How many genders are there?

The definitive and conclusive guide

Since time immemorial, man (gn) has gazed up at the stars and begged God for an answer to the overwhelming question: how many genders are there?

Joe Biden did pretty well; there are indeed at least three. But we can do much better than that. Fortunately, I happen to know the answer, and unlike every other yokel who has written on the subject, I am correct.

First, let’s get some bad answers out of the way. Here are some numbers that are not equal to the total quantity of genders:

Two: There are obviously more than two genders. You Fucking Nincompoop. Do you conclude that they accidentally left Waldo out following a single cursory glance at the picture? Get real.

Three: [EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER SOUND] The genders are not male, female, and non-binary. This is ridiculous ill-posed nonsense; being non-binary myself, I can say on good authority that non-binary is not a gender that exists. It is the “1, 2, many” of gender science. I am deeply embarrassed by the prevalence of this particular gender ennumeration. At least the proponents of Two Gender theory can be forgiven as suffering from either ignorance or dogmatism.

“As many as there are people”: Ohohoho you’re very clever aren’t you? You are like the person in xkcd 977 who picks “a globe.” But your mealy-mouthed cowering beneath the boot of the inclusivity cops won’t save you. You’ll be getting the wall along with all the rest.

One: No, Patrick, the human gender is not a gender.

Now, with that out of the way, I want to be very clear—I’m being funny here, because that’s what got me positive attention in elementary school, but the gender enumeration I am about to present to you is deadly serious. Not only am I an interestingly-gendered person myself, but I am also blessed with the True Sight, incapable of being fooled by infernal or sorcerous works.

So, how many genders are there?

There are six. We will list them. Number 6 will surprise you!

1. Boy

We all know what these are. They are small, grubby, and loud. They drool; they go to Jupiter; they get more stupider. You know the drill.

To be honest this gender is a weak point of mine; I have never been one and encounter them rarely. However, in a few months I am to extrude the larval form of something that likely may become a boy, and I intend to fully capitalize on this anthropological opportunity. I will report back in some years; in the meantime, moving on.

2. Girl

I am confident this one exists because I was one. Really! I liked pink. I played with Barbies. I enjoyed stories about princesses. In some ways I was an unusual girl, particularly in how I related to other girls and boys. Specifically, I viewed boys (my hated enemies) as wretched rivals with whom I was in perpetual deadly struggle for dominance with, and I viewed other girls as strange ethereal beings with nice handwriting that I was a little afraid of. But I was undoubtedly one of them, however sorry an example.

What is there to be said about girls? They have nice handwriting; they rule; I have it on good authority that they go to college, to get more knowledge.¹

Boy and Girl are obviously different genders from Man and Woman, and no less distinct and valid gender identities for their inherent transience. Not all boys become men, not all girls become women—bafflingly, despite my heartfelt and abiding love for pretty pink Barbie princesses, I did not become a woman following my girlhood, at least not via the conventional path of puberty. Some boys grow up to be girls. Many things are possible.

However, edge cases aside, these are ancillary genders. Now let’s get into the real meat and potatoes.

3. Man

Most boys become men, but not all. Many people who outwardly resemble men in fact remain boys for the duration of their lifetimes. There is nothing wrong with this; their genders are valid, even if they don’t seem to “pass”.

Men—men! Men, men, men. What is there to say about men? Much ink has been spilled on their matter. And honestly, what do I know about them? Sure, I have a husband, who seems to be a man, but that was entirely accidental on my part; I only noticed I wasn’t a lesbian mid-blowjob at the age of twenty-seven.

Instead I will defer to Garrison Keillor, via The Book of Guys:²

A large guy (I would say about a size 62) stepped into the circle. He was blinking back the tears. He had a hank of hair falling down in his eyes that he tossed back with his head. He blew his nose and said, in a soft voice, “I have never been in a group of men before, and it’s hard for me to say what I have to say.” We shouted our support and encouragement. “Thank you,” he said. “I had a chance to become a girl when I was in the fourth grade. We all did. You could check a box marked F on the Iowa Basic Gender Questionnaire, but they never explained it to me very well, like most things about sex, so I checked M instead, but some of the girls in my class checked M, and they got changed a few weeks later—in those days, it was referred to as ‘having your tonsils out’—[…] and those girls grew up and became extremely successful ,happy, and well-adjusted men, the sort of guys who are easy with their masculinity and get along just fine. And sometimes—”and here his voice shook—”sometimes I wish I had become a girl.”

4. Woman

Everyone knows what a woman is. Moving on.

5. Woman but quirky

For those girls who failed to mark M on their Iowa Basic Gender Questionnaires but don’t much care to be women, this gender is realistically where they’re headed.

We know this is a gender because it has its own slurs. Theyfabs, transtrenders. As a proud theyfab transtrender myself, it brings me no pleasure to say that a large fraction of my fellow so-called uncategorizable gender-indecipherables are in fact perfectly decipherable, genderly speaking: they are Women But Quirky. Sadly, this is the fate of far too many trans men.

However, not all Women But Quirky are assigned female at birth. Plenty of trans women are Women But Quirky—in fact, most trans women I personally know are specifically aiming to be Women But Quirky, and they’re often better at it than ex-girls, too. This is because it’s nearly always better to become something on purpose rather than arrive there on accident in an attempt to escape it, “The Appointment in Samarra” style.

6. Faggot

This final gender is the most indisputable. Everyone can tell who the faggot is; ask any group of boys and they’ll point them out to you immediately, on the same “I know it when I see it” principle generally applied to women by British magistrates.

Plenty of apparent-men are faggots, though certainly this does not describe exclusively or primarily gay men. Very few apparent-women are faggots.

Trans women are generally in the business of striving to escape this gender and successfully become either Women or Women But Quirky, though some get a little confused and attempt to become Girls instead.

But trans men! For a trans man, and many other dissatisfied ex-girls, to be a faggot is a Holy Grail. You hope and pray to someday achieve faggotry; you cherish the day and hour that an enraged commuter calls you one on the subway. You might never truly be a man, but you might become something even better than a man—a man’s man, a man-squared, a rotating tesseract of inverted malehood. That’s the fucking dream.

Could there be more?

I do not completely discount the possibility that additional genders exist. For example, professional. Is a professional a man or a woman? A man, you might suppose, but in the neuter sense—man as in mankind, totally different and distinct from men as they actually exist.

Similarly, is autism a gender? Or merely a modification and risk factor for the other, canonical genders?

One can continue in this vein, but down that road lies madness, infinite gender fractals of tremendous beauty and complexity which can swallow a person whole for their entire life. As with kabbalah and alchemy, there are some mysteries better left unplumbed, some tweaks to the standard model that cannot cost-effectively be explored. For now and the foreseeable future, we leave the answer at six.

1. Who could have imagined that this innocent albeit chauvinistic childhood rhyme would turn out to be a prophecy—perhaps a magic spell?—ushering in the modern age of disproportionate female educational attainment and the resultant social disharmony?

2. Is guy a distinct gender from man? Or is it perhaps a single meta-gender encompassing both men and boys? Scholars are still debating, but my vote is no.