Over the past few years, sexuality and gender have received much more of a spotlight than it used to. This has led to much more of a discussion surrounding them. One of the more complicated facets of this has been the different genders that may have been highlighted because of these talks.
Naturally, this has led to a certain amount of confusion for many people. While the majority of people will not want to be bigots, they can often become overwhelmed at the number of genders that someone may have. Much of this is because there could be quite a large variety of them to differentiate between.
One of the main reasons that people may feel overwhelmed is that they often may not know what many of these genders are. As such, they may want to know what the various genders that there actually are.
A significant amount of this can depend on who you ask, as many of them can be open to interpretation. Alongside this, you should also make sure that you differentiate gender from sexuality. This could mean that it’s worth defining what both of these are.
Alongside this, it’s worth defining what a person’s ‘sex’ is, as this can often differ from their gender. Typically, they’re defined as:
- Sexuality: This refers to who a person is attracted to. This can be divided into romantic orientation, which focuses on who a person is romantically attracted to, and sexual orientation. While these may often be related, they can be separate and distinct things.
- Gender: This is where a person feels they fall on the spectrum between man and woman. While the majority of people identify as either male or female, there are many who may fall in between these two genders.
- Sex: This is the gender that a person was assigned at birth, and is typically used to refer to the gender of their sexual organs. Though many people identify as the gender they were given, there’s a large number that may not.
This could be somewhat complicated to quite a large number of people. However, it also opens up a variety of questions. Perhaps the most notable of these focus on how many genders there are and what they are.
How Many Genders Are There? What Are They?
While asking how many genders there are may seem as though it’s a relatively simple question, the answer can be quite complicated. This is because the answer could depend significantly on your perspective. While there may be some people who only claim that there are two genders, many others claim that there are several more genders on top of this.
As such, there can often be a significant amount of confusion about this. While the exact number may vary, there are a few genders that are generally agreed upon around the world. This should mean that there are a few of them that you should know about.
- Cisgender*/Binary: This refers to people who identify as being either male or female and agreeing with the gender they were assigned at birth.
- Transgender: A person who identifies as the opposite gender to the one they were assigned at birth.
- Non-Binary: This refers to a person who doesn’t identify as either male or female. Can sometimes be referred to as Agender.
- Genderfluid: This is someone who moves between genders or has a fluctuating gender identity.
- Bigender: Someone who identifies as two genders, typically male and female.
- Polygender: Someone who identifies as multiple genders at once.
- Intergender: Somebody who’s gender is somewhere between male and female.
- Androgyne: This refers to somebody who overlaps significantly between gender presentation and identification. Typically, androgynes can identify as both male and female at the same time or neither.
- Gender Apathetic: This is someone who doesn’t identify or care to identify as any particular gender. Typically, this means that they don’t have an opinion either way about their gender.
- Maverique: This is a non-binary person who believes that they exist outside of the typical social bounds of gender.
- Novigender: While rare, there are a variety of people who identify as Novigender. This is a term used by somebody who believes that their gender is quite complex and may be impossible to describe in a single term. As such, people who use this term may have a variety of different genders.
Finding out how many genders there are and what these actually are can be much more overwhelming than many people might expect. However, by having a certain amount of patience, you should be able to find out more about each of them. Though it may initially seem confusing, it can make much more sense the more you know about it.
Understanding new things may often take longer than many of us may want. However, this can often be needed to make sure that everybody understands what these genders are.
*Cisgender comes from the Latin-derived prefix cis-, meaning “on this side of”, which is the opposite of trans-, meaning “across from” or “on the other side of”.
