"My dog is gender dysphoric."
This topic contains 9 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by 
Kristina 5 months, 2 weeks ago.
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Self-identification is an important tool in understanding gender identity in humans, one which is mostly not an option with other animals. When we talk about gender, we’re talking about a really wide gamut of concepts ranging from biological sex to purely social constructs. If there is anything analogous to that in other animals, we’d have a hard time identifying it with much confidence.
Most of the 58 terms provided on that list are not mutually exclusive. A number of them mean the exact same thing as others on the list. Sure, it does amount to more than two and yes, we could add others, but the fact that we apply these terms to humans and not other animals has more to do with our ability to express complex concepts pertaining to identity rather than some foregone conclusion other animals cannot be transgender.
With regard to biology, it would be wrong to say it recognizes just two genders or just two sexes. It recognizes variability and gamuts where they exist. The idea of binary sex in humans is a one-dimensional conceptualization of a much more varied and complicated set of associated phenomena.
It’s a useful categorization, but actual biology doesn’t require such a neat and tidy delineation. Even if we strip it down to the most basic concept of gametes, it’s not like everyone is just out there with cookie-cutter copies of Xs and Ys. Those chromosomes are varied across the species and continue to mutate. And every level up you go from there from micro to macro to individual organisms to species behaviour, there is more and more complexity and variability. Increasingly, as you go, bucketing into discrete male and female categories becomes cruder and less descriptive. Still useful in a great many contexts, but it has a lot of limitations with regard to describing human traits and experiences.
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This reply was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by Kristina.
However, having 58 gender names where many are synonyms of each other does violate Occam’s Razor by multiplying categories more than necessary.
It appears to be a rough lexicon of terms which are relevant to gender identity and expression. there is nothing particularly odd about it as that’s how we are with language.
Imagine we were talking about cars. We could refer to them generically as ‘cars’. We could refer to them by a broader category such as ‘automobiles’ or ‘vehicles’ or even just ‘machines’. We could refer to them by narrower categories such as ‘sedans’ or ‘sports utility vehicles’. We could abbreviate those terms such as ‘SUVs’. We could use colloquialisms such as ‘ride’. We could refer to them by particular features such as ‘manual’ or ‘automatic’ or ‘two-wheel drive’ or by the amount of horsepower they have.
In all that language, we’d end up with huge amounts of overlap and redundancy. We have massive variation in specificity of terms. We’d have variation in terms of what type of information is being revealed with each term. The 58 terms in the OP are kind of like that. We could strip things down to roughly five terms across two attributes:
non-binary
female
maleand
transgender
cisgenderI probably wouldn’t strip things down quite that much, but apart from the term ‘intersex’ it encompasses everything on the list. That said, given the natural tendencies of language and discourse, the overall terminology applied to gender identity and expression is going to be much much larger than just those five terms.
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This reply was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by
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