oh, you’re in for a hell of a ride. (and don’t worry, there will a TL;DR at the bottom of this post just in case you’re too lazy to read or are simply unwilling to have your ignorant worldview dismantled by actual concrete facts.)
first, let’s look into the social construction of gender and the gender binary.
the narrow-minded idea that there are only two genders has been continuously debunked by biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and doctors alike, first of all. second, gender and sex are not the same thing, but they are both the same in the sense that they are both social constructs made to describe natural phenomenon, not actually based in any scientific reality.
gender is only your sense of, and internal mental relationship to masculinity, femininity, and androgyny, which can be expressed through words, behavior, or clothes. this does not actually have anything to do with biology—even less so than sex. there is no scientific, biological, or medical basis for a binary system of gender, and in fact the gender binary completely contradicts the laws of natural variation. The Yogyakarta Principles on The Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity further elaborates on the definition of gender to be “ each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech and mannerisms.”
there is no limitation on who you are and what identity you construct for yourself. since it is a socially defined construct, people can and do construct more than the two traditional genders, and all are valid.
citations from other works of literature:
• Wendy Wood, “Gender: An Interdisciplinary Perspective” (2010)
- “Sociological explanations, in turn, often fail to recognize that gender beliefs are influenced by individual-level factors. For example, people differ in the extent to which they hold gender identities, or personally identify with a sex category. Although identities often reflect categories of male or female, they also may include alternatives (e.g., intersex, transgender). The specific content of gender identities can include communal or agentic personality attributes, gender-typed interests and occupations, or gendered ways of relating to others (Wood and Eagly 2009). Men and women act in gendered ways as they regulate their behavior in line with a valued gender identity (Witt and Wood 2010; Wood et al. 1997). Thus, people may do gender because it enhances their self-esteem and positive feelings.” (p.g. 337)
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)
- “If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of ‘men’ will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that ‘women’ will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.” (p.g. 10)
• Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000)
- “All of which brings me back to the five sexes. I imagine a future in which our knowledge of the body has led to resistance against medical surveillance, in which medical science has been placed at the service of gender variability, and genders have multiplied beyond currently fathomable limits. Suzanne Kessler suggests that ‘gender variability can… be seen… in a new way—as an expansion of what is meant by male and female.’ Ultimately, perhaps, concepts of masculinity and femininity might overlap so completely as to render the very notion of gender difference irrelevant.” (p.g. 101)
- “Given the discrimination and violence faced by those whose cultural and physical genitals don’t match, legal protections are needed during the transition to a gender-diverse utopia. It would help to eliminate the ‘gender’ category from licenses, passports, and the like. The transgender activist Leslie Feinberg writes: ‘Sex categories should be removed from all basic identification papers—from driver’s licenses to passports—and since the right of each person to define their own sex is so basic, it should be eliminated from birth certificates as well.’ Indeed, why are physical genitals necessary for identification? Surely attributes both more visible (such as height, build, and eye color) and less visible (fingerprints and DNA profiles) would be of greater use. Transgender activists have written ‘An International Bill of Gender Rights’ that includes (among ten gender rights) ‘the right to define gender identity, the right to control and change one’s own body, the right to sexual expression and the right to form committed, loving relationships and enter into marital contracts.’’90 The legal bases for such rights are being hammered out in the courts as I write, through the establishment of case law regarding sex discrimination and homosexual rights.” (p.g. 111)
just because you cannot handle your societally constructed worldview surrounding sex, gender, and genetics being smashed by sociology & biology itself doesn’t mean, additionally, that you have the right to make other people feel unsafe and uncomfortable just because you don’t like having your world view being dismantled. the complexities of human behavior & the diversity of sex and reproduction in life cannot all be covered in a simple high school biology class. shocker!
now, let’s move on to the social construction of “biological” sex.
