Let’s talk about a gender system not based on sex (biological or otherwise).
Theoretically genders are just types. For example, some languages might have genders something like “human,” “living being,” and “inanimate,” rather than “male,” “female,” and “neuter.”
So I’m interested in your examples of non-sex-based gender systems, whether from history, fiction, or your own personal imagination or desire.
How many genders are there and what would they be?
Do the genders have any roles or purposes in society?
Are the genders differentiated in any superficial way, such as by attire, grooming, or adornment?
The genders are not based on or don’t originate in sex, sexual relationships, or sexual attraction, but do they interact with or influence them?
In other words, do the genders influence what it means to be a biological man, woman, or other, cis or trans, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or other?
Since gender doesn’t indicate these things any more, how do people behave in terms of finding sexual or relationship partners?
How might the genders affect social interactions, such as formations of social groups, politics, law, family structures, etc.?
And just to be clear I’m talking about a system that exists instead of a sex-based categorical system, not in addition to one. So not like ahindis having ethnicity, caste, clan, etc., in addition to sex-based gende.
Note that for a language to include certain genders it only needs to have them some of the time in some types of words: “English has sex-based genders in professional names” is true, despite there being tons of professions whose English names are gender-invariant.
Are you asking about languages, or not? For instance, Turkish has no grammatical gender, while a language like Swahili has 15 or so. Yet in all cases people still seem to be able to relate to one another naturally. It is true that in some languages you have to worry about addressing someone in different ways depending on their gender, degree of respect or familiarity, and other factors, which necessitates knowing the prevailing cultural rules.
Or are you mainly interested in scenarios like the old Albanian custom whereby a female can swear an irrevocable oath to be able to function as a man in society, even though she is a woman? Or sci-fi scenarios like where everybody’s hermaphroditic, or a marriage consists of four people, or anything else you might imagine?
I am not asking about language. I am asking about actual gender of people in society. Language might be a component of that, but only as a part of a much bigger issue.
But in a language with genders of “human, living being, and inanimate”, all people would be of gender “human”, and it’s not really a way of categorizing people.
I am not interested in mere augmentations to our current male-female gender system, but rather a completely new system that does not have biological sex as it’s basis.
A six-do scenario is fine, but it must apply to Earth-origin Homo sapiens. I want to know how it affects us as humans as we currently are, not some fictional species with a different biology.
A thought experiment I have done is “what if our genders were not male-female but introvert-extrovert?”
That would operate substantially the same way that the current male-female gender system works. Numbers of each group are, if not really equal, at least large enough to be a plausible division. Mostly people can guess which category a person would fall into, but sometimes they’d get it wrong. There are important life decisions that can be heavily influenced by your intro- or extro-version - whether to take up a job in sales, for instance. Both groups have some fundamentally different needs, and sometimes find it hard to understand the other group.
People on the borderlines might be 'version-fluid … sometimes they would feel like introverts, sometimes like extroverts. Or some might be pigeonholed into one group when they really feel like they’re in another group
At least among gay men, there’s a “bottom-to-top” spectrum regarding anal sex, with those in the middle being totally versatile. There are also gay men who don’t fit into that spectrum, not being interested in anal sex. There’s a less frequently used spectrum for oral sex.
Quarks come in six flavors—up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. What if humans were still male, female, etc., biologically but that didn’t play a part in societal gender identities. What if the genders were blueberry, raspberry, chocolate, vanilla, coffee, and tea? What kind of gender system might that produce? That’s the kind of idea I’m interested in hearing about.
That does sound like (an elaboration of) eg one of Ursula Le Guin’s sci-fi scenarios: there are (in her story) two flavors: Morning and Evening. You inherit your mother’s flavor, and you can’t have sex with anyone of your flavor. Marriage is a foursome consisting of a man and a woman from each flavor.
If you want six flavors instead of two, you could posit some more intricate rock-paper-scissor interactions, but Le Guin’s idea was meant to be already pretty complicated.
