Clarificatory note based on several misunderstandings: nothing I say in this article is about non-binary people. There might be two sexes and non-binary people, just as, to give an example from a commenter, there are two Koreas but many non-Koreans.
Up until this most recent weekend, I hadn’t really stopped to consider how many genders there are. Conservatives often tout the widespread liberal belief in more than two genders as some insane dogma, while liberals treat it as a core part of the movements for trans rights. How you answer this question is treated as a way to signal your tribal political affiliation rather than a genuine belief, only different from chanting “go dodgers” in what it signals affiliation with. As a result, I hadn’t really considered which of the views is true.
It’s strange that whether there are two genders is seen as a core part of the debate over how trans people should be treated given that the number of genders seems mostly beside the point that liberals and conservatives disagree on. Whether one can change their gender or whether one must have a gender doesn’t depend on whether there are two of them; in a world where there were only two places to blog, Substack and Wordpress, it would still be possible to switch from one to the other or not blog at all.
Thus, I don’t know why anyone cares much about this question. However, given how much it’s discussed it’s worth figuring out what the right answer is. I think it’s obvious: there are two genders. The two genders are male and female. On the traditional liberal view, the male gender is composed of those who have mostly traits associated with biological males and the female gender is composed of something like those who have mostly traits associated with biological females. On the conservative view, the male gender simply refers to biological men and the female gender refers to biological females.
Lots of people seem to think that there are more than two genders, but like, what are they? What are these extra genders? If there are more than two, you should be able to name them.
The common answer people give is that the genders exist along a continuum. We all have a different mix of masculine and feminine traits and a gender simply picks out some point along the continuum. Genders are like height—there are infinite possible heights because height comes in degrees. So, should we adopt this view? I’ll humbly suggest that the answer is no.
First of all, wtf??? Why would anyone think this view is right? Who has ever used the term this way to refer to highly specific values along the continuum of gendered traits? On this picture, it’s inaccurate to say male and female are genders, because they don’t refer to highly specific values along the continuum of gendered traits.
Second of all, on this picture, just as no two people have exactly the same height, no two people would have the same gender. But that’s obviously false. I’m the same gender as other men even though I’m much more masculine than they are, being a hulking high-testosterone goliath of a man who doesn’t engage in cucked beta behavior like meat eating.
I’m the same gender as other men, even though unlike them, I’m accurately described by the words of the former president:
“[Bentham’s Bulldog] was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women, I love women. … This man was strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros they came out of there, they said ‘Oh, my God. That’s unbelievable.’”
Now, maybe some people would bite the bullet and simply say that no two people are the same gender. This is very crazy but politics causes people to have brainworms and say ridiculous things to justify their preexisting position. But such a view implies a consequence that such people would be unhappy with—it implies that a male can’t change their gender to be the same as the gender of a biological female.
Third, this view implies that everyone is transgender. The precise degree to which a person exhibits masculine vs feminine traits varies from moment to moment. When I’m in the gym pumping iron, as I often do, or reading analytic philosophy, I exhibit more masculine traits than when I’m, say, eating at a restaurant. But surely a person’s gender doesn’t change whenever they get a bite to eat.
The other view one might have is that there aren’t infinite genders but just a lot of them. Medicine.net, the second website that one finds when they google “how many genders are there,” lists a bunch of supposed genders, including:
Abimegender: Associated with being profound, deep, and infinite. The term abimegender may be used alone or in combination with other genders.
…
Anxiegender: This gender identity has anxiety as its prominent characteristic.
…
Esspigender: The individual relates their gender identity with spirits.
(I assume they’re not talking about alcohol).
But this account must assume that gender is determined by self-identification. If not, it implies that a person who thinks they’re female might instead be Abimegender if, like me, they are profound, deep, and infinite. It would be very odd to think that a person who thinks they are a man is really mistaken—that they should start calling themself Abimegender in order to be precise. But the self-identification account of gender is flawed—there’s no property F that you possess if and only if you identify as possessing F. The definition is circular, using the word defined in the definition. In other words, there are two possibilities:
Being Abimegender, for instance, is simply about identifying as Abimegender. But on this picture: what are they identifying as? A word can’t be used in its own definition, and if this is all Abimegender means, then someone who is Abimegender simply identifies as one who identifies as one who identifies as one who identifies as one…who identifies as Abimegender. A word’s proper definition can’t take infinitely long to unpack and use the word in the definition! What’s an apple, you ask? The definition “something that is something that is something that is something that is something that is…an apple,” would not be helpful or illuminating.
