Guest post: Between Egogender and Genderblank
Originally a comment by Sastra on A myriad of other genders.
Near as I can make out, the “myriad” of genders comes in two forms:
1.) Genders that involve different ways of playing around with man (male) and woman (female.) Included are man, woman, neither-man-nor-woman, both-man-and-woman, switching between man and woman, switching between man and neither-man-nor-woman, and any other combination you can think of, in fluctuating circumstances. We can at least conceive of such genders because they conceptually draw from our prior understanding of man (male) and woman (female.) Gender and sex used to be synonyms.
2.) Genders that don’t involve man (male) and/or woman (female.) The connection to sex is tenuous at best. This is where we find people having the “gender of a cloud” or being Aesthetigender, a gender derived from aesthetics. Most of this either sounds like results from a teenage magazine personality test (“What Kind of Flower Are You?”) or is seriously incoherent. Included in this would be genders that are basically nothing more than attitudes towards gender(Cassflux: There is a fluctuating intensity of irrelevance toward gender.)
There’s a list of The 72 Genders here.
I personally fluctuate between Egogender: “a personal type of gender identified by the individual alone based on the person’s experience within the self” and Genderblank: “It is closely related to a blank space.”
I don’t see why a blank space can’t give birth.
This stuff seems to be a delicate balance of satisfying two somewhat conflicting urges:
1) I am special and not like regular people
2) But not quite so special that there aren’t enough other people like me to warrant a category and a pride flag.
It’s like the folks who brag about how they have a very rare Myers-Briggs type, and/or their particular combination of star sign and moon sign makes them unusual (but not so unusual that it doesn’t convey very specific information to other afficionados).
I agree, Screechy. Everyone needs to feel that they are part of a distinct tribe, and hold a unique and important position in that tribe. Even in families, everyone wants a labelled niche. I remember my second son when the twins were born; he was ten, and came to me to ask how he was special. “You’re special, because you’re Mummy. Daddy’s special, because he’s Daddy. [Big brother] is special, because he’s the oldest. [Sister] is special, because she’s the only girl. [Younger brother 1] and [younger brother 2] are special because they are twins. What makes me special?” It was heartbreaking, in a way. I never wanted him to feel lost!
There’s a really great book, by a former military interrogator, that uses this concept as a premise.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2412614.Get_People_to_Do_What_You_Want
According to him, you can get anyone to do anything if you can figure out where they are in the belonging/differentiation cycle (wanting to be in the group, in the group but unsure of yourself, securely in the group, looking to distinguish yourself from the group and move on to another one), and with which groups, you can easily manipulate them using four types of statements:
Positive inclusion (you’re just like us)
Negative inclusion (you’re one of them, you xs are all alike)
Positive differentiation (you’re different from the other xs)
Negative differentiation (you’re not like us)
Makes a note of it.
This is one of the reasons I think the world might be in many ways a better place without the Internet and instantaneous, global communication. Competition for specialness is against the entire species. While that’s good for finding the most special, it’s bad for individual status and esteem. It’s much easier to be the biggest fish in a little pond than the biggest fish in the ocean.
I once read a sci-fi novel where some force had separated mankind into small communities and rendered communication between and even knowledge of other communities impossible–for the purpose of maximizing people’s well-being. In blanking on the title and author, though.