How Many Genders Are There?
Just for the record
The political climate lately has made the issue of gender a bit contentious. This doesn’t mean that there’s any good cause for confusion about the actual number of genders, which is pretty easy to establish. I’m writing this here less to be enlightening than to make very clear my stance on the subject, because I find myself repeating these remarks at least once a season to audiences ranging in size from one to about fifteen. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, people take things philosophically. More often than not, they gesticulate angrily and gnash their teeth. But they never actually say anything meaningful, other than to explain to me in their own special way that simple facts—whether grammatical, cultural, mathematical, or biological—trigger the symptoms of their NOS mental illnesses. I’m just telling them facts, but I feel like I’m channeling Darth Vader for the emotionally devastated reaction they give when I tell them to search their feelings, because they know what I’m telling them is true.
This is my way of warning you that you may not like the number I’m about to give you. Personal experience tells me that somehow, for some reason, you may feel as though the universe is conspiring against you, and frankly rather than sifting through a comment section filled with tears and rage I’m just going to tell you that you might be happier watching reruns of Spongebob than knowing the actual number of genders there are.
And to be fair, those who know me well realize that I will listen to rebuttals! I will listen to counterarguments! But I’d rather not listen to angry, tearful ranting; please see a mental health specialist rather than taking out your problems on Substack.
Gender: The Definition
Now that the little ones are safety out of the room we can get down to business. My favorite dictionary growing up was always the American Heritage Dictionary, and the illustrious 5th Edition defines gender as:
A grammatical category, often designated as male, female, or neuter, used in the classification of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs that may be arbitrary or based on characteristics such as sex or animacy and that determines agreement with or selection of modifiers, referents, or grammatical forms.
The fact of being classified as belonging to such a category.
Either of the two divisions, designated female and male, by which most organisms are classified on the basis of their reproductive organs and functions; sex.1
Gender and biological sex are not really the same thing. One is cultural, the other biological; but clearly the two are related. And already we see the number “two,” but we also see three enumerated categories: male, female, neuter. The tension between these numbers can be resolved by looking carefully at what a division or category is.
An Interlude
It may help if I illustrate what I mean with a story. You see, a friend of mine, Jack Jackson (not his real name), was standing on the corner the other day, when a white Mercedes screeched to a halt beside him. The doors opened, and three people rushed out of the car. The first one, a girl, cussed him out, while the second, a man, grabbed him by his jacket. He didn’t get a good look at the third person, but whoever it was stole his cell phone and grabbed his wallet. As soon as they got that, the three of them immediately darted back into the car and sped away.
When Jack talked to the police later, they were pretty helpful at first. But (and I am not making this up) when he told them about the getaway car the cops started hassling him about it. According to him, the conversation went something like this.
Jack: “So is there anything you can do?”
Police: “That may depend on you, and the information you can give us. You say they pulled up in a Mercedes, is that correct?”
Jack: “Yes.”
Police: “Did you get the license number?”
Jack: “No, everything happened so fast that—”
Police: “That’s OK, can you at least tell us the color of the car?”
Jack: “White.”
Police: “White isn’t a color.”
Jack: “Wait—uh… What?”
Police: “Try to focus. What color was the car?”
Jack: “The car was white.”
Police: “No, sorry, white isn’t a color.”
Police Officer #2: “White is all colors; is that what you mean—the car was all colors?”
Jack: “What, like a rainbow? Look, I’m telling you, the car was white! Just white!”
At this point the officers exchanged knowing glances, and (I am still not making this up) they told Jack he could go down to the police department and check the lost and found for his wallet and see if it turned up. Realizing this would get him nowhere, he instead moved to France and started a lucrative career as a mollusc therapist.
Now I realize it may seem that this is the end of the story. But (and I am still not making this up) while in France, Jack was helping one of the molluscs, a lovely little garden snail, work through some childhood issues relating to God. It seemed that the snail had trouble with the idea of the Trinity, and some psychological problems were interwoven with the snails’ father and mother, as well as a Godparent of indeterminate gender. Due to doctor-patient confidentiality, Jack couldn’t give me the actual name of the snail, but he relayed the conversation to me in detail, and it went very much like this:
Jack: “So maybe it would help if we talked a bit about religion.”
Snail: “I don’t know… but I’m willing to if you think it matters.”
Jack: “I do, I do. Genuinely. So tell me, what religion are you now?”
Snail: “Atheist.”
Jack: “I’m sorry, maybe you didn’t understand the question? I asked, what is your religion.”
Snail: “I’m an atheist.”
Jack: “That isn’t a religion—I really need you to help me out here.”
Snail: (getting flustered) “But I told you—”
Jack: “Atheist isn’t a religion. An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in God. Atheism is merely the absence of religion.”
Snail: “Look, you just asked what my religion was, and—”
Jack: “I’m sorry, I’m not going to be able to help you progress until you’re ready to work with me on this.”
