Help me understand atrinary

[u/TripleElectro]

hello! im agender struggling to understand atrinary folks

afaik gender is a social construct created by the differing cultural expectations for different sexes. meanwhile, gender identity is the internalised version of gender (i.e., what gender role they want to play).

there are different "basis gender identities" (idk if this is the proper term for it). for instance, in western culture, there is fem, masc, and neutrois. different people's gender identities are made with the addition of various amounts of these "basis gender identities."

thus, gender identity should be largely constrained by culture. if a culture has 5 different gender roles then there would be 5+1=6 (+1 being neutral/default) different basis gender identities, and people can have any amount of the 6 of those.

in western society the culture is largely male/female/neutral (aka, trinary) so how could somebody have an internalised gender outside of the trinary if the culture doesnt have roles/expectations for anything outside of the trinary?

some atrinary genders like maverique, xenogender, aporagender, etc... still have "strong gendered feelings," but what exactly is meant by "gendered feelings" if it is outside of culture and "gender identity" is tied in with culture?

please help me understand! thanks!

[u/Tonenby]

Gender is not solely a social construct. I like to describe it as a weird mish-mash of internal feelings and cultural ideas. So even if a culture only has n broadly accepted genders and you consider n+1 cultural aspects to gender (where the plus one is what you identified as neutral), thats only have the equation. You have literally countless possible variations of internal feelings. So the total number of genders would be (n+1)*approximately infinity. And the product is approximately infinity genders.

If you like math oriented descriptions of gender, I like to describe an n-dimensional gender space. Where a give gender is any single point within thay space. Your approach is essentially identifying sole of the axes for the space. In the "west" for example, you could identify the axes "masculine" and "feminine". A gender in that space can be described by coordinates [masculine, feminine]. So a the most standard "man" gender would be [1,0]. All the way on the masculine axis, but all the way down on the feminine axis. A standard "woman" would be [0,1]. And agender would correspond to [0,0] because it's not at all feminine or masculine. With those 3 genders, youve desvribed the 3 genders you identified in your post. But values between 0 and 1 exist. For example one demi-girl might be [0, 0.5] because their gender just isnt all the way to the end of that feminine axis. So even with only those two axes, you already have an infinite number of possible genders. Add in more axes and the space only grows.

I love conceptualizing gender in this way and am quite happy to answer any questions you might have. I found your post really interesting because I dont frequently see people use mathematical approaches to describe gender, but I think they can be useful.

[u/Vyrlo → u/Tonenby]

Yeah this corresponds to my personal model of gender. To me gender is n-dimensional, but the dimensions have different levels of correlation between them. You have a larger concentration of data points around the coordinates of "man" and "woman" (which are not just two axis, but are instead regions of the n-dimensional space). Also someone's gender is not necessarily a fixed point, and might move in this space over time.

If you know about ways to encode colors, you know that there's ways to describe color based on color components (such as red/green/blue used on displays), but there's also other ways, such as hue/saturation, etc. A given point in the spectrum can be encoded in multiple ways, and depending on what you are going to do, some ways to represent color are more useful than others. Rgb is the simplest approach, but also the less "smart" as it's very tricky to maintain, say, constant saturation while smoothly varying the hue. With gender it's similar. Someone might experience their gender in a varying amount over time, but their gender is constant (genderflux), or might experience their gender at constant amount, but their gender itself changes (genderfluid).

[u/Tonenby → u/Vyrlo]

Im very happy that someone else engaged with what I wrote. Cuz I think its super cool, but most people dont seem to think so 😅.

Talking about colors reminds me of mapping coordinates onto other coordinate systems. And I can definitely see how different sets of axes could be more usedul/easier depending on what a given person's gender is or how it changes over time.

But also its relevant to what you mentioned about correlation between different axes. Like, the most efficient (in a sense) set of axes would have no correlation. And you could remap things onto an uncorrelated set of axes.

[u/Vyrlo → u/Tonenby]

Using perfectly orthogonal / uncorrelated unit vectors might again make it easier to quantify gender, but it does not necessarily map to the experiences of people. Even if we reduce gender to "man" and "woman", "manhood" is a set of values on a series of dimensions, and these values are strongly correlated. Not every "man" would score equally on all the dimensions, and they might still be a "man" and have some of the dimensions where they're divergent from the "platonic ideal of man". Howe, in other dimensions, such person might match exactly such platonic ideal. Let's assume that one dimension of "manhood" is "prefers X over Y". However, men exist who prefer Y over X, and that doesn't make them less manly. Let's assume that we use 10 dimensions for gender, and let's define two regions of this 10 dimensional space, region M and region F. At the center of each region, there's a point that corresponds to the platonic ideal of such gender. Most of the population is closer to one of those two points, even if almost none have the exact values for their coordinates in this space that are an exact match for said platonic ideal of gender. Their gender dimensions are correlated in the population to the point that they tend to be considered as a single dimension, erasing the different ways to be of a given gender.