Genders: The Serious Stuff

Genders are a lot more confusing and complicated than once thought. Like sexuality, it’s a spectrum rather than a binary, and everyone falls somewhere on it. It’s subjective, and doesn’t always follow sex, appearance, or sexual orientation. Genders should be respected, and knowing about them is important.

To start off with the basics, let’s cover the difference between sex and gender. 

Sex is your physiological body, it’s what you've got going on in your pants. Usually, this is male or female, but other sexes do exist. It also relates to your hormones and chromosomes. Males have XY chromosomes, and produce a hormone called testosterone. Females have XX chromosomes, and produce a hormone called oestrogen. Occasionally someone may be born with an extra chromosome, and hormones can be affected with certain drugs, which is what many transgender people use as part of their transitioning process.

Transitioning is where, using drugs, surgery and other methods, a person can change their physical sex. The drugs induce extra testosterone or oestrogen, and stop periods or lowing voices. The surgery is for genitals or other sex-specific aspects of the body, like breasts or hair. Transitioning can happen at any point in a trans person’s life, and does not have to happen at a young age. However it is expensive, and hard for young people to do without funds or parental permission. Other temporary methods such as binders are available.

Though this will make a trans person more comfortable, as they are finally satisfied with their form, it is not necessary to be validated as trans. A lot of people will be the sex they were designated at birth, either due to complications and limitations with transitioning, or due to the fact that their gender is not linked to male or female. They are still trans.

This is where the difference with gender is found. Gender is your psychological personality, who you are inside. Gender does not exist inside any sort of binary, and instead lies on a spectrum. There are many genders, and there is no way I could possibly list them all. Here are a few common ones:

• Cisgender Male – male and born as such
• Cisgender Female – female and born as such
• Transgender Male – male but not born as such
• Transgender Female – female but not born as such
• Agender – has no gender
• Bigender – has two genders, can be both at the same time or switch between them
• Genderfluid – has multiple genders, fluidly switches between them
• Demi boy – sometimes a boy sometimes something else
• Demi girl – sometimes a girl sometimes something else
• Non Binary – doesn't fit inside the ‘male’ or ‘female’ binary

All of these are perfectly valid, and as you can see, many of them don't correlate to a specific sex. This makes transitioning pointless for many people, and shows that it is not required to be considered trans. A transgender person is anyone who does not associate with the gender they were assigned at birth, not someone who has undergone surgery to change their sex. That is why we say transgender instead of transsexual, as it’s about gender rather than sex.

Different genders come with different pronouns, and these are also important to understand and respect. More on that in a later blog post.

There are a lot of genders, and it’s important not to judge or make assumptions upon them. If someone tells you their gender, and you've never heard of it before, that doesn't make it stupid or less valid, it just means you've never heard of it before. That being said, if someone says ‘I identify with plants’, that’s different. Firstly your gender can’t be a plant, that’s not what gender is, plant isn't gender. Secondly, that’s something called ‘otherkin’. Identifying with a physical or fictional object/person on an emotional level. It’s something I don't fully understand and it kind of baffles me, but it is a thing, apparently.

The point is, gender is a spectrum and there are countless types of gender, some of which probably aren't even named yet. Respect gender. It’s part of personality and a huge part of who people are. It’s not something to joke about or make fun of, trans people get enough of that already. Just respect it, and remember a trans person probably knows more about their gender than you do. Forget binary, open your mind, there's a lot of cool stuff out there.