How Many Genders are There Anyway?
The answer is “it depends,” but generally speaking it’s five.
I started writing this article as an academic paper, but I figured it might be useful to open it up to more general audiences, in part because there’s so much confusion about the nature of gender. While to truly understand gender, it’s important to understand what something I call “eidos,” I think I can explain a few points here.
An Eidos is a social role that divide societies into distinct groups which establish the way in which people interact with one another, and which are closely related to, but which are distinct from, biological separations. There are a number of eidoi that I mention in my initial paper on the topic, including gender and race. While all eidoi are influenced by our biology, they are not themselves biological. And as a result, the way biological characteristics in our species, present within one culture, can be very different from how they present in another culture.
Differences in Gender Norms
In the United States, there was a significant period of time where only two genders were accepted. There were very strict roles that males and females could fill, and there were no allowances that would be made for non-binary gender norms. But there are many different gender…
