@Solifuge: I like that system, although I think it's unwieldy. Think about it this way: for people to understand "Androgyne Trans-Female, with a Gyno-Masculophilic Sexual Orientation" they'd have to understand all elements of that and how they fit into the broader system. Therefore they'd have to be using the full terminology to describe everyone. It doesn't help you if the terminology exists but nobody uses it, because you'd still be constantly explaining it.
The fact is, the most common terms to describe people's gender/sex and orientation are shorthand which describe most people. Even though you can iterate all the possible combinations of terms in your system, that doesn't mean that all combinations make sense, or that each combination is proportionally equal.
People will still end up using the shorthand descriptions because they're convenient to describing the vast majority of people. You can't expect e.g. a "straight male" to be referred to as a "Man Male with Gyno-Feminophilic Sexual Orientation", because people will just flat-out refuse to use that terminology. And if they're not using the "correct" terminology for the vast majority of people, then they're not going to understand the terminology when it's applied to niche minorities.
Also: if all terms a described in terms of a male/female spectrum you haven't really separated from a gender-binary concept.
But I simply can't imagine a gender that is not connected in some way to the male-female "anchors." Cisgender, transgender are each on an anchor. Genderlessness isn't even on the graph, it's not a gender. Everything else I've seen is like "demifemale" or "hemidemisemifemale", which is "halfway from one to the other."
Or if gender itself is a combination of multiple traits that go from F to M, and if you have mostly M then you're male, then we're still stuck to the F/M anchors.
Agreed. Imo gender is the mental/societal aspect of the physical sex, and you only get male/female/intersex in human bodies. Gender has to follow the same spectrum otherwise we're doing stupid tumblr things like identifying as pudding. Though that would be tasty.
Reelya, I'm not 100% sure I follow you on why people need to know the whole system to understand any one part of it, or why that's any different than it already is? The idea was that we get 1 step more specific than Man/Male and Woman/Female without abandoning their existing meanings, and reform "Gay/Straight/Bi" to work for non-binary folks. The medical-sounding long form words were intentionally clinical, since they describe the state of someone's body or mind. I agree that it needs shorthand words for some new concepts (gynophilic and androphilic are already the terms we're using for non-binary Sexual Orientations), but old shorthand words still work in that system. For example, "Gay Guy" would apply to any Androphilic Man, regardless of their body's Sex (Male, Female, etc.) or their additional preferences (say if they're into Girly Males and are Andro-Feminophilic).
For the "also" part, and in response to Caz and DL...
When thinking about reforming our ideas about gender and sex, I think it's important to keep it relevant to the average person, and to build on ideas they already know. There's a reason that singular "They" is the most common pronoun-of-choice for androgynous or genderqueer folks, while earlier attempts to use "Ze/Hir" didn't take off as well outside of LGBT folks and allies. It's similar to the reason Esperanto never took off as a constructed language either. People prefer to use tools they're familiar with, including language. Also, ideas need to relate to something concrete or important, and for people we're evaluating as patients or as partners, that's often our bodies and our behavior.
Male and Female are good anchors, which is why I use them to describe Physical Sex. Feminine and Masculine are less solid anchors, since they're cultural ideals and vary from person to person. Still, it helps to have a word to separate the Masculine Gender Role (Man) from the XY or Androgenic Body (Male), and the Feminine Gender Role (Woman) from the XX or Estrogenic Body (Female).
Speaking of which, I do think it's relevant to doctors and potential partners to expand beyond Male, Female, and Intersex as definitions for bodies. We have both Primary (genetic) and Secondary (hormonal) sex characteristics as people, and trans and intersex people may have Secondary traits which don't match their Primary ones due to hormones or surgery. Working off
that mess I posted earlier, here's some charts that define the kinds of Physical Sexes there are, without distancing it from ideas people are familiar with. I'm skipping a Gender Chart since they're arbitrary, but there's an Orientation Chart that sort of covers it too.
Also they're color coded by their relationship to the binary, because I love y'all too. :Y
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Topic: Gender/sexuality etc. - What Even Is A Gender Anyway (Read 143443 times)