N-DIMENSIONAL GENDER SPACE
~or~
The Dangers of Thinking About Gender Too Much

I feel like a lot of what I tweet about gender may be confusing, so I'm gonna try to walk everyone through my feelings. With GEOMETRY.

Everything I'm about to discuss in this thread is deeply flawed nonsense, and you are welcome to disagree!

The gender binary in its most conservative form is zero-dimensional; two infinitessimal points, male and female. Most people know that there's at *least* a spectrum of genders, but there are a handful of adherents to the "all men X and all women Y" worldview, so it bears mention.

Most cis people understand, though, that the binary genders aren't monolithic, that there's some wiggle room. And I think they conceptualize it in one dimension, like this:

It seems like most cis people live their whole lives perceiving gender this way? They see masculinity and femininity as opposing forces, and to become less masculine is, necessarily, to become more feminine, according to their model.

Most trans people realize that this is nonsense!

First of all, it crushes all of the nonbinary feelings into that "neutral" point, which works fine for people who feel that they're AGENDER, but what about folks who feel a close connection to BOTH masculinity + femininity?

Plus, the zero-sum game of "more of one gender means less of the other" has a nasty implication for women with masculine traits or men who're "in touch with their feminine side": that they're LESS man or woman for being that way.

So, we have to acknowledge that masculinity are not opposite vectors of gender, but perpendicular axes!

This is an understanding of gender you begin to see all the time in queer circles. It helps to explain the existence of agender and bigender folks, as well as demigenders.

A few notes:
-All of these categories are blurry because they're products of consensus. There are a lot of versions of womanhood, especially, which is why I drew it wobbly.

-Manhood is smaller than womanhood on this chart because (cis) men have done less to expand their gender.

-A nonbinary person might feel they fit within the conventionally recognized box of manhood and still consider themselves a not-a-man. This is quite peculiar, no? Almost as if... this model doesn't tell the whole story.

Here are some questions that have been on my mind, though, in this 2D space:

-What are the "exogenders" that exist outside of the ranges of femininity and masculinity as experienced by women and men? Hyperwomen? Hypermen?

-Do masculinity and femininity really bottom out at 0 (no affect) or do some people have antipathy towards them in such a way that it suggests a negative range? I feel this way, though not strongly, about masculinity & masculine traits!

And so we arrive at a full cartesian plane. Now we can look at negative masculinity and femininity! Just because they're not opposites of each other doesn't mean that someone's gender can't be opposed to one or the other or both?

Folks whose genders feel more like angels or robots or slime than like anything recognizably masculine or feminine have a more comfortable space, now, in the negatives, but we still don't see the non-binary dimensionality of their genders.

Being able to map things by antipathy also puts some unpleasant gender-feelings on the board: Manhood and demiboyhood get misogynistic penumbras-- the people who get mad about & feel they CAN'T relate to female ghostbusters.

A blob of womanhood appears that's more defined by its hatred of perceived masculinity than by any other trait.

I don't know what hardcore, ambivalent antigender actually looks like? But it is theorized to be metal as hell?

But still, we're going to fail to capture complex and dynamic genders. Like... a cis drag queen might comfortably fit in the box of consensus-of-manhood, but the entirety of his *relationship* to that manhood is NOT being reflected.

So let's add... another axis!

Being a transfeminine person... FEELS, to me, like I have a meaningfully different experience with and relationship to that blob of womanhood-by-consensus than a cis woman.

But consensus says we both belong there.

The dodge, then, might be on this 3rd queerness axis?

But once we accept that gender relationships aren't just about masculinity and feminity, that can of worms is wide open.

I've seen so many trans and nonbinary people describe their genders as goblins, as slime, as worms, as angels, as ghosts, as zodiacs, elements, etc.

My feeling is that gender can be described in as many dimensions as is relevant. My three requirements of a dimension of gender, like masculinity or femininity or queerness, are:
-Aesthetic Implications
-Interpersonal Relationships
-Mythological/Narrative Identity

Temperature is my go-to example of an unconventional dimension of gender, because hotness and coldness have clear aesthetic, emotional, relational and mythological ties.

But so do... a LOT of qualities. And any and all of them can be dimensions of gender.

I think the most important aspect of gender as an Nth-dimensional space is that, in decentralizing the gender binary from the model, explorations of gender suddenly become a priority for cis people as well as trans people. We all gain more axes on which to relate to one another.

Anyway, this concludes my deeply flawed napkin philosophizing for the evening!
-People's positions in genderspace aren't static, and might not be points, but shapes or functions?
-If I got your gender all wrong, I'm sorry, tell me how
-Tell me your favorite dimensions of gender