even if gender was the exact same thing as sex, it still wouldn’t be a binary or a scientific absolute. despite the name “biological sex,” sex isn’t a biological fact either. Anne Fausto-sterling, PhD, is one of many biologists who has written literature explaining the social construction of “biological” sex (see: Sexing the Body, 2000, and her previous book, Myths of Gender, 1985). in the novel Sexing the Body, Fausto-Sterling explains that there are 5 specific measures of “biological sex” according to modern medical science:
1. chromosomes (male: XY, female: XX)
2. genitalia (male: penis, female vulva and vagina)
3. gonads (male: testes, female: ovaries)
4. hormones (male: high testosterone, low estrogen, low progesterone; female: high estrogen, high progesterone, low testosterone)
5. secondary sex characteristics (male: large amounts of dark, thick, coarse body hair, noticeable facial hair, low waist to hip ratio, no noticeable breast development; female: fine, light colored body hair, no noticeable facial hair, high waist to hip ratio, noticeable breast development)
in real life, very few people actually match up with all five categories. estimates by the intersex society of north america notes the frequency and prevalence of intersex conditions, and puts the total rate of human bodies that “differ from standard male or female” at around one in 100, while anne fausto-sterling estimates that 1.7% of the population do not fall within the usual sex classifications. there are lots of people out there with XY chromosomes, testes, a vulva, a vagina, “female” secondary sex characteristics, and “male” hormone patterns; people with XX chromosomes, testes, a penis, “male” secondary characteristics and “female” hormone patterns, and there are even people with both “male” and “female” secondary sex characteristics or hormone patterns at the same time, regardless of their genes, gonads, or genitalia. now, these people are technically intersex assuming that the two sex system is absolutely true. however, in order for the binary to even be considered real, every single person on earth must completely match up on all 5 markers of sex all the time. that’s not what happens in real life. in real life, literally MILLIONS of people have bodies that are contrary to the biological concept of the two sex system.
to illustrate further, let’s look further into fausto-sterling’s book and consider the case of the athlete maria patiño. patiño has “female” genetalia, and she has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. however, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports. patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex, and she successfully fought to be recognized as a female athlete, arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient enough to not make her female. intersex people, like patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.
citations from other works of literature:
• Judith Lorber, Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology; from Gender and Society, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1993)
- “Until the eighteenth century, Western philosophers and scientists thought that there was one sex and that women’s internal genitalia were the inverse of men’s external genitalia: the womb and vagina were the penis and scrotum turned inside out.” (p.g. 568)
- “…the social construction of the conventional sex and gender categories already assumes differences between them and similarities among them. When we rely only on the conventional categories of sex and gender, we end up finding what we looked for-we see what we believe, whether it is that ‘females’ and ‘males’ are essentially different or that ‘women’ and ‘men’ are essentially the same.” (p.g. 578)
• Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000)
- “Consider Angela Moreno’s more recent tale. In 1985, when she was twelve years old, her clitoris grew to a length of 1.5 inches. Having nothing to compare this to, she thought she was normal. But her mother noticed and with alarm hauled her off to a doctor who told her she had ovarian cancer and needed a hysterectomy. Her parents told her that no matter what, she would still be their little girl. When she awoke from surgery, however, her clitoris was gone. Not until she was twenty-three did she find out she was XY and had had testes, not ovaries. She never had cancer.21 Today Moreno has become an ISNA activist and credits ISNA with helping her heal psychologically from the damage done by lies and surgery. She dreams of teaching in a Montessori school and perhaps adopting a child. She writes: ‘If I had to label myself man or woman, I’d say, a different kind of woman… . I’m not a case of one sex or the other, nor am I some combination of the two… and from the bottom of my heart, I wish I’d been allowed to stay that way.’” (p.g. 84)
- “We stand now at a fork in the road. To the right we can walk toward reaffirmation of the naturalness of the number 2 and continue to develop new medical technology, including gene ‘therapy’ and new prenatal interventions to ensure the birth of only two sexes. To the left, we can hike up the hill of natural and cultural variability. Traditionally, in European and American culture we have defined two genders, each with a range of permissible behaviors; but things have begun to change. There are househusbands and women fighter pilots. There are feminine lesbians and gay men both buff and butch. Male to female and female to male transsexuals render the sex/gender divide virtually unintelligible.” (p.g. 101)
• Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman”
- “At this point, let us say that a new personal and subjective definition for all humankind can only be found beyond the categories of sex (woman and man) and that the advent of individual subjects demands first destroying the categories of sex, ending the use of them, and rejecting all sciences which still use these categories as their fundamentals (practically all social sciences).” (p.g. 19-20)
• Lisa Adkins, Sex in Question: French Materialist Feminism (1996)
-“One of the most important developments in early 1990s’ anglophone feminist theory is seen to be the destabilisation of the apparent orthodoxy regarding the relationship between sex and gender. It is no longer assumed that sex is a ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ category, with gender a social or cultural construction somehow imposed on top of it. ‘Sex’ is increasingly recognised as a sociohistorical product, rather than a fixed, transhistorical, or taken-for-granted category.” (p.g. 15)
