Red, Blue, Violet, Yellow

So the Public Religion Research Institute conducted a survey, "The Politics of Gender, Pronouns, and Public Education."

The second section of the article asks: "Is Gender Binary?" Had they asked me, I think I would have answered: I don't know... Define 'gender'." Because this one of those things where I suspect it's important that everyone be on the same page as to the language they're using. As a cultural matter, I think that gender is binary, at least in the sense that American culture lacks anything like the "third" or other genders that some cultures do. "Non-binary" does not come across as a gender, in and of itself. At least as I encounter it, it's more of a rejection of the standard "boy/man and girl/woman" labels. It's kind of like saying something is neither red nor yellow - there is no word in American English that describes everything that isn't red and yellow as a single color. It's somewhat the same with non-binary. To say that an adult is neither a man nor a woman doesn't describe what they are, nor, at least in common usage, does it seem to be intended to. And in that sense, at least in the United States, gender is effectively binary, even if "none of the above" is an allowable answer.

Personally, I think that it would be useful for American society to have more than simply two genders; mainly because the boundaries of the genders seem to be shrinking, rather than expending. As such, the labels seems to hew closer to their common stereotypes than I recall them doing when I was younger. But even outside of that, it may make sense to have a social understanding that terms like "masculine" and "feminine" may not cover all possibilities. Sure, the two may be viewed as a continuum between two poles, but that makes the distinction necessarily one-dimensional. Perhaps that's not a good way to conceive of it. One could imagine adding some understanding of intensity; some people come across as so weakly attached to either gender that they're effectively neuter. And even in a binary, it's not always possible to draw sharp distinctions; some people really are androgynous. That would give us four.

Which, come to think of it, may not make a difference. Consider, for a moment, the idea that in the United States, we have a "two-party" system. But there are more than two political parties in the United States. There are a few "third parties." But their influence and reach is so small as to be negligible, and so everyone speaks of the United States as having only two parties. While not a binary in reality, it's a binary in effect, and thus, in language. I wonder of the politics metaphor isn't more apt than I first thought it. After all, "Independent" functions in much the same way as "non-binary." It marks a person as identifying as neither Democrat nor Republican, but isn't itself a party affiliation - in the American two party system, a Socialist and a Libertarian are equally "independent." (And equally irrelevant.)

And maybe that's what it's all about for many people. Are the people who use "they" as their pronoun, or say they aren't a man or a woman? Yes. Are they relevant to anything? Not enough to count. So 1 + 1 + X = 2, because no matter what the value of X, many people don't see it as any different from zero.