I suppose birth order could be a basis for social structure. Does anybody else remember the old children’s book about the Chinese family with elder son Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo and younger son Chang? Highly questionable in terms of its inauthentic, “orientalist” fake-Asian-culture-melange approach, but always stuck with me as a thought experiment in super-valorizing first-born-ness.
Of course, the imaginary world of that book and the real cultures it was very loosely based on would have had sex-based gender conventions as well, but you could imagine a setup in which only birth order really mattered as a gender category.
You could go with the four blood types A, B, AB and 0. Of course, this classification would be pretty useless for all purposes except blood transfusions, but mere uselessness has never stopped any classification system from being adopted:
It’s kind of hard to answer the question without doing some backstepping to look at gender as we know it.
Gender isn’t the same as biological / morphological sex. But it did start out as a set of generalizations about biological sexes. Is everyone here on board with that, or is that something we should discuss and debate?
The drift of gender away from sex, and not just the definition of gender as “social” and sex as “biological”, is what establishes the groundwork for why a person’s gender is not always indicative of, or derived from, their sex. And some components of that drift are:
Gender became prescriptive, not just descriptive. One aspect of that was that exceptions to the general rule were ignored and/or erased and/or treated as pathological shameful things. Physically, that meant that instead of exceptions to the general rule that we are male or else female (which does describe most of us) being simply recognized as exceptions without any associated value judgment, intersex conditions were ignored in discussion of the sexes (so that the either/or of male versus female would be absolute) and when recognized at all were considered medical ailments or shameful disfigurements. Socially, it meant that personality and behavioral characteristics that might be the subject of accurate generalizations, as generalizations, became requirements for properly manifesting as your sex, with exceptions to these general rules also being viewed as wrong or shameful.
Another aspect of gender being prescriptive is that it came to contain elements that weren’t actually true of the sexes; they were instead composed of traits that society found it useful to project onto the sexes. See: “patriarchy”, wherein characteristics that the social system wished to promulgate as a feminine ideal were defined as traits of female people in a prescriptive fashion, when they were not by any means true in general of female people.
With both forms of that prescriptivism, gender drifted pretty far away from being a literal representation of what the sexes were like, and with that situation established it became the case that some people born female mapped so poorly to the social (gender) definition of what “being a woman” was supposed to be like that they understood one thing to be “woman” and understood themselves to be something other than that (perhaps “man” but also perhaps something entirely else). Likewise for some people born male being estranged from recognizing themselves as “men”.
Note that this does not address the possibility that some people have a sort of biological “wiring diagram” in their brain that tells them they were supposed to have a different physical sexual morphology than the one they do have. Or that informs them that who they are is in some intrinsic fashion “a man” despite having a body categorized as female, or as “a woman” despite having a body classified as “male” – those phenomena are mostly not social, although there sort of has to be a social element by which any individual comes to interpret, using the concepts embedded in our language and observable in the surrounding society and so forth.
OK back to your question… a “gender system not based on sex”. We could certainly have a categorical system not based on sex, but what would make it “a gender system”? The one we’ve got is what it is because it originated from generalizations about sex diffs. We could indeed use this not-based-on-sex gender system to designate who is going to have what roles, including erogenous if not necessarily procreative, I suppose. We would not need to have one, I think, in order to not have gender as we know it. But it would be hard to prevent the reoccurrence of generalizations about bio-morphological sex. If we trashed our often-ludicrous notions about that it means to be this sex or that sex and started over, I suspect we’d notice sexual dimorphism and make generalizations. I don’t think they’d necessarily descend right back down into the morass of prescriptive and rigid roles and sexist expectations, if that’s what you’re asking.
I thik race would easily fit into this categorization system. We have a tendency to categorize people into white, black, asian, hispanic etc. These generalization are to some extent genetically based in that someone whose parents are both black is likely to be categorized as black themselves. And there are a number of traits that people assign based on these categorizations, but the groups are much more fluid and indistinct than people like to believe.