- “The Category of Sex’ (first published in 1982) provides an excellent brief introduction to the key ideas shared by the group. In it, Monique Wittig, a novelist and literary theorist, argues that the division of society into two sexes is the product, and not the cause, of oppression; that ‘sex’ is a political category and there would be no ‘sex’ without oppression; and that heterosexuality is of central importance in defining the sexes as natural, different and complementary.” (p.g. 16)
• Maria Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender” (2008)
- “Sex is still presumed to be binary and easily determinable by an analysis of biological factors. Despite [countless] anthropological and medical studies to the contrary, society presumes an unambiguous binary sex paradigm in which all individuals can be classified neatly as male or female.” (p.g. 6)
• Anonymous Author, “The Problematic Ideology of Natural Sex” (2016)
- “Around the world, over the past four or five hundred years, people have been cajoled, threatened, forcibly re-educated, beaten, imprisoned, locked in mental hospitals, put in the stocks, publicly humiliated, mutilated, and burnt at the stake for violating one or more of the precepts of ‘Natural [Biological] Sex.’ That’s the sure sign of enforced ideology, not a true natural law…”
- “If we truly believe in science, in a rational world where we look objectively at what is, rather than impose our beliefs onto reality, then we need to reject the Ideology of Natural Sex. We need to see the reality of the sex spectrum and stop framing intersexuality as a rare disorder that somehow violates natural law. We need to understand that different societies have divided the sex spectrum up into different numbers of social sexes, and that binary sex is no more or less arbitrary than trinary or quartic sex systems…”
• Courtney Adison, “Human Sex is Not Simply Male or Female. So What?” (2016)
- “It is no surprise, then, that the sex binary is so firmly rooted in Euro-American thought, along with many others (think body and mind, nature and culture). It underpins and naturalises gendered divisions of labour through, for example, the notion of women as the weaker sex. Language mirrors the distinction between male and female, as in the way we talk about the sexes as ‘opposite’, and throughout life we are encouraged to think in binary terms about this central aspect of our existence.”
- “While these gendered binaries play out in social life in reasonably clear ways, they also seep into places conventionally seen as immune to bias. For example, they permeate sex science. In her paper ‘The Egg and the Sperm’ (1991), the anthropologist Emily Martin reported on the ‘scientific fairy tale’ of reproductive biology… scientific knowledge is produced in culturally patterned ways and, for Euro-American scientists, gendered assumptions make up a large part of this patterning.”
- “ In Gender Trouble (1990), the feminist theorist Judith Butler argues that the insistence on sex as a natural category is itself evidence of its very unnaturalness. While the notion of gender as constructed (through interaction, socialisation and so on) was gaining some acceptance at this time, Butler’s point was that sex as well as gender was being culturally produced all along. It comes as no surprise to those familiar with Butler, Martin and the likes, that recent scientific findings suggest that sex is in fact non-binary. Attempts to cling to the binary view of sex now look like stubborn resistance to a changing paradigm. In her survey paper ‘Sex Redefined’ (2015) in Nature, Claire Ainsworth identified numerous cases supporting the biological claim that sex is far from binary, and is best seen as a spectrum. The most remarkable example was that of a 70-year-old father of four who went into the operating room for routine surgery only for his surgeon to discover that he had a womb.”
- “All of these different manifestations of sex layer onto each other, so people might go their whole lives without knowing that they have cells or even organs of the ‘opposite’ sex.”
- “Looking to other times and to other cultures, we are reminded that sex is to some degree produced through the assumptions we make about each other and our bodies. Modern science is moving towards consensus on sex as a spectrum rather than a simple male/female binary, and it is time to start casting around for new ways of thinking about this fundamental aspect of what we are. Historical and anthropological studies provide a rich resource for re-imagining sex, reminding us that the sex spectrum itself is rooted in Euro-Western views of the person and body, and inviting critical engagement with our most basic biological assumptions.”
• Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (1992)
- “For quite different reasons, Catharine MacKinnon argues explicitly that gender is the division of men and women caused ‘by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission’; sex-which comes to the same thing-is social relations ‘organized so that men may dominate and women must submit.’ ‘Science’, Ruth Bleier argues, mistakenly views ‘gender attributions as natural categories for which biological explanations are appropriate and even necessary.’ Thus some of the so called sex differences in biological and sociological research turn out to be gender differences after all, and the distinction between nature and culture collapses as the former folds into the latter.” (p.g. 13) r
“biological sex” is just as biased, unscientific, and subjective as the concept of gender is, and to base sex or gender on chromosomes or genitals or some other arbitrary feature is to ignore and marginalize the truth. there are millions of people who have different genitalia, lack them all together, or are intersex, people with differing karyotypes (i.e. XXY, XXX, XYY, X, etc) or chimerism (a body where some cells are of one karyotype and others are of another), and there are people with all kinds of genetic/epigenetic/biological conditions. these are all normal, natural variations of the human body that aren’t inherently connected to each other. to say sex or gender is defined by any of these features is erasive, intersexist, transphobic, and entirely contrary to what actual biologists and geneticists have been saying for decades.
