, if somebody has masculine traits in one domain, they are likely to be masculine in other domains too, but not necessarily.
(edit: also similar to intelligence, gendered traits are not necessarily fixed, people can change over time)
I would consider there to be infinite genders, but that's mostly because I refuse to play the game of counting or categorizing genders.
The proliferation of language that people use to self-describe is useful; but it is similar to people self-describing their tastes in music, not worth trying to count the number of different musical tastes people could have.
Well, it's interesting to look at the anthropology of gender. There are lots of cultures that have conceptions of gender that aren't just man and woman. This includes third genders like the hijra in India and surrounding countries, the fa'afafine in Samoa, the mahu in Hawaii, two-spirit people, a general term for nonbinary genders in North American indigenous people, among others. There are even cultures with four genders, like the Navajo, or five, like the Bugis.
And the whole "X number of genders thing" comes I think from websites like facebook giving 58 options for one's gender, but a lot of them seem redundant or very similar, it's just giving people options on wording, unless there's some nuances I don't know about between options like "Female to Male" and "FTM". But there's additions like two-spirit for indigenous people, which is good imo.
It's also cool to read about the nuances of sex, if you're interested.
Here's the mind-bending shit for yas. I'm not trans, I'm not NB, I'm just really extra and it's a great interest for me.
Gender is a fuck. In the US, and in most of the West, there are two genders. There's arguably now more genders, but the whole x number of genders thing is a reference to something a spunky trans YouTuber said that was taken as gospel by a bunch of bullying cunts.
I had a beautiful article that I now of course can't find where a biologist talked about sex-determining chromosomes and she described that we actually have as many sexes as we do people on earth, but that those sexes can be categorized MOSTLY into two buckets, but a spectrum is a better way to depict that too. In the West it's mostly been that gender and sex are largely aligned (but not entirely!) while elsewhere in the world it's been pretty different.
I'm neither trans nor nb, but my understanding is more that there's a gender spectrum, with most people being on either end, rather than so many distinct genders
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@LeftistJoeBiden please confirm
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