"Gender is like the twin towers. There used to be two of them, but now it's a really sensitive topic."
~Meme that showed up on my Facebook feed
I admit I laughed when I first read that little nugget of wisdom. Gender seems to be one of the most contentious issues of the last few years or so and we still haven't found much of a productive way around talking about the issue. Adding to the confusion is the lack of proper differentiation between gender and sex, and the conflation of the two by the layman's definition.
Transgender rights are also one of the core focuses of the modern LGBTQ+ movement but much like gays and lesbians, the fight for equality has been an uphill one for trans people. Trans people also make up an even smaller portion of the population than cisgender gays, lesbians or bisexuals, and thus even within the movement had their fights lose priority to whatever was the more pressing matter, something I've been guilty of in the past. It reminds us that activism isn't perfect.
But if we want to learn, we have to make the choice to educate ourselves. So let's do just that.
For the sake of thoroughness, I want to do a quick recap on the current state of things. Historically, gender and sex have been conflated and used interchangeably. Within that definition of gender, it was and still is widely accepted that there are only two genders corresponding to two biological sexes; male and female. This is what's known as the gender binary; you are either one gender or the other. There is no state in between.
A common way to view gender is by the XY Sex Determination system. Your DNA carries a pair of sex chromosomes which define your biological sex, either a pair of X chromosomes (resulting in XX chromosomes, or homogametic sex) which would make you female, or a pair that includes an X and a Y chromosome (resulting in XY chromosomes, or heterogametic sex) which would make you male.
Another way to view gender (and this is the weakest in my opinion) is by primary sex characteristics, or as the few folks who actually view it this way, by whether or not ya'll got a penis or a vagina.
You can live your whole life by these definitions. Hell, you can meet transgender people and fit them within the gender binary just fine, because humans are pretty good at putting things that are vaguely alike into neat little boxes.
Real life, however, is much more complex.
Debunking most of these are pretty easy. I'm s firm advocate for dropping the gender binary, but many people might not feel that way. If you're still with me, and if you're one of the people on the fence, maybe I can say a couple things that'll make you rethink your position.
First, let me debunk all both previously mentioned forms of gender binary;
Through the XY Sex Determination System we know that men are born with XY chromosomes where as females are born with XX chromosomes. However, there are several documented cases of babies born with XXY chromosomes, also known as Klinefelter Syndrome. Those affected produce less testosterone and develop smaller testes. XYY Syndrome which affects a small percentage of men, symptoms can include becoming taller. In the past, men with XYY syndrome were referred to as "super males". Turner Syndrom, in women, occurs when one of the two X chromosomes is missing.
As you can see, there are people who don't adhere to conventional chromosomal pairings that are still referred to as men or women. Chromosomes are the determinators of biological sex, but by that definition, sex can vary wildly through different chromosomal pairings.
Next is primary sex characteristics. This one is a lot easier to debunk because it doesn't take much of a logical leap to conclude that some people can be born without or with an excess of primary sex characteristics.
This is where intersex people come into play.
Intersex people are born with any variation of sex characteristics, which can also include a chromosomal pairing that isn't XY or XX. Intersex people can also develop genitalia that fits somewhere in between male and female genitalia.
If one wanted to, one could describe intersex people as the third gender. The gender that is neither male, or female, but is either somewhere in between or both. Once upon a time, we used the word hermaphrodite, but this has become stigmatized and can be misleading. As of writing, the preferred term is intersex when referring to humans. For animals, however, the word hermaphrodite is still mostly used.
Because we observe hermaphroditic qualities in animals. Mostly invertebrate such as worms or slugs exhibit hermaphroditic qualities. And there are several species of hermaphroditic animals that reproduce asexually (talk about being told to go f*ck yourself).
I think it's telling how complex gender is since all I've so far done is shown that biological sex is complex and that one can be born perfectly healthy but not perfectly fit any definition of male or female. But biological sex is only part of the equation since one's biological sex can be incongruent with one's gender.
Basically, when your biological sex and your gender identity are incongruent, you would be transgender.
Gender is also more of an umbrella term encompassing one's gender expression and one's gender identity. These two may seem the same but they're fundamentally different concepts.
Gender identity is your own personal experience of gender. Your gender identity can correlate with your biological sex or it can be incongruent. But gender identity is internal. It's how you feel on the inside.
When your gender identity is incongruent with your biological sex, you can sometimes experience what's known as gender dysphoria. While it affects most transgender people, being transgender does not immediately equate to having gender dysphoria. Some transgender folk can live their entire lives without ever feeling it. Gender dysphoria is also much like depression, in that it can be a mood or state of being, but it can also be a diagnosable mental illness.
Gender expression is the final term on the list. This is the one I think people are least familiar with. Gender expression is how we outwardly express our gender. How we physically manifest our inner gender identity. From clothing to pronouns to hair to voice to the way we stand. It's any way we outwardly express what we feel. What we do, how we do it, how we look, and how feminine or masculine we present any part of ourselves.