you can also check out this lovely post explaining the social construction of both human sex and gender.
not to mention, the idea of a gender binary is a very, very recent concept rooted in colonialism and racism, not “science” or “biology”.
in fact, the idea of third and nonbinary genders is as old as human civilization. (the list below is a very VERY brief history of nonbinarism):
§ 2000 BCE: in mesopotamian mythology, among the earliest written records, there are references to types of people who are neither men nor women. in a sumerian creation myth found on a stone tablet from the 2000 bce, the goddess ninmah fashions a being “with no male organ and no female organ”, for whom enki finds a position in society: “to stand before the king".
§ 1800 BCE: inscribed pottery shards from the middle kingdom of egypt, found near ancient thebes, list three human genders: tai (male), sḫt (“sekhet”) and hmt (female).
§ 385-380 BCE: aristophanes, a comic playwright, tells a story of creation in which “original human nature” includes a third sex. this sex “was a distinct kind, with a bodily shape and a name of its own, constituted by the union of the male and the female: but now only the word ‘androgynous’ is preserved.”
§ 77 BCE: genucius, a roman slave is denied inheritance on the grounds, according to art historian lynn roller, of being “neither a man nor a woman.” he is “not even allowed to plead his own case, lest the court be polluted by his obscene presence and corrupt voice.”
§ 1871: british administrators pass the criminal tribes act in india, effectively outlawing the country’s hijras—a community that includes intersex people, trans people, and even cross-dressers. celebrated in sacred indian texts, hijras had long been part of south asian cultures, but colonial authorities viewed them as violating the social order.
§ 1970: mexians in oaxaca state establish vela de las intrepidas (vigil of the intrepids), a festival celebrating ambiguous gender identities. the zapotec culture embraces a third-gender population called muxes. muxes trace back to pre-columbian times, when there were “cross-dressing aztec priests and mayan gods who were male and female at the same time”.
§ 2014: india’s supreme court recognizes the right of people, including hijras, to identify as third-gender. the court states, “it is the right of every human being to choose their gender.”
this binary gender system of ours is comparatively very new, and has been forced upon the rest of the world by white europeans in destructive and violent invasion, genocide, and complete appropriation and destruction of the original cultures of each land. really, it is the binary system that is unnatural. multiple genders have always existed in this world. and despite the best attempt of european colonialists, they continue to exist today, indicating that it is part of human nature to not fit in a neat binary and instead have multiple genders. there are multiple countries today that have either no genders at all, or three or more genders officially recognized, and there are many languages where gendered pronouns and categories don’t even exist. even within the united states, some native american tribes have a system of gender that include up to six distinct genders.
citations from other works of literature:
• Maria Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial /Modern Gender System” (2007)
- “Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power… gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peopks, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the ‘civilized’ West.” (p.g. 186)
- “As global, Eurocentered capitalism was constituted through colonization, gender differentials were introduced where there were none. Oyeronkk Oyewhmi has shown us that the oppressive gender system that was imposed on Yoruba society did a lot more than transform the organization of reproduction… many Native American tribes were matriarchal, recognized more than two genders, recognized ‘third’ gendering and homosexuality positively, and understood gender in egalitarian terms rather than in the terms of subordination that Eurocentered capitalism imposed on them. Gunn’s work has enabled us to see that the scope of the gender differentials was much more encompassing and it did not rest on biology.” (p.g. 196)
• Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000)
- “Were we in Europe and America to move to a multiple sex and gender role system (as it seems we might be doing), we would not be cultural pioneers. Several Native American cultures, for example, define a third gender, which may include people whom we would label as homosexual, transsexual, or intersexual but also people we would label as male or female. Anthropologists have described other groups, such as the Hijras of India, that contain individuals whom we in the West would label intersexes, transsexuals, effeminate men, and eunuchs. As with the varied Native American categories, the Hijras vary in their origins and gender characteristics. Anthropologists debate about how to interpret Native American gender systems. What is important, however, is that the existence of other systems suggests that ours is not inevitable.” (p.g. 108-109)
• Phoenix Singer, “Colonialism, Two-Spirit Identity, and the Logics of White Supremacy”
- “Colonialism as practiced by Western culture is used to erase traditional non-binary roles of gender orientation and systems of sexuality, i.e. the Two-Spirit. Identifying as Two-Spirit becomes not just a traditional way of expressing Indigenous beliefs of gender orientation and sexuality but a political identity in resistance of colonialism. Through the use of inherently violent, assimilative measures, these traditions of the Two-Spirit in Indigenous societies are lost in many of our communities and are replaced by the Western gender binary and spectrum of sexual orientation. As this paper will show, this plays into the colonialist logic of white supremacy and how it relates to the Indigenous body, colonizing Two-Spirit identity.” (p.g. 1)
