Originally posted 2021-02-06 14:49:58.
Many people are confused by the claim, widely accepted today, that there are multiple genders. In fact, this has even been enshrined in law in some countries.
However, this feels wrong. We intuitively know that it’s a lie. And of course, it is. But explaining why and how the lie is made is not so easy, partly because most of us never consider this, or even gender at all. Some people think that gender is the same as sex; which it is not. So let me explain.
The first clue can be found by studying one of the many lists of the ‘available genders’. To begin with, these all say that an individual can pick their gender and even invent a new one, if he were to find that his particular mix of weirdness were not already catered for. Or, we can mix then and be what — bi-gender? Tri-gender? Poly-gender? Or maybe just ‘gender fluid’ and float from one to the other like a will o’ the wisp?
A plethora of ‘genders’
Then, look at the list of genders itself; I only include the first eight in this list There are over 100. Rest assured, the remainder are just as airbrained.
Abimegender: a gender that is profound, deep, and infinite; meant to resemble when one mirror is reflecting into another mirror creating an infinite paradox
Adamasgender: a gender which refuses to be categorised
Aerogender: a gender that is influenced by your surroundings
Aesthetigender: a gender that is derived from an aesthetic; also known as videgender
Affectugender: a gender that is affected by mood swings
Agender: the feeling of no gender/absence of gender or neutral gender
Agenderflux: being mostly agender except having small shifts towards other genders making them demigenders (because of the constancy of being agender)
And my personal favourite:
Alexigender: a gender that is fluid between more than one gender but the individual cannot tell what those genders are
(For more crackheadery, see
http://genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com/gender/
retrieved 13/02/2017. If it’s still there.)
Do these remind you of gender even remotely? Do they tell you anything useful about the person described at all? Do they give any indication of that person’s sexuality or orientation? No, they don’t.
They describe personality types, not genders. And that’s being generous. Mostly they just look like made-up trendiness.
Personality is not a function of gender. There are kind women and cruel ones, passionate men and reserved ones. What this looks like, perhaps is a list of archetypes, but expressed in terms of personal feelings, rather than behaviours. But even that does not really capture the apparently deliberate obscurantism. What, exactly, does this mean?
Vapogender: a gender that sort of feels like smoke; can be seen on a shallow level but once you go deeper, it disappears and you are left with no gender and only tiny wisps of what you thought it was
At first I thought that this had to be a hoax, so I did some more digging. But no such luck. For example, we have
xenogender: A gender that cannot be contained by human understandings of genders
To call that absurd seems a significant understatement.
Jung
All this seems to follow a misunderstood Jungian psychology, seen through a glass very dimly. This is much as how the now infamous and discredited Myers-Briggs profiling system works.
Gender, let us be quite clear, is not personality. It might be true that certain behavioural characteristics are more common in males than females or vice versa, but we do not know whether that is due to sex or gender or something else. It could be cultural; indeed, innate and cultural influences meld in the formation of the individual such that it is practically impossible to tease them out, something which occupies greatly the minds of psychologists — who, never forget, are subject to exactly the same influences and biases as the rest of us.
We can be quite sure that the so-called multiple genders do not actually exist at all and that the ‘multiple gender’ fallacy is just that, a canard, another politicised social identity that actually has nothing to do with either sex or sexuality but is instead a kind of badge that actually signifies membership of an anti-establishmentarian group.
It would be good if the children grew out of it.
See also Sex Sexuality and Gender are real