Your gender expression, however, can run entirely incongruent to your gender identity.
That's an out there concept, isn't it? But think of it this way. Transgender people who are closeted for any reason have to present themselves as cisgender. They have to express themselves in a way that does not correlate with their gender identity, but rather their biological sex. Some may choose to simply not express extreme versions of said gender identity. These would be your demigirls or demiboys. Sometimes you can express an incongruent gender just for the fun of it. We basically built the entire drag subculture around incongruent gender expression.
And if you've made it all the way here, I want to present my case. If your Sex, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression can all be incongruent, then by doing some simple math, we have at least 3 (male, female, other) times 3 (Sex, Identity, Expression) different types of people! 9 different combinations of people! That's weird and cool and great! Humans are diverse things and we can be born with not a goddamn thing wrong with us and come out so different.
Why not express that through our language?
I've avoided using the term Gender Spectrum. The term has a lot of stigma attached, but honestly, it's what describes us. We exist on a spectrum. And no position on it makes you better or worse than anyone else. It just makes you different. And if you were born a boy who identifies as a boy and expresses himself like a boy, like I do, then... Well, I suppose it makes no damn difference, doesn't it? Sure, maybe it might mean someday I'll have to tick a few more boxes while filling out census forms but really, you're unaffected by it.
However, it's life changing for someone else.
Having a set of words to describe your experience is like learning how to spell your own name. For someone, this is a tool to describe their everyday experience, a way to normalize how they feel. That's important.
I think there's sect of people who believe that kids online are making up genders to feel special, usually the same people who use the phrase "I identify as an attack helicopter" because it'll make stranger on the internet laugh or something. And I think it's that kind of person who really needs to ask themselves what would even be so wrong about that?
Making up words for things is how language evolves. A word for where you personally fit into the gender expression that might describe a different experience from someone else is important, because it might also describe the experience of another person. Imagine we got mad at music genres for inventing new subgenres (actually wait, we do do that. Anyone remember when the metal community lost their collective shit over metalcore made by teenagers who stood a little too wide, and then the glorious meme that was crabcore was born into this world?)
We don't lose our minds every time there's a new film genre, or videogame genre, or music genre. Why are we so mad at new people genders?
Either way you slice it, science doesn't support the gender binary, the human experience doesn't support the gender binary and why on earth would you want it to? The weirder and wackier we come out the box, the better. Humans aren't factory assembled, and diversity is great.
So let's all just be excellent to each other, okay?
Here's a great video with Emily who is an intersex person herself.
~Meme that showed up on my Facebook feed
I admit I laughed when I first read that little nugget of wisdom. Gender seems to be one of the most contentious issues of the last few years or so and we still haven't found much of a productive way around talking about the issue. Adding to the confusion is the lack of proper differentiation between gender and sex, and the conflation of the two by the layman's definition.
Transgender rights are also one of the core focuses of the modern LGBTQ+ movement but much like gays and lesbians, the fight for equality has been an uphill one for trans people. Trans people also make up an even smaller portion of the population than cisgender gays, lesbians or bisexuals, and thus even within the movement had their fights lose priority to whatever was the more pressing matter, something I've been guilty of in the past. It reminds us that activism isn't perfect.
But if we want to learn, we have to make the choice to educate ourselves. So let's do just that.
For the sake of thoroughness, I want to do a quick recap on the current state of things. Historically, gender and sex have been conflated and used interchangeably. Within that definition of gender, it was and still is widely accepted that there are only two genders corresponding to two biological sexes; male and female. This is what's known as the gender binary; you are either one gender or the other. There is no state in between.
A common way to view gender is by the XY Sex Determination system. Your DNA carries a pair of sex chromosomes which define your biological sex, either a pair of X chromosomes (resulting in XX chromosomes, or homogametic sex) which would make you female, or a pair that includes an X and a Y chromosome (resulting in XY chromosomes, or heterogametic sex) which would make you male.
Another way to view gender (and this is the weakest in my opinion) is by primary sex characteristics, or as the few folks who actually view it this way, by whether or not ya'll got a penis or a vagina.
You can live your whole life by these definitions. Hell, you can meet transgender people and fit them within the gender binary just fine, because humans are pretty good at putting things that are vaguely alike into neat little boxes.
Real life, however, is much more complex.
Debunking most of these are pretty easy. I'm s firm advocate for dropping the gender binary, but many people might not feel that way. If you're still with me, and if you're one of the people on the fence, maybe I can say a couple things that'll make you rethink your position.
First, let me debunk all both previously mentioned forms of gender binary;
Through the XY Sex Determination System we know that men are born with XY chromosomes where as females are born with XX chromosomes. However, there are several documented cases of babies born with XXY chromosomes, also known as Klinefelter Syndrome. Those affected produce less testosterone and develop smaller testes. XYY Syndrome which affects a small percentage of men, symptoms can include becoming taller. In the past, men with XYY syndrome were referred to as "super males". Turner Syndrom, in women, occurs when one of the two X chromosomes is missing.
