Fourth gender
[ID: A pride flag. It is a red circle on dark purple ground. On the circle 4. Is written in white. END]
What is fourth gender?
Fourth gender is an old timey label for afab queer people. You may have heard of the book "Berlin's Third Sex" by Magnus Hirschfeld. Well there's a fourth sex too! Sex and gender are the same word in German so you may also have seen it translated as third gender. I have read before that third gender is a term used in Black American communities, I know nothing about that and am not speaking for that community, please do keep that in mind when continuing reading.
The concepts of third and fourth sex/gender, as I'm understanding them, go back to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' (*1825- † 1895) concepts of sex, sexuality, and gender. Ulrichs was an early queer activist who pushed for the recognition of queerness as a natural trait that you are born with. She conceptualized same gender attraction as an intersex condition, where the part of you that feels attraction is of the "opposite" sex. She broke your sex down into three parts, your body, your love and your soul where all of these can fall on a spectrum of male, female or both. People of male body, who were female in their love and/or soul became conceptualized as being born a third sex person. People of female body, who were male in their love and/or soul, as fourth sex. If you were both male and female in any of these regards you would be categorized as a double nature by Ulrichs. As far as I can tell Hirschfeld went on using the concepts of third and fourth sex but not double nature, which makes it a bit more of an obscure term as he is the more well known one of the two! I have read more of Ulrichs' works than Hirschfeld's though so don't quote me on this.
As you can see quite a bit of this understanding is outdated, but quite a bit is still part of our culture! The born this way narrative endured, but the reasoning is no longer that being queer is an intersex condition. The split of body (sex), love (attraction) and soul (gender) is something that we have now emphasized more, but that was already there. Of course many cis lesbians and bisexuals strongly object to their attraction to women being seen as male and that's good! But I think many sapphics and trans people also do view it as part of our gender and our bodies and I really like that this label highlights how interwoven and inseparable our body, sexuality and gender really are!
So I thought I'd bring this back maybe, and yes, while the fourth sex in it's original usage may have been mainly for lesbians, straight trans men, and everyone in between, I translated it as fourth gender here for a reason! We are not 19th century sex philosophers here. I want this label to be open to for all women, sapphics, intersex, nonbinary and trans people who vibe with it regardless of assigned gender. The reason I like these old labels is, the ambiguity of them, the way they connect me to my history, but also to my current community. And my current community is full of bisexual nonbinary trans women.
What does the flag mean?
The white 4. on the circle is just because this is the fourth gender flag. You can use any four you want here, I just chose the amiri font because it seemed fairly neutral. I picked white as the color of nonbinary and transitioning people, but it also just looks good.
The red circle is meant to be a planet. Both Venus and Mars are fairly red planets, and red symbolizes both masculinity and feminity. The circle shape is also meant to call back to the intersex flag to symbolize intersex people and because the concept was originally seen as a form of intersexedness. It's here to symbolize womanhood, manhood, intersex people, butches and femmes. Also communism ;)
The purple/lavender background is the color of queerness, sapphics and feminism! It's also space for our little red planet to be in. ❤️
