Unikum august 2019

KOMMENTAR
with concepts of gender-fluidity (“two-spirit”) that
would seem very unfamiliar to Western cultures.
And just as our conception of colours has evolved
over time, so have our conception of gender and
gender roles. Pink is female, right? And blue is
male? Wrong! Or at least it would have been
wrong up to half a century ago, when pink was
still considered a male colour and blue a female
one. Up until the 15th century, Europeans didn’t
even differentiate between boys and girls. All
children were called girls, irrespective of their
biology. And if they ever needed to differentiate,
male children would be called “knave girls” and
female ones would be called “gay girls”.10 The
word “boy” was apparently reserved for servants
or “churls”, which I’m not going to tell you what
means because I haven’t bothered looking it up.
I’ve thus far attempted to show that what we
associate with each gender breaks down under
any scrutiny. It varies over time and between
cultures, and there is so much variance between
individuals that no one would ever fit completely
into their assigned category even if they
were trying to. I mean, even the manliest man
ever, Nick Offerman, admits to crying often
and heavily, which is such a girly thing to do.
“But,” You say. “SCIENCE!”
Ok, imma stop you there, You. No one has EVER
operated with science when identifying someone’s
gender. You don’t dig in a woman’s pants
to check if she’s got a vagina before you agree
to refer to her as a “she”, and you don’t ask a
guy for a DNA test to check his chromosomes
before you’re comfortable calling him a man.
AND EVEN IF YOU DID, this is not as simple as
the likes of wannabe public intellectuals, like Ben
Shapiro and other idiots, want it to be. The “facts
over feelings” crowd are just being deliberately
obtuse and ignorant about the facts in order
to reaffirm their feelings. But let’s play their
game. I’m gonna put aside the fact that modern
medicine can sometimes make it impossible for
us to tell the difference between a trans person
and a cis person, and that some chicks do in fact
have dicks and like it that way. Let’s use Shapiro’s
dogwhistle of a term, “biological gender” –
which is using what chromosomes you have in
order to define gender. Well, congratulations,
Ben Shapiro, you’ve successfully shot yourself
in the ass and destroyed the gender binary!
Because humans don’t just operate with XX
and XY chromosomes.11 We have monosomy,
X or X0 (Turner syndrome). We have triple-X
syndrome of XXX, often referred to as “super-females”
or “meta-females” in part because
they’re generally taller other women. We even
have XXXX and XXXXX. Klinefelter syndrome is
XXY or XXXY or a XY/XXY mosaic. Oh, and lest
we forget, we also have the genotype XYY, aptly
named “XYY syndrome”. Who’d have guessed.
And sometimes the chromosomes are not the
what determines your physiology. Someone born
XY but with Complete Androgen Insensitivity
Syndrome – which means that your body does
not react to the presence of androgenic (i.e. male)
hormones – develops as what we would generally
call a woman, despite their XY chromosomes.
And this is just one of many conditions that go in
under the term “intersex” – people who are born
with sex characteristics that do not fit the typical
binary notions of male or female bodies.12
This isn’t even particularly rare. 1 in every
1’000 women are meta-females, and intersex
people are about 1,7% of the population,
which apparently makes it about as
common as having red hair (1-2%).13
And I could go on and on and on. And on. About
the problems with our popular conception of both
sex and gender. And on. Just as with the rainbow,
the CoRrEcT sCiEnTiFiC answer would depend
entirely on what question we started out with,
and even if there is one, it’ll be one that is unmanageable
and completely useless to us. And on.
How many genders are there? Just as with the
colours of the rainbow, the answer depends
entirely upon what we even mean by gender,
and the answer is going to depend entirely upon
the culture, the language, the time in history, the
individual etc. If you understand how difficult
it is to say how many genders there are in our
Rainbow, then you will understand how many
colours there are in our humans and why
putting down a Q.E.D. is nigh impossible. The
rainbow, which has long been used as a metaphor
for diversity in the LGBT+ community, can
thus serendipitously be reinvented in order to
talk about and understand gender diversity.
Gender is diverse and complicated. Personally, I
vote we toss the entire concept out the window,
but that’s likely not going to be possible any time
soon. Until then, let’s be excellent to each other
and let cultural and linguistic evolution run its
course. And when we’ve settled on whatever
and however many terms that’s linguistically
practical and non-exclusionary to use, we’ll use
‘em. Until then, would I recommend just referring
to everyone with a gender neutral “dude”.
TEKST: EMIL O. ESPELAND
AUGUST 2019 UNIKUM NR 6 27