Why There Are As Many Genders As People
A rightist talking point against gender identity is that only two genders exist. Class enemies come to Pride or other events meant to promote inclusion to ask thinly veiled manipulative questions like “How many genders are there” to try and win points with other reactionaries. There is so much to unpack that many people are not prepared for when they are asked at these events randomly, so I think I should put the issue to rest about how many genders exist.
Obviously most living things tend to fall into one of the two biological sexes at birth, and gender is based off of roles and cultural associations that are given to each of these sexes, usually to divide labor and assign tasks of childcare or domestic work to one sex or the other, with most favoring women to care for children due to their ability to multitask. When rightists say there are only two genders, this assumes that every person and every society in the world has had the same binary ideas of gender without variation, or that third genders have never existed or are somehow invalid.
Many arguments against non-binary genders existing independently from male or female come from theological arguments and as such can be discarded. Many societies across the world have independently developed unique gender identities that fall outside of conventional male and female genders that were created in the west to fit into European family structure. The Indian subcontinent has a gender known as Hijra which comes from Hinduism and is deeply connected to a goddess that is said to choose them at birth. Native American societies had a gender known as the two-spirit.
Even besides this, we have to keep in mind that because ideas about gender and gender roles are social constructs and vary from society to society, there are at least two genders for every culture that assigned different roles to them. This is not even counting every individual person’s perceptions or ideas about gender which can be different from every other person’s conception of it. Ideas we have about gender can even change with age, with some things being considered masculine at younger ages that later become considered feminine at later life stages. Gender is almost like a religion in the way that personal interpretation of it is the basis of everyone’s involvement in it regardless of how much the society tries to make everyone’s understanding conform to ideals.
However, we don’t even need to go deeply into everyone’s minds to see where the idea of gender becomes muddy. Different people have different amounts of estrogen and testosterone, and since these are characteristics of gender, does having different amounts of them make some more or less feminine and/or masculine? Some people seem to think so as athletes have been accused of being transgender for having naturally higher levels of testosterone, with rightists claiming it gives the woman an unfair advantage in sports. I will not get into that situation here because I can only deal with one disaster at a time, but it shows just how the entire worldview reactionaries have created does not conform to any science or even practicality. Class enemies operate as a hate group and it’s obvious to anyone who does even the most basic research into their ideas.
The next time someone shows up to Pride and asks you how many genders there are, the correct answer is that there are even more genders than people, as every person has their ideas of what it means to be masculine, feminine, or non-binary even if they are based on the same archetypes. Just like other ideas, personal interpretation is so varied that it’s unlikely for any two people to think the same thing.