How does someone know they are Gender 36# and not Gender 37#?

[AHunter3]

@octopus

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.

It is freaking weird, isn’t it?! nods

I certainly thought so when I was 7 (minus the chromosomes part; I was precocious but I don’t think I was hip to chromosomal configurations yet).

Oddly, though, lots of other kids, and some adults as well, didn’t agree with me. “You sit like a girl!” “How come you act like a girl?” “Why don’t you want to {insert boy behavior here}, are you a girl or somethin’?” “What, are you a girl?” “C’mon, prove you’re a man!” “Stop that immediately, you act like a damn girl” “Are yew a boy or are yew a girl?” “Ahunter3 is a girl, Ahunter3 is a girl…”

Naturally, my response was almost exactly what yours is, above: I’m still a boy no matter how I act, so therefore all this concern that who I am and how I am is more like one of the girls should not be a concern, because what’s my personality and behavior got to do with it? Why should I have to act a certain way just because I’m male?

But the truth of the matter is that in general, human society holds a really large body of notions and beliefs about how the sexes are, and how they’re different from each other. There’s a whole lot of utter bullshit in those notions, and even if you look mostly at the others, they are true only as generalizations. Yet there they are, these notions, and there’s a lot of really passionate emotional energy attached to them.

So eventually along come some social scientists and in order to talk about this phenomenon, they call it (the socially attached beliefs and notions) “gender” and distinguish it from “sex” (which is the presumably empirical biological configuration of having xy chromosomes and male plumbing or having xx chromes and female morphology, although even there we have exceptions). With me so far?

So, quick review: we don’t live in a world where if you’re xy chromosomed, you are perceived as male and your thinking is perceived as male and your behavior is perceived as male, period, end of story. Instead, other people gender us, they altercast us, they form in their heads notions of who we are, and for those of us who are deemed by these other people to be outliers, misfits, an issue is made of the fact that we’re different. Some of us respond to that attention by trying to reshape our visible behaviors and appearances (this is called “presentation”, by the way) so as to fit the stereotyped expectations better. But others of us react with more of a “yeah, so?” attitude and we internalize a sense of self that includes this assessment of difference, we accept that the difference exists, and because other people make such a big freaking deal about the whole matter, it tends to become important to us as well.

Well, OK that’s not the only pattern. Certainly some people grow up not having other people make a big honking deal about them being different, but they themselves perceive themselves as not being who everyone thinks they are, not being the person that everyone else treats them as being, so the sense of difference originates more in them. But they, too, would have picked up on the emphasized importance that everyone makes about gender as an identity. So maybe, with other people not constantly pointing it out, they keep this a secret for awhile, but it becomes a central part of how they think of themselves internally.

This clear anything up for you?

[Lemur866]

@Velocity

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.

Dude.

“Society” hasn’t expanded the list of genders to 37. You honestly don’t understand that all this is is that someone made a list of all the gender descriptions that kids today talk about on social media? Society didn’t make up all these terms. Tinder put them as options, because who cares?

What do you think the purpose of words is? Words aren’t reality, words describe things. Do you get offended that the French have a different word for everything? If everyone is either a man or a woman, why don’t the French use the words “man” and “woman” to describe people?

Different words have different shades of meaning. “Male” isn’t exactly equivalent to “man”. “Female” isn’t exactly equivalent to “woman”.

What exactly is the horror about Tinder having a giant grab bag of gender terms that people can choose to identify themselves with? Because it’s a denial of reality?

Dude, Tinder is a dating site. If you’re on Tinder, and you see someone identify themselves as a “gender nonconforming” instead of “male” or “female”, well, that’s pretty useful information for you. If you think that sort of thing is fucking nonsense, then you swipe left. If you’re into that sort of thing, you swipe right.

Tinder has these options because they are a useful heuristic for users on a dating/hookup service like Tinder. A dating service needs to provide two things. It needs to provide information about other people, so you can tell whether you might be interested in those other people. And it needs to provide information about you, so other people can tell whether they they might be interested in you.

If you wouldn’t be interested in someone who describes themselves as Agender, Androgynous, Bigender. MTF, FTM, Gender Fluid, Gender Nonconforming, Genderqueer, Pangender, or Two-Spirit, then it’s your goddam lucky day, because now on Tinder you can swipe left on all those people and save yourself a lot of goddam time.

If you’re not on Tinder, then why are you complaining about how people on Tinder can give themselves a bespoke gender identity? How are you hurt by this? Are you triggered because they’re invading your safe space by identifying as a gender you don’t understand? And the modern world frightens and confuses you?