Being Amimegender is about being profound, deep, and infinite. But on this picture, many who think they’re men and are biologically male are mistaken about their gender and are really Abimegender. On this view, almost everyone on Earth is mistaken about their gender!
I don’t know why the number of genders got bundled up with all the dumb politicized debates involving transgender people. It got bad enough that when Joe Biden was asked how many genders there are, knowing that you’re supposed to say there are more than two, but not knowing what the right answer is, he replied “there are at least three.”
(Me when I’m asked how many people you should think there are if the self-indication assumption is true).
It seems this is a classic case of liberals saying crazy things because they think it’s what they’re supposed to say, a bit like when they deny that the fetus is alive (note: I think abortion is fine in the early stages, but those who deny that the early fetus is alive are denying basic biology.) When an issue becomes politicized, it gets people to say some extremely silly things, and this case is one such example. The politicization of the debate surrounding how transgender people should be treated got potentially hundreds of millions of liberals to deny something extremely obvious without thinking their position through.
I would humbly suggest to my fellow liberals that if you’d like to convince conservatives to give up their views, it’s unwise to do so by clinging dogmatically to crazy beliefs simply because they’re featured in left-wing slogans and then condescendingly treat those who disagree with the slogans as if they have the brainpower of lobotomized children.
None of these points are convincing:
1. *“First of all, wtf??? Why would anyone think this view is right? Who has ever used the term this way to refer to highly specific values along the continuum of gendered traits? On this picture, it’s inaccurate to say male and female are genders, because they don’t refer to highly specific values along the continuum of gendered traits.”* In answer to who has ever used “gender” this way: an increasingly wide share of Western society. In reply to the second point: all of your opponents will agree that, as in the way they use the term “gender”, it’s inaccurate to call “male” and “female” genders, though they’ll agree that there’s genuine polysemy in how gender is used (as a grammatical property, a synonym of sex, etc.) This is not a reductio.
2. *“Second of all, on this picture, just as no two people have exactly the same height, no two people would have the same gender.”* Oddly, Matthew omits the word “exactly” from the second part of this sentence, making the inference ambiguous. It’s true that no two people have exactly the same height. Still, many people are roughly the same height, in a way that lets us apply the same height designation (6,8”, 4,11” [mine and Matthew’s heights respectively]). In the same way, it’s not a bullet to bite to say no two people have exactly the same gender; we can still say they have roughly the same gender, in a way that allows us to group them under the same gender term.
3. *”Third, this view implies that everyone is transgender. The precise degree to which a person exhibits masculine vs feminine traits varies from moment to moment. When I’m in the gym pumping iron, as I often do, or reading analytic philosophy, I exhibit more masculine traits than when I’m, say, eating at a restaurant. But surely a person’s gender doesn’t change whenever they get a bite to eat.”* The sex/gender distinction does not imply that everyone is transgender. Any reasonable account of what it is to be transgender will include that the trans person’s gender identity — the one at variance with the gender identity that usually correlates with their sex — has to be sufficiently deep-rooted and stable. (If the worry is that the sex/gender distinction implies that everyone is a gender-bender to some degree… they’ll happily agree with that, and it isn’t a bullet to bite.)
1. One stronger version of the multi-gender position is that gender identity and gender roles make up our view of gender, and if we look at what makes up these norms and expectations, we find it is quite different between a young British male philosophy student, an ageing Chinese eunuch, or a middle-aged Inuit hunter etc.
2. Another view is that people can be agender, intersex, non-binary etc. Societies can and do recognise various kinds of "third gender".
The boring answer is that people are using the term "gender" in different ways and insisting their definition is the important one.