Fortunately it seems that everything turned out all right for Jack; the snail discontinued therapy with him on amicable terms, migrated to the United States, and started a local chapter of Atheists Anonymous. Unfortunately, not long afterwards, the snail was tragically run over by three unscrupulous people in a white Mercedes, and this is where our story ends.
The Moral of The Story
A good story has a good moral, and the moral for this story is this: Even though some people might insist that the definition of “color” excludes shades like white or black, and even if someone might insist that the definition of “religion” excludes stances like atheism or agnosticism, clearly, to say that a car is white is a good answer to the question “What color is that car?” To say you are an atheist is a good answer to the question “What religion are you?”
Those kinds of answers aren’t ungrammatical, or irrelevant, like “three” would be. Right? “What religion are you?” “Three.” Doesn’t work there. “Three” doesn’t give the information the question is getting at. Similarly you couldn’t say “atheist” to the car question, or “white” to the religion question. The fact that you can usefully and cooperatively say “atheist” in answer to a religion question, and “white” in answer to a color question, gives pretty good evidence that white is the same kind of thing as green or brown, and an atheist is the same kind of person as a follower of Allah, or Bastet, or Nerites.
Now Look, Are You Ever Going To Stop All This Snail Nonsense and Tell Us How Many Genders There Are, Already?
Well let’s just be systematic about this. Definition 1 from the dictionary above has gender as “[a] grammatical category, often designated as male, female, or neuter, used in the classification of nouns,” etc. Well, you’re reading this in English, and English has three genders: male, female, and neuter (or neither). So, three.
If you don’t like that, OK, definition 2 isn’t much help, it’s just “being classified as belonging to such a category.” But finally we have definition 3, which is what many of you, I suspect, are after: “Either of the two divisions, designated female and male, by which most organisms are classified on the basis of their reproductive organs and functions; sex.” So here at last with three we have “two” as our answer, and what a relief it is!
…Until we realize something about categories, definitions, and snails.
You see, there’s something I didn’t tell you about Jack and his patient above. Clever readers may have noticed that I was playing the pronoun game with the snail, just like college students who don’t want to admit to their parents over the phone that they’re dating someone a little bit different from the kind of person they usually went out with back home. But maybe it will help if I repeat one last conversation Jack happened to tell me he had with the snail towards the start of their therapy. It went like this:
Jack: “I’m not French myself, so it’s difficult for me to tell by the way you’re dressed—what’s your gender? Are you a male or female?”
Snail: “Both. Or really, neither. Snails are hermaphrodites.”
Jack: “No problem; I’ll just put you down here as other.”
Right away we can see that words like “both,” “neither,” “other,” or “none” are good answers to the question, “What gender are you?” And because they’re good answers, they are the same kind of thing as male and female. Are they distinct answers? Clearly they’re distinct from male and female, but are they distinct from one another? No, not really. We have two well-defined categories, male and female, and an undifferentiated space surrounding them. The fact that the other category is an ill-defined place where nothing in specific comes to mind goes to show that culturally speaking, we do understand that there’s something significant about two biological sexes—it’s just that not everyone fits within them.
And that’s the way it is: Most organisms may be classified as sexually male or female by their reproductive organs, just as definition 3 gives: “Either of the two divisions, designated female and male, by which most organisms are classified on the basis of their reproductive organs and functions; sex.”
But what about the others? What about the hermaphrodites? What about the transgendered? What about someone with XXY chromosomes, nonfunctioning genitals, broad shoulders, discernible breasts, and a lovely mustache, who goes by Kai (zhe/zher)? Does this person not exist?
In fact, according to WebMD, there are numerous biologically indeterminate or intersex individuals born every year:
In short, intersex individuals may have chromosomes, genitals, or internal reproductive organs that don’t fit into the typical male or female category or may possess characteristics of both male and female sexes…
Being intersex isn’t common. It’s estimated that around 2% of individuals worldwide fit into the intersex category.
This rate seems rather high—presumably they’re talking about many individuals who could be called male or female, but are somewhat borderline. The Intersex Society of North America, surprisingly (but more convincingly) claims the number is lower, saying, “If you ask experts at medical centers how often a child is born so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in, the number comes out to about 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births.” In other words, around 0.05% of babies are hard enough to gender that experts are called in.
More interestingly, they cite an article from the American Journal of Human Biology that listed a variety of conditions; across samples, the proportion of births with non-XX, non-XY chromosomes was 0.193%. The proportion with late-onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a broad range of conditions often contributing to various intersex outcomes, was higher, at 1.5%, while true hermaphrodites were found to be extremely rare, at 0.0012%. Somewhere in between these percentages, we find the proportion of living, breathing people who are themselves somewhere in between.
