How many genders are there?

[GregTheGreat657]

I'd say only 2

[President of the great nation of 🏳️‍⚧️]

There's only one gender: The human gender.

[Antonio the Sixth]

oh here we go again

[Big Abraham]

The answer is three, if Latin class has taught me anything.

[KoopaDaQuick 🇵🇸]

Multiple. Not going to attempt to give a number as it's pragmatically impossible to find out.

[Klobmentum Mutilated Herself]

Joe Biden's hilarious answer to this, "there are at least three", was unironically a fairly good answer. I say that because the quantity of genders doesn't really matter much, gender can mean a lot of things to different people and it doesn't really help anyone's relationship to their gender or lack thereof to try putting a number on it.

For all practical purposes, there are men, women, and nonbinary people.

What people who troll in bad faith about "400 genders" and "blorp/blorpem" pronouns don't realize is that while, yes, there a lot of different specific gender identities besides those three that are confusing to cis people — your genderfluid people, agender, bigender, demigirls/demiboys, etc. — and those gender identities and expressions are all valid, but those fall under the umbrella of nonbinary, and people with those nonbinary genders are almost always content to identify themselves as nonbinary in cis spaces. The deep gender stuff and neopronouns are usually aimed at a queer audience, not a cis one — this goes for neopronouns too; many people who use neopronouns are fine with using they/them in cis spaces. Nonbinary (and its synonym, genderqueer) is a catch-all term for anyone outside of the man-woman binary, not a description of a one specific form of gender expression.

So there are more than three genders, but there are no fewer than three or four (some intersex people identify with intersex as their gender in addition to their sex, while many other intersex people identify inside the gender trinary of men, women, and nonbinary — also, many of them are trans). A precise number doesn't matter because there isn't necessarily one to begin with, but for categorization purposes, almost everyone will fit under one of those three or four big tents.

My answer in a queer space would be different and less pragmatic.

[parochial boy]

Just in Europe you have:

masculin
feminine
neuter
common
animate
inanimate
and genderless

So that's 7 straight off the bat

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Does it matter? Death is inevitable.

[Antonio the Sixth]

7 billion

[dead0man]

I normally don't like trolly, loaded questions as threads (even when the joke is on my political enemies), but the answers here are so good.....

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

[Bootes Void]

69

[Ferguson97]

At least three.

[Schiff for Senate]

oh here we go again

I really agree. I feel like this gets predictably messy - the conservative minority advocate there are only 2 genders, the left gives a politically correct or cheeky answer, several people are moderated and it ends with a lot of unnecessary arguing. But I vote 2.

[Del Tachi]

Zero

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Zero

OP, this is an AMERICAN forum. We speak ENGLISH here.

[Mopsus]

Zero

This. Gender was invented in 1955 and like most postwar innovations was a terrible mistake.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Zero

This. Gender was invented in 1955 and like most postwar innovations was a terrible mistake.

Describing an extant phenomenon does not equate to inventing it from nothing, nor does it imply that it wasn't understood in some similar form in other cultures besides the sphere of Western academia (although some scholarly works from before then did in fact document the practice of what we might call gender non-conformity in other cultures; the bottom quote in my signature is taken from one such text on the indigenous peoples of Siberia), nor does the admittedly highly lacking and repulsive personal conduct of one person, who we've already established as my no means the "inventor" of the concept in any form discredit anything that might be remotely associated with them.

You're grasping at straws to reinforce a bubble where normative Western understandings of gender roles and societal expectations around our bodies can never be questioned, and to coercively impose that bubble on every extant culture when as many different answers to these questions exist as there are unique human cultures. If you think that entire fields of human knowledge can be discredited by virtue of having unsavory characters (who in this case aren't considered particularly innovative or influential even within their fields, which you'd know and instead know more about those who actually are/were if you cared about this area of study beyond regurgitated talking points from those who hate it on principle), then you just ought to reject the entirety of human knowledge because there are a hell of a lot more sex pests in the history of thought than just those you consider heinous enough (read: disagree with enough for entirely different reasons) to act like anything they may have any tangential relationship to is hogwash. It smacks of, dare I say it, "cancel culture"?

[Mopsus]

Zero

This. Gender was invented in 1955 and like most postwar innovations was a terrible mistake.

Describing an extant phenomenon does not equate to inventing it from nothing, nor does it imply that it wasn't understood in some similar form in other cultures besides the sphere of Western academia (although some scholarly works from before then did in fact document the practice of what we might call gender non-conformity in other cultures; the bottom quote in my signature is taken from one such text on the indigenous peoples of Siberia), nor does the admittedly highly lacking and repulsive personal conduct of one person, who we've already established as my no means the "inventor" of the concept in any form discredit anything that might be remotely associated with them.

You're grasping at straws to reinforce a bubble where normative Western understandings of gender roles and societal expectations around our bodies can never be questioned, and to coercively impose that bubble on every extant culture when as many different answers to these questions exist as there are unique human cultures. If you think that entire fields of human knowledge can be discredited by virtue of having unsavory characters (who in this case aren't considered particularly innovative or influential even within their fields, which you'd know and instead know more about those who actually are/were if you cared about this area of study beyond regurgitated talking points from those who hate it on principle), then you just ought to reject the entirety of human knowledge because there are a hell of a lot more sex pests in the history of thought than just those you consider heinous enough (read: disagree with enough for entirely different reasons) to act like anything they may have any tangential relationship to is hogwash. It smacks of, dare I say it, "cancel culture"?

That's a lot to infer from a funny joke post!

Honestly though my views aren't that far from what you'd expect them to be, except that I would be willing to throw out the "contributions" of sex perverts if it seems likely that their perversity had an influence on their thought (I'm a Nietzschean in that way so not much of a "gotcha" there). But the vast majority of philosophers lived in time periods when people kept those things to themselves, so we'll never know.

Anyway, like most people I've never had a reason to question my gender role (except to ask myself whether I was performing my role well enough), so it's not my place to say whether gender-nonconforming people are valid or not. I can only remark, what I'm sure doesn't surprise you at all, how strangely it strikes me that some people's inner experience would be so different from their biological experience. I understand a mother's worship of the Great Mother, but a eunuch's? Very removed from my own understanding.

[NYDem]

Exactly 79

[If my soul was made of stone]

Zero

This. Gender was invented in 1955 and like most postwar innovations was a terrible mistake.

Describing an extant phenomenon does not equate to inventing it from nothing, nor does it imply that it wasn't understood in some similar form in other cultures besides the sphere of Western academia (although some scholarly works from before then did in fact document the practice of what we might call gender non-conformity in other cultures; the bottom quote in my signature is taken from one such text on the indigenous peoples of Siberia), nor does the admittedly highly lacking and repulsive personal conduct of one person, who we've already established as my no means the "inventor" of the concept in any form discredit anything that might be remotely associated with them.

You're grasping at straws to reinforce a bubble where normative Western understandings of gender roles and societal expectations around our bodies can never be questioned, and to coercively impose that bubble on every extant culture when as many different answers to these questions exist as there are unique human cultures. If you