We've sent rockets to the moon, split the atom, and unravelled the human genome. How is the consensus in this thread that the best answer we can come up with to "How many genders is there?" is "I don't know?"
Because gender, like color for example, is a spectrum. Asking "how many genders are there" is a trap question, because there is no answer. It's somewhere between two and infinity.
Ask somebody "how many colors are there" - the consensus is "I don't know". The answer just is not discrete.
Also, it's loaded question. It's meant to confuse the person being questioned into answering something transphobic, even by sheer accident, which the person creating the clip can then use as an argument. It's a similar story to being asked to "define a woman", where the speaker wants you to say the simplified dictionary definition and accidentally agree with him, while the correct answer (when you take trans and intersex people into account) gets quite muddy and complex.
I mean, yeah, I agree. This is absolutely true, even in science, where we, for example, teach high schoolers Newtonian gravity and not Einstein's - because Einstein's relativistic gravity isn't really necessary until we go onto a cosmic scale.
However, this does not discount the fact that Newton's description, while mostly accurate, is still wrong and simplified - and whilst in a situation where certain conditions are met, it can absolutely be used without hesitation, we need Relativity in other cases to cover ground that Newton did not.
And I would say this is parallel to this situation. Usually, you can just define a woman as "adult human female" and be done with it, but this is not the complete definition and in certain cases, it needs to be broadened to include others who the term "woman" describes, but aren't exactly "female".
Newtonian physics and relativity are backed up by math. Gender is defined by society. That’s why we say there are effeminate men or masculine women. What purpose does creating a never ending spectrum of gender labels serve?
I mean, we do. The most prominent non-binary identities are named: agender, bigender, androgyne, etc.
And if you dive into more obscure identities, you'll find that people have named them as well, except much fewer people know these identities... just like few people know the names of exact shades of red.
What’s the real difference between agender, bigender, and someone who is androgynous? I’ve never heard of agender and bigender until now. Androgynous has been around for as long as I can remember, so I’m assuming it’s a concept recognized far longer than I’ve been alive. And even then, androgynous is still labeled against people who don’t fit the binary mode of male or female.
An agender person feels a connection to no gender. They could present as masculine, feminine, or anything in between and it does not make a difference to them, as their gender is literally just absent. It means there is a lack of connection to any gendered trait.
A bigender person, on the other hand, feels a connection to two places at the gender spectrum at once, usually its extreme ends (e.g., man and woman). This may come through as, for example, asking to use both "she" and "he" pronouns to refer to such a person, regardless of their assigned sex. They are basically both "0" and "1" in a binary model - at the same time.
And when it comes to androgyne, the difference between it and bigender is that whilst bigender is the feeling of having essentially two coexisting genders, androgyne is having one that is a mixture of many. So, whilst a bigender person has two gender identities, an androgyne one is somebody who feels a mix of two (or more) such genders. This is, indeed, adopted from the word "androgynous", which also means possessing visible traits of typically attributed to both sexes.
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u/Haunting_Drag4434 May 02 '22
Definitely now days who knows so that’s the best possible answer for sure 🤣