Gender

[Leila Raven]

Recently someone I might let me know I introduced them to the term pansexual, that they had before only been familiar with the term bisexual. They were curious why I used the term over the term bisexual when there are only two genders... So I wrote a very brief reply about the fact that actually there are more than two genders. Gender duality is a social construct, not a biological one.

Here is my response to him, it's brief, but I thought I'd blog it anyways:

Actually more than two genders.. most societies have recognized at least three. There are besides XY and XX chromosome pairs, XO, XXY, XXXY, XYY, and other combinations.

There are also people born hermaphroditic with various combinations of male and female parts.

There are people born with all kinds of combinations of chromosomes and genitalia.

There are people who simply identify their soul/spirit as one gender when their body is the opposite...

Gender in fact comes in many different forms. Our society downplays the statistics of this, but the percentage of people who are not strictly all male, or all female, is quite high.

Native populations and other cultures have often referred to a 'third' gender, but in fact, there are really many genders with gender existing in many forms.

In our western modern society this has become paramount to taboo with Dr.'s over the decades assigning sexes to babies and maintaining the illusion of gender duality. The reality.. is many people don't fit in those boxes, and are ostracized, hiding their authentic gender identities from the world... sad, but true.

One of the many illusions of social constructs created around us.

People may identify as transgender, intersex, gender fluid, and many more labels that have been adopted by people living outside of the gender duality illusion.

This a very short, brief and incomplete picture of the topic, but it's a good start for people new to the concept of exploring gender outside of dualism.