If a person born male feels that he is really a female or vice versa, I understand - “male” and “female” are two readily recognizable criteria that have been around in society by definition for millennia, and usually fit the “You know it when you see it” description.
But how does someone know for sure that they are Gender 36# instead of 35# or 37#? The definition is far murkier and in fact there isn’t even agreement on how many genders there are (some say 37, some 57, some 75, and I can’t recall if someone has already claimed that it exceeds one hundred or not.) There aren’t even names for Genders 3 through 37 or 3 through 100. How do you know with certainty which of the numerous unnamed and unidentified genders you are when they don’t even have a description or recognized attribute?
I don’t think they are really defining different genders (from what I read) as that they are providing 37 descriptions of different ways a person can feel about their own gender or lack of it. There seems to be considerable overlap between some of the different terms.
Yeah, “Transsexual man,” “Transsexual woman,” and “Transsexual person” isn’t describing three different genders. Heck, it’s not actually describing more genders than the traditional two - a transsexual man is still a man, and so forth.
Lest anyone think otherwise, the message boards (and equivalents) that young people go to to discuss such things are chock-full of “Hey everyone, I have been identifying as genderfluid but lately I’ve been thinking I’m more of a demiboy, which do you think I really am? Here’s some longwinded description of my situation and what I’m like…”
I would say to you and to them (and I do, btw):
It is probably healthy to stop thinking in terms of a whole bunch of genders that empirically exist, and you need to figure out if you’re Gender 36# or Gender 35#, and instead think in terms of the described gender identities either fitting comfortably as a set of words and descriptions and notions or else not fitting so well, when compared to how you experience yourself. And remember, each and every one of them was invented and compiled by one or more people, and you could invent or compile your own description, give it a label, and claim it as your own; the only advantage to grabbing one that’s already out there is that it’s already out there (and people may have heard of it, hence you don’t have to start from scratch explaining what it means to everyone). But aside from that one difference, the ones that are already out there floating around in the public domain aren’t more valid than one that you compile for yourself. All of them depend on generalizations and a notion of a shared set of experiences that would put you in a category with some others that you have something in common with. But you’re as entitled as anyone else to make your own generalizations.
It’s probably not useful to think of numbers as something people are assigning themselves to. It’s more useful to realize that people are on a continuum of attitudes, preferred roles, attractions, feelings, emotions, that are all different - billions of different possibilities.
People choose a word (usually not a number) to communicate their status to others, but those words are imperfect representations because they’re categories shared by language; and we don’t have billions of possibilities in our language.
OP, what are you trying to say? Do you literally believe that there are genders or gender identities out there that have numbers, but no other descriptor or definition?
What I’m asking is, how do people who aren’t male or female know which of the non-male or non-female genders they are, since their characteristics are far less set in concrete than the male-female which has been around for milllennia, and in fact no one can even agree on how many genders there are (be it 37, 63 or 112?)
Edit: In other words, two decades ago, before anyone felt that there were 37 genders instead of just 2, how did someone know deep down that they belonged to a Gender-36 that hadn’t even been classified or described yet?
Are you genuinely and specifically curious about how a person can come to perceive themselves as a gender identity that isn’t already “out there” to be selected from?
Yes. Specifically, not just “I am neither male nor female” (which is vague) but “I am Gender 36, or 74, or 111” with certainty before someone has expanded the list.
Put it another way, suppose that at some point in the future, society expands the list of genders to 3,000. In that case, how might someone *today *know, deep down, that “I fall under the category of 2,678” before the list has been expanded and described?
Edit: Trying to think of a suitable analogy but it would probably just derail the thread.
I think it’s weird that there is a right way to feel if you are male and if you are xy chromosomed and don’t feel that right way then you aren’t male. My way of thinking is that any way of thinking if done by a creature of xy is male thinking by definition. Otherwise, it just feels that people are trying to conform to a stereotype.
Labels are just labels. In some contexts they are important - indeed, can be very important - but they are not the totality of the thing being labelled.