- “When Europeans came to Turtle Island, much of their culture, their ideals, their beliefs and institutions came with them through the continued centuries of settler-colonialism. Building their own nation upon this land, they were able to more permanently construct and impose their culture upon others. The Western colonization of the Americas brought forth many institutions which sought to erase and displace Indigenous cultural traditions and beliefs. Through the use of violence, forced assimilation, demonization of Indigenous beliefs and then appropriation of Indigenous culture, the subjugation of Native sexuality and gender roles have continued unquestioned in the minds of the settler and of our own people. It can be said and will be shown, that the Western binary is a system of oppression and repression and is actively a form of institutional violence against the Two-Spirit. This is all connected to the idea of white supremacy and domination over Indigenous bodies and beliefs, of colonization of our very selves. Thus an analysis of colonization and white supremacy is not complete without an approach towards Two-Spirit identity in our own communities.” (p.g. 1-2)
- “Before the colonization of this land, there were as many as six traditional gender orientation roles among numerous tribes. However, due to boarding schools erasing these traditions […] the Christianized related the existence of the Two-Spirit as sin… The Western Gender Binary is thus superimposed upon all cultures and their histories seen through the gaze of not only male dominance but a male/female paradigm that does not account for the existence of third, fourth, fifth and even more varieties of non-male/female expressions and identities. […] The Western Gender Binary does not see the Two-Spirit, the Western Gender Binary only sees a Man acting in ‘Unmanly’ ways or a Woman acting in ‘Unwomanly’ ways… The influence of Western culture on the erasure of Indigenous “queer” and Two-Spirit peoples has created a system of sexual assault, homophobia and transphobia used against our peoples, entangled with the history of colonialism. As part of the settler mentality, we can see these actions as colonial violence against the Two-Spirit and are also the results of genocide. To reiterate previous statements, the Western gender binary is a form of superimposed and universalized colonialism upon Indigenous bodies and minds.” (p.g. 5-6)
• Anonymous Author, “The Problematic Ideology of Natural Sex” (2016)
- “…we have ignorance of the long and violent history of the imposition of the Ideology of Natural Sex under European colonialism. The genius behind framing an ideology as ‘natural’ is that its history erases itself. Why would anyone study the history of something natural and eternal? We don’t study the history of covalent bonds in chemistry or cumulus clouds in meteorology. And so we don’t study the spread of European binary sex ideology under colonialism. If you do, you’ll find that all over the world before European colonialism there were societies recognizing three, four, or more sexes and allowing people to move between them—but that’s a subject for another post. Suffice it to say that societies were violently restructured under European colonialism in many ways, and one of those was the stamping out of nonbinary gender categories and stigmatization of those occupying them as perverts.”
to say that nonbinary genders don’t exist would not only be scientifically incorrect and historically inaccurate, but it would be to say that the cultural traditions of these people are invalid, and only the white european standard of gender, which was forced onto indigenous people via genocide and forced assimilation, is “correct”. trying to enforce western concepts of gender on other cultures is an act of blatant racism and imperialism, and presumes that one group somehow knows more about the human condition.
i’ll leave with this: principle 3 of The Yogyakarta Principles on The Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity reads, “A person of diverse sexual orientation and gender identities shall enjoy legal capacity in all aspects of life. Each person’s self-defined sexual orientation and gender identity is integral to their personality and is one of the most basic aspects of self-determination, dignity and freedom”.
neither gender nor biological sex is innate, binary, or a scientific reality in any way, and the vast majority of biologists, scientists, doctors, psychologists, historians and anthropologists have been debunking these ignorant claims for decades and proving that both of these concepts are socially constructed. since gender as completely subjective, nonbinary genders have existed since the dawn of human civilization, even dating back to mesopotamia, the VERY FIRST human society. there are many countries today where there are officially more than two genders recognized, and there are multiple languages that are entirely gender-neutral. the gender binary is an entirely european theory based on a complete lack of understanding of science, and was forced on the world via colonialism, violence, and genocide. saying that nonbinary genders aren’t real is an act of transphobia, racism, and imperialism, and is the same as saying that thousands of cultures, personal experiences, and entire societal structures throughout history are not real, which makes no sense. it is part of human nature to not fit in a neat binary.
but you know, curse those special snowflakes, or whatever.