As you can see, there are people who don't adhere to conventional chromosomal pairings that are still referred to as men or women. Chromosomes are the determinators of biological sex, but by that definition, sex can vary wildly through different chromosomal pairings.
Next is primary sex characteristics. This one is a lot easier to debunk because it doesn't take much of a logical leap to conclude that some people can be born without or with an excess of primary sex characteristics.
This is where intersex people come into play.
Intersex people are born with any variation of sex characteristics, which can also include a chromosomal pairing that isn't XY or XX. Intersex people can also develop genitalia that fits somewhere in between male and female genitalia.
If one wanted to, one could describe intersex people as the third gender. The gender that is neither male, or female, but is either somewhere in between or both. Once upon a time, we used the word hermaphrodite, but this has become stigmatized and can be misleading. As of writing, the preferred term is intersex when referring to humans. For animals, however, the word hermaphrodite is still mostly used.
Because we observe hermaphroditic qualities in animals. Mostly invertebrate such as worms or slugs exhibit hermaphroditic qualities. And there are several species of hermaphroditic animals that reproduce asexually (talk about being told to go f*ck yourself).
I think it's telling how complex gender is since all I've so far done is shown that biological sex is complex and that one can be born perfectly healthy but not perfectly fit any definition of male or female. But biological sex is only part of the equation since one's biological sex can be incongruent with one's gender.
Basically, when your biological sex and your gender identity are incongruent, you would be transgender.
Gender is also more of an umbrella term encompassing one's gender expression and one's gender identity. These two may seem the same but they're fundamentally different concepts.
Gender identity is your own personal experience of gender. Your gender identity can correlate with your biological sex or it can be incongruent. But gender identity is internal. It's how you feel on the inside.
When your gender identity is incongruent with your biological sex, you can sometimes experience what's known as gender dysphoria. While it affects most transgender people, being transgender does not immediately equate to having gender dysphoria. Some transgender folk can live their entire lives without ever feeling it. Gender dysphoria is also much like depression, in that it can be a mood or state of being, but it can also be a diagnosable mental illness.
Gender expression is the final term on the list. This is the one I think people are least familiar with. Gender expression is how we outwardly express our gender. How we physically manifest our inner gender identity. From clothing to pronouns to hair to voice to the way we stand. It's any way we outwardly express what we feel. What we do, how we do it, how we look, and how feminine or masculine we present any part of ourselves.
Your gender expression, however, can run entirely incongruent to your gender identity.
That's an out there concept, isn't it? But think of it this way. Transgender people who are closeted for any reason have to present themselves as cisgender. They have to express themselves in a way that does not correlate with their gender identity, but rather their biological sex. Some may choose to simply not express extreme versions of said gender identity. These would be your demigirls or demiboys. Sometimes you can express an incongruent gender just for the fun of it. We basically built the entire drag subculture around incongruent gender expression.
And if you've made it all the way here, I want to present my case. If your Sex, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression can all be incongruent, then by doing some simple math, we have at least 3 (male, female, other) times 3 (Sex, Identity, Expression) different types of people! 9 different combinations of people! That's weird and cool and great! Humans are diverse things and we can be born with not a goddamn thing wrong with us and come out so different.
Why not express that through our language?
I've avoided using the term Gender Spectrum. The term has a lot of stigma attached, but honestly, it's what describes us. We exist on a spectrum. And no position on it makes you better or worse than anyone else. It just makes you different. And if you were born a boy who identifies as a boy and expresses himself like a boy, like I do, then... Well, I suppose it makes no damn difference, doesn't it? Sure, maybe it might mean someday I'll have to tick a few more boxes while filling out census forms but really, you're unaffected by it.
However, it's life changing for someone else.
Having a set of words to describe your experience is like learning how to spell your own name. For someone, this is a tool to describe their everyday experience, a way to normalize how they feel. That's important.
I think there's sect of people who believe that kids online are making up genders to feel special, usually the same people who use the phrase "I identify as an attack helicopter" because it'll make stranger on the internet laugh or something. And I think it's that kind of person who really needs to ask themselves what would even be so wrong about that?
Making up words for things is how language evolves. A word for where you personally fit into the gender expression that might describe a different experience from someone else is important, because it might also describe the experience of another person. Imagine we got mad at music genres for inventing new subgenres (actually wait, we do do that. Anyone remember when the metal community lost their collective shit over metalcore made by teenagers who stood a little too wide, and then the glorious meme that was crabcore was born into this world?)
We don't lose our minds every time there's a new film genre, or videogame genre, or music genre. Why are we so mad at new people genders?
Either way you slice it, science doesn't support the gender binary, the human experience doesn't support the gender binary and why on earth would you want it to? The weirder and wackier we come out the box, the better. Humans aren't factory assembled, and diversity is great.
So let's all just be excellent to each other, okay?
Here's a great video with Emily who is an intersex person herself.