[typoink]

Perhaps OP might consider the analogous but not identical situation of sexual orientation:

Twenty-ish years ago, there were, in most people’s minds, basically three options: straight, gay, or bi (which some people refused to believe was even real). Nowadays, you’ll frequently find pansexual and sometimes queer added to that list as some folks began to feel those previous labels didn’t feel right to them.

Folks who are completely straight or gay have it comparatively easy, but folks in between now have a few choices to better explain a potentially complicated aspect of themselves or to feel closer to folks sharing their experience.

Similar to orientation, people who identify as “male” or “female” have it relatively easy BECAUSE those terms are well-established and fairly easy. Folks WHO DON’T identify that way or feel uncomfortable with those terms have a messier situation as they try to explain their sense of self, find a healthy relationship with identity, and form communities.

Nobody is really advocating that each gender on an arbitrary list is absolutely a discrete, real, necessary thing. There are definitely terms that are very similar in meaning and may be seen as synonymous eventually. But lists like that exist because there’s enough people who prefer those different labels to make them available.

[Eyebrows_0f_Doom]

@Velocity

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.
.

No one actually says “I am Gender 36”

[Delayed_Reflex]

Think about it in terms of a color spectrum - throughout history, different cultures and societies had different words to describe colors, with the only universal distinctions being “black” and “white”. Some languages might only have another word for “red”, while other languages can have many more.

If a word for “blue” doesn’t exist in a particular language, does that mean that people speaking that language are not perceiving the color blue? Instead, they may be grouping blue together with black, or red, but they may still understand that blue is different from black despite not having a word to distinguish them. Yet, when communicating with other people in that language where there is no word for blue, a person would end up calling a blue object “black”. I imagine something similar exists with gender identity - people may feel like gender X, but without a more prescriptive word for it, might lump it in with “male” for the purposes of describing it to other people.

Incidentally, as language continues to evolve and the concept of additional genders becomes better understood by a wider range of people, their perceptiveness to different genders may also increase. Apparently this is the case with colors - for example, in certain cultures where colors are grouped differently, people fro these cultures are easily able to see the difference between certain shades of green (that Western people have difficulty differentiating), while having difficulty differentiating between blues and greens.

So, it could be the case too that people of a younger generation may be more sensitive to gender differences, having been exposed to such concepts at a younger age, while older people who may still have similar underlying feelings/preferences may still describe themselves within the male/female gender binary lens, since that is the language and cultural milieu that they are familiar with.

Note that this is speculation on my part; I would be interested to see if there is any research supporting this theory.

[iiandyiiii]

@Velocity

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?

I’m not trans, but here’s how I understand it: How does a human know they’re a human until they learn language, including the word and definition for “human”? They don’t. They have feelings, but until they learn language, they won’t be able to put their feelings into words.

Someone who doesn’t feel comfortable with the gender they’re assigned at birth might have feelings of discomfort or awkwardness or other negative feelings, but may not exactly know what those feelings are, or how to describe them, until they learn about gender identity, transgender identities, and all the variations within the topic.

Further, as I understand it, there aren’t “37, 63, or 112” genders – rather there are a variety of ways of describing one’s gender identity, and different websites might include different options for these various descriptors.

[Little_Nemo]

@Velocity

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?

The feelings existed just not terms for them. Somebody who might describe themselves as Agender or Gender Fluid or Transfeminine today would most likely have just described themselves as “I’m different” a few decades ago.

[Delayed_Reflex]

As for whether there are 37/57/112 genders or whatnot - I see that similar to colors, in that it depends on just how granular the information you want to be conveying information. Is it useful to have words for “cyan”, “azure”, “indigo”, “cerulean” or do “blue” and “green” suffice? The main thing that will determine whether these multiple genders will gain widespread use will be whether they provide shared understanding - if someone doesn’t know what “cyan” is, the word will be meaningless to them, much like “Gender 36”. However, if “Gender 36” describes a mutually agreed-upon set of characteristics, then people can meaningfully use it as shorthand to describe that set of characteristics, much like “cyan” can be used to refer to colors close to #00FFFF (RGB).

[octopus]

@AHunter3

It is freaking weird, isn’t it?! nods

I certainly thought so when I was 7 (minus the chromosomes part; I was precocious but I don’t think I was hip to chromosomal configurations yet).

Oddly, though, lots of other kids, and some adults as well, didn’t agree with me. “You sit like a girl!” “How come you act like a girl?” “Why don’t you want to {insert boy behavior here}, are you a girl or somethin’?” “What, are you a girl?” “C’mon, prove you’re a man!” “Stop that immediately, you act like a damn girl” “Are yew a boy or are yew a girl?” “Ahunter3 is a girl, Ahunter3 is a girl…”

Naturally, my response was almost exactly what yours is, above: I’m still a boy no matter how I act, so therefore all this concern that who I am and how I am is more like one of the girls should not be a concern, because what’s my personality and behavior got to do with it? Why should I have to act a certain way just because I’m male?

