There is a joke, originating online in the 2010s, that birds aren’t real. As the joke goes, birds are actually a conspiracy to surveil the population with government drones, and there is no such thing as a bird in the animal kingdom. Were you to cut one open with a knife, you’d find circuits and motors instead of flesh and blood.
The “birds aren’t real” conspiracy theory is funny because it’s easy to disprove, and yet it plays into the paranoia and justification-seeking of real conspiracy theories. If you don’t want to believe that a thing is real, who’s going to prove you wrong?
Thanks to the popularity of this joke, serious sources have popped up declaring that birds are in fact real, and providing scientific evidence. This is also the case for other topics of contentious reality. We have conclusively proven that Santa Claus isn’t real, but narwhals are. And that’s because people care about these topics and want to find the truth. But do we have scientific sources on whether all animals are real?
As of writing this (27/12/2023), there are no relevant Google results for the query “Are horses real?”. There is a wikipedia article on horses as the top result, but it doesn’t say horses are real. It simply mentions them and does not call them fictional or mythical. Would this be compelling evidence for a skeptic? If someone was of the opinion that horses aren’t real, would this convince them that sufficient scientific inquiry has been made into proving the reality of horses?
I found a similar lack of Google results for walruses, bees, dogs, clouds, houses, computers, ants, cans, cars, sand, iron, and by the time I got to iron I decided I had enough evidence to make my point.
Interestingly, I did find results discussing the reality of mountains and flowers. Because some people think mountains are giant tree stumps, and some people decorate their offices with fake flowers. There are also biologists claiming that fish aren’t real on taxonomic grounds. This is because taxonomy is garbage pseudoscience, and I may elaborate on that in a future article.
My point, and the reason I talk about birds, is that you will only find scientific evidence for something if somebody cares. Ten years ago, nobody cared if birds were real. Then somebody came up with a good joke, and people started putting in the work to get to the truth. Nobody bothered asking if birds were real a decade ago, it wasn’t a question anybody could take seriously enough to research. Professional-grade research requires grants, work, time, peer-review, and publication. All of these require that somebody actually care. And if only a few people care, then the best research you will get is amateurish, small-scale, and unpublished.
Gender
Let’s talk about how many genders there are. The most narrow-minded estimate is 2. It’s also the one with the least scientific evidence. The most open-minded estimate is infinity, but if you prefer to deal in real numbers, then it’s just over 8 billion currently, but set to grow in the coming years. Various traditionalist interpretations often say somewhere in the realm of 2–18. You can thank Thailand for that 18, it’s the highest traditionalist number I’m aware of. Jewish law comes in at a respectable second place with 8 genders. Medical texts and online memes frequently assert a number in the several dozens. Personally My favourite middle-of-the-road estimate is 10,000, because it’s a high enough number that nobody is likely to ever learn them all and therefore have grounds to exclude someone over it, but it’s still realistically low if we assume that cis men or women are all the same gender (this is false, but this assumption is helpful for some applications).
There are estimated to be 8.7 million surviving species of animal on earth by the CK-12 foundation. Other estimates vary, because we haven’t discovered all of them yet, but they’re usually in that neighbourhood or lower.
That means there could be 1000 times more genders than animal species. And as we discussed above, nobody is trying to prove the existence of most of these animal species. In largest part because most of them haven’t been discovered yet, but also for the cultural reason that nobody cares.
And yet some people expect there to be a record and a scientific trial conclusively proving the existence of every gender identity.
The Point
If you’ve been linked this article in reply to assertions that a particular gender isn’t real because a scientist didn’t write a paper on it, it’s probably because the person showing you this article thinks you’re a ridiculous nincompoop. In the interest of satisfying your purported scientific curiosity (which totally isn’t concern trolling and excuse-making to attack a trans person), here are some sources on the existence of xenogenders and the number of them:
https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Xenogender
https://lgbtqia.fandom.com/wiki/Xenogender
https://saltyworld.net/what-are-xenogenders-the-evolving-self-identity-landscape/
https://teentalk.ca/learn-about/gender-identity/
https://www.healthline.com/health/different-genders
https://www.medicinenet.com/what_are_the_72_other_genders/article.htm
https://www.sexualdiversity.org/edu/1111.php
Yes, this is intended to be source vomit. There are a LOT of sources on the existence of genders beyond male and female, and you damn well better have a good excuse to say that sources like Healthline and MedicineNet are wrong.
In these sources we saw figures on the range of 60–100+, and none of them claimed they had an exhaustive list of genders. Why should all of these 100, 10,000, or 8 billion genders have thorough scientific sources for their existence, when we don’t even have sources that horses exist?
Nobody feels the need to prove that horses exist, because there is no problem solved by the answer to this question. Nobody has anything to gain or lose from the issue. In fact, this is also the case for birds, and it’s precisely why the bird conspiracy theory is funny. It’s funny because who cares? Why would anyone go to the effort of fabricating the existence of birds from nothing?
And why indeed would anyone go to the effort of fabricating the existence of a gender from nothing? There is nothing to gain from fabricating a gender, and you have nothing to gain by denying a gender. On scientific grounds, the question of whether a particular gender exists just doesn’t matter, and that’s why nobody cares. It only matters when you decide to attack trans people.
But…
There are two genders, whose existence a significant number of people actually care about. Whose fabrication stands to benefit certain people and groups. Whose denial stands to benefit certain political groups and individuals. These two genders are man and woman.
Proving the existence of these two genders benefits the patriarchy and organisations which use patriarchal control. It also benefits reactionary sexist and transphobic political parties. Denying their existence benefits social justice advocates, feminists, and posthumanist philosophers. As well as a huge number of oppressed women and a moderate number of incel men who are oppressing themselves.
To date, there has been no scientific evidence, to the standard demanded by opponents of xenogenders, that the man or woman genders exist. The reasons for this are twofold:
First and most obviously, the standards of proof demanded by transphobes are unreasonable. We won’t be able to look into another person’s brain with scientific instruments and see gender for a long time. Not even fMRI is precise or reliable enough for this purpose. And it may well be that our methodologies for attempting to read the brain with machines are completely wrong in the first place, as Donald Hoffman asserts.
And second: Gender is a social construct. It’s made up. It’s magic. It’s real because you believe in it, you’ll never find its existence if you begin a skeptic. You will only find evidence for gender if you first choose to believe in it. The evidence for gender is a paradox. You can’t bootstrap it with science.
So why would you hold an impossible standard for any gender?