As a physicist, I very much appreciated their check at the end:
The approach used to estimate intersexuality, at all levels, from the chromosomal and hormonal to the anatomical, is plagued by the uncertainties inherent in the medical literature. Therefore, we derived a second type of estimate from statistics on the fre- quencies of cryptorchidism (undescended testes) and hypospadias (the incomplete closure around the urethra of the embryonic genital folds). These estimates serve as an order of magnitude check of the preceding calculations…
If… only medium and severe hypospadias represent deviations from a dimorphic ideal, then the incidence calculated from cases of hypospadias would be 0.5797/ 1,000, or 0.05%.2
Clearly the exact proportion of people who can’t really be called biologically male or female depends on how strict the definition of male and female are; personally, I find 2% seems high, and something in the neighborhood of 0.05% feels about right as the proportion of people out there who are truly and genuinely other than male or female.
But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter how many or how few other-gendered people there are out there. Saying there are only two genders is grammatically wrong for English speakers, and culturally wrong as well, given the many people there are wandering around claiming a non-binary gender. But most importantly, it’s biologically wrong. The claim that there are only two genders tacitly tells every intersex person out there, “You don’t exist,” or more poignantly, “You shouldn’t exist.”
If we want to say “there are two genders, male and female” that’s fine if it’s meant in the same way that we might say “there are two political parties in the US, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.” It’s true that there are Republicans, and there are Democrats. But saying “there are only two political parties in the US” is wrong, in just the same way that saying “there are only two genders” is wrong. There are Libertarians, Greens, and others—always so many, many others.
By the way, we aren’t the first to realize there were others. The indigenous Hawaiians, the Incans, the Sakalavas of Madagascar, and others have long recognized a third category of people who didn’t fit into the other two.3
Frankly, though, I don’t know how well it works to explicitly define a third gender as anything besides “other,” because as soon as you do, then there will be an “other” besides the three you’ve defined. Mathematically speaking, the existence of the third gender is a natural result of defining male and female in terms that are merely disjoint, rather than with one being the true compliment of the other. In other words, to get only two genders, you could define female however you liked, but male would then have to be simply “not female;” or if you preferred, you could define male however you liked, but then you couldn’t define female in any terms besides “not male.” The fact that we see a distinct picture of male and female in our mind when we close our eyes entails that anyone who doesn’t fit the pictures lies outside of both sets, in the wide world of otherness.
What To Do?
The solution in this case is pleasantly simple: Let’s be clear that the right answer to the question “How many genders are there?” is not “It’s complicated,” or “White,” or “Atheist.” The number of genders is three: Male, Female, and Other. That’s all. As soon as the Woke get bored of thinking they’re morally superior for being able to rattle off a list of umpteen “genders,” the conservatives will be able stop screaming about their favorite number being two-and-only-two, and I can get back to wearing black lipstick and nail polish in peace.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2011). Gender. In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed).
Blackless, M., Charuvastra, A., Derryck, A., Fausto‐Sterling, A., Lauzanne, K., & Lee, E. (2000). How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis. American Journal of Human Biology: The Official Journal of the Human Biology Association, 12(2), 151-166.
Bader, L. (2014). Third Genders? New Concept? Or Old? The evolution of human sexuality. Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://sites.psu.edu/evolutionofhumansexuality/2014/02/19/third-genders-new-concept-or-old/
On a more serious note, you might be interested in Slavoj Zizek's remarks on this topic. It's impossible to give a tl;dr on someone like Zizek, but consider to begin with that gender is a form of category-anxiety, and attempting to dispel this by multiplying the categories is fruitless, if not insane. "Be a real man" Is supposed to be anxiety-provoking, that's the point. It's aspirational. Saying "Oh no thanks I'm actually a real zan" doesn't solve the problem unless 'zan' is entirely empty of meaning -- whatever a real zan is, you're probably failing to live up to it.
As Carl Sagan might have said, "billions and billions" 😉🙂
Think the issue is a matter of definitions -- which are somewhat arbitrary. Most people don't realize that Moses didn't bring the first dictionary down from Mt Sinai on tablets A through Z so they apparently "think" some/all qualify as gospel truth and not to changed except on peril to their immortal souls.
The fact of the matter is that definitions change all the time, and are often "purpose built". As you're apparently a physicist, you probably know that mathematics textbooks are absolutely littered with stipulative definitions. The point is that communication is impossible if we can't agree on what words mean. As Will Durant put it:
“ 'If you wish to converse with me,' said Voltaire, 'define your terms.' How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.”
And there is a great deal of merit in DEFINING "gender" to denote personalities and personality types -- whence the billions and billions. And similarly for DEFINING "male" & "female" to denote those with functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexLESS. While the sexes are usefully defined as a binary, that doesn't mean that those two categories are exhaustive -- harkening back to your religion analogy, atheists are "religion-less".
You in particular might have some interest in my Welcome post for some elaborations on those themes, particularly the section on Rationalized Gender:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/welcome