But the truth of the matter is that in general, human society holds a really large body of notions and beliefs about how the sexes are, and how they’re different from each other. There’s a whole lot of utter bullshit in those notions, and even if you look mostly at the others, they are true only as generalizations. Yet there they are, these notions, and there’s a lot of really passionate emotional energy attached to them.

So eventually along come some social scientists and in order to talk about this phenomenon, they call it (the socially attached beliefs and notions) “gender” and distinguish it from “sex” (which is the presumably empirical biological configuration of having xy chromosomes and male plumbing or having xx chromes and female morphology, although even there we have exceptions). With me so far?

So, quick review: we don’t live in a world where if you’re xy chromosomed, you are perceived as male and your thinking is perceived as male and your behavior is perceived as male, period, end of story. Instead, other people gender us, they altercast us, they form in their heads notions of who we are, and for those of us who are deemed by these other people to be outliers, misfits, an issue is made of the fact that we’re different. Some of us respond to that attention by trying to reshape our visible behaviors and appearances (this is called “presentation”, by the way) so as to fit the stereotyped expectations better. But others of us react with more of a “yeah, so?” attitude and we internalize a sense of self that includes this assessment of difference, we accept that the difference exists, and because other people make such a big freaking deal about the whole matter, it tends to become important to us as well.

Well, OK that’s not the only pattern. Certainly some people grow up not having other people make a big honking deal about them being different, but they themselves perceive themselves as not being who everyone thinks they are, not being the person that everyone else treats them as being, so the sense of difference originates more in them. But they, too, would have picked up on the emphasized importance that everyone makes about gender as an identity. So maybe, with other people not constantly pointing it out, they keep this a secret for awhile, but it becomes a central part of how they think of themselves internally.

This clear anything up for you?

I understand that. I still think it’s weird that others feel the need for an arbitrary label to be narrowly and precisely defined. I mean, what exactly constitutes being human if you look at the species through time?

To me it seems inherently fuzzy and I don’t have a problem with that. Contrary to how it comes across at times, I do appreciate the brave souls who push the discussion.

[The_wind_of_my_soul]

@typoink

Perhaps OP might consider the analogous but not identical situation of sexual orientation:

Twenty-ish years ago, there were, in most people’s minds, basically three options: straight, gay, or bi (which some people refused to believe was even real). Nowadays, you’ll frequently find pansexual and sometimes queer added to that list as some folks began to feel those previous labels didn’t feel right to them.

Folks who are completely straight or gay have it comparatively easy, but folks in between now have a few choices to better explain a potentially complicated aspect of themselves or to feel closer to folks sharing their experience.

Similar to orientation, people who identify as “male” or “female” have it relatively easy BECAUSE those terms are well-established and fairly easy. Folks WHO DON’T identify that way or feel uncomfortable with those terms have a messier situation as they try to explain their sense of self, find a healthy relationship with identity, and form communities.

Nobody is really advocating that each gender on an arbitrary list is absolutely a discrete, real, necessary thing. There are definitely terms that are very similar in meaning and may be seen as synonymous eventually. But lists like that exist because there’s enough people who prefer those different labels to make them available.

I’ve never understood what terms like queer and pansexual meant, so I still think of sexuality as coming in those three options. But your analogy is interesting in the context of my own sexuality. I am straight, but if I’ve been drinking I’ll sometimes make out with other women at the party, and I have had some people act baffled when I say I’m not gay or even bisexual. They think that by definition, if I’m making out with a member of my own gender I’m not completely straight. I try to explain that I never fantasize about other women, have no desire to go into a bedroom and explore a woman’s body, or get into a relationship with a woman, but in some people’s minds, enjoying making out with someone of your own gender means you’re not straight. So I guess I can relate to the concept of being a of a sexual orientation that hasn’t been defined yet, because I certainly don’t feel bisexual or gay, but I guess I don’t always act straight, either.

[bump]

I don’t think the OP is expressing any horror or hate; he’s just wondering how exactly someone knows or chooses between say… “Androgyne”, “Androgynous”, “Gender Variant”, or “Neutrois”? Or between Trans-man and Trans-masculine?

Knowing that you’re male or female, or straight/gay/bi is a lot more clear I imagine.

And on the other side of the app, what do those terms mean? What would one get different between Androgyne and Neutrois?

That’s how I’m interpreting the OP.

[begbert2]

@Delayed_Reflex

As for whether there are 37/57/112 genders or whatnot - I see that similar to colors, in that it depends on just how granular the information you want to be conveying information. Is it useful to have words for “cyan”, “azure”, “indigo”, “cerulean” or do “blue” and “green” suffice? The main thing that will determine whether these multiple genders will gain widespread use will be whether they provide shared understanding - if someone doesn’t know what “cyan” is, the word will be meaningless to them, much like “Gender 36”. However, if “Gender 36” describes a mutually agreed-upon set of characteristics, then people can meaningfully use it as shorthand to describe that set of characteristics, much like “cyan” can be used to refer to colors close to #00FFFF (RGB).

Actually it’s worse than that - as has been pointed out, the list of categories would categorize “red hats”, “green hats”, and “hats” as three different categories. It’s not that there are umpty-billion categories, it’s that there are several different ways to be, and lots more different ways to describe those ways to be.

Which is to say, the “37” different ways to be exist explicitly as clear definitions of what those categories are. To even come up with 37 different genders you have to be looking at a list of different gender-related terms that will, inevitably, label everything and describe it in a way that makes it crystal clear what each term means.

And the OP is explicitly ignoring those labels and descriptions, and based on the pointless numbers they themselves assigned are saying that the pointlessly renumbered categories don’t make it clear what they describe. Oh so confusing!

[BigT]

They just go by which one they think better describes them. If multiple ones describe them, they may pick the one they think sounds better, or the one that is more common (to have commonality) or less common (because they want to stress the differences, not the similarities).

The problem is that there are tons of terms out there that are basically equivalent, but it’s not up to us to decide which is the “right” one. They will decide, in time, what the exact criteria are, and what ones can be lumped together, and which ones should be split. Of course, there will always be lumpers and splitters, but there will eventually be some rough consensus.

But we’re not there now, because we’re just now allowing the choice. It’s not up to us to tell them how to do it, but it does make some sense to pick the 37 most popular genders and allow them to be chosen, and see what happens.

Myself, all I requires is male, female, and other (or unspecified). I refused to join ProBoards as they forced people to pick Male or Female to sign up, and I found that wrong. But one extra option is enough to show some level of acceptance of non-binary gender. The rest is more about discovery than necessity.

[nelliebly]

@Velocity

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?

I’m not sure I understand. Do you think people do a certain amount of introspection and place themselves in very precise categories, even if those categories haven’t been set or numbered/named yet? Do you think 60 years ago, there were people walking about thinking, “Hm, I’m ambitious, organized, impatient, and highly competitive. Someday, someone will tie those characteristics together and call it…um…Type A! That’s it! I’m a Type A!”

People can only assign themselves to particular categories when those categories have been established. **The wind of my soul ** notes that she likes kissing women but doesn’t identify as bi or gay. Maybe someday “straight female who likes kissing women” will become a category of its own, but for now, she merely considers herself a straight woman (who likes kissing women now and then). You work with the categories you know but realize it’s not a precise fit.

And back when there were only 3 categories, there must have been a lot of miserable people who didn’t fit in any of them but had to pretend they did. It’s upsetting to think how lonely each of them must have felt.

[Regallag_The_Axe]

@AHunter3

It is freaking weird, isn’t it?! nods

[Rest of the post omitted for brevity]

Thank you, AHunter3. My stance on gender identity can be summed up as “accepting but confused” and your post was very helpful in removing much of that confusion.

[JKellyMap]

Delayed Response, I like your color-names analogy.

[typoink]

@The_wind_of_my_soul

I’ve never understood what terms like queer and pansexual meant, so I still think of sexuality as coming in those three options. But your analogy is interesting in the context of my own sexuality. I am straight, but if I’ve been drinking I’ll sometimes make out with other women at the party, and I have had some people act baffled when I say I’m not gay or even bisexual. They think that by definition, if I’m making out with a member of my own gender I’m not completely straight. I try to explain that I never fantasize about other women, have no desire to go into a bedroom and explore a woman’s body, or get into a relationship with a woman, but in some people’s minds, enjoying making out with someone of your own gender means you’re not straight. So I guess I can relate to the concept of being a of a sexual orientation that hasn’t been defined yet, because I certainly don’t feel bisexual or gay, but I guess I don’t always act straight, either.

If you’re curious:

“Pansexual” mainly exists because some people felt that “bisexual” was exclusive of trans or nonbinary people. Some people also use it to mean that they are attracted to people completely regardless of gender, whereas “bisexual” people may still take gender into account. It’s a fairly messy term and has actually become somewhat divisive.

“Queer” is intentionally vague; it’s meant as an umbrella term for anybody who isn’t 100% straight (and USUALLY not 100% gay). It’s partly a political term, meant to allow folks of various orientations to recognize they have a shared experience in how society regards them.

For the record, how you describe yourself is actually pretty interesting. I think it’s probably safe to say you’re straight but like kissin’. Your actual motivations, feelings, and boundaries would probably factor in.