A question about gender identity?

[Snow in the background]

Hello everyone.

I recently had a discussion with a friend who told me that there are over 100 gender identities.

This discussion made me curious about this fact. I would like to know how many gender identities are there? 

[LaReine]

Well, this is hard to evaluate. There are so many identities, it's hard to fathom.

Everyone is different and personally I would say that there are many gender identities, but not over 100.

 

Edit: Facebook, by the way, gives you the option to choose between 58 gender identities. 

[Rynn]

There is an infinite amount of points between zero and one, or between male and female, or male and agender. And then when you add in gender fluidity it becomes really complicated.

 

Spoiler

I think this graph works well, at least for western cultures.

 

The real question is where do you want to draw the line between 'woman' and 'demigirl'? The number of gender identities depends on how you group them together. How different do they need to be before they're separate identities?

 

You could argue for an amount of gender identities equal to the number of people that have ever existed, or you could arbitrarily say there's four, or ten, and just stick the ones that are 'close enough' together into one label.

 

I think it's more useful to think of gender identity as a sliding scale, rather than having a set number of them.

 

I read somewhere that some peoples in Indonesia had/have five socially recognized genders. Don't quote me on that though. 

[Sarah-Sylvia]

You can take a look at the sticked thread "Gender Definitions Masterlist, Forum Ettiquette, and FAQ" for some listed. There might be a site that lists a whole bunch, but I'm too lazy to look right now.

There's a lot of labels. But most of the time, after the bigger more general ones, it's more like micro-labels that try to mean something more specific.
'Non-binary' in example is a big one, and lots of other labels can fit into it.

I think it's good for someone to know the ones that are more general, for the public, in example, and then someone can have something more specific for those that matter, or talking with other people who know about gender identities.

[Alawyn-Aebt]

It really depends on how one defines gender, particularly because not all cultures throughout history define it the same way. Even people within the same culture will arrive at different answers to what gender is.

If one says gender is what society sees you as then that would be a list of all socially-recognized genders (and yes @Laurann, parts of Indonesia and elsewhere have culturally more than two recognized genders as the most of the world had. Many ethnographies touch upon this and makes for very interesting reading. I highly recommend finding an ethnography that deals substantially with gender in a region with more than the binary-model common in the west, they make some interesting observations about gender). If one says gender is how you feel then an equal number of genders to people could exist. If one says gender is how you label yourself, then that is constantly expanding.

 

Pretty much there is never a set list although depending on how you define gender the list might be more or less flexible and more or less lengthy.

[Snow in the background]

I understood!

Thank you very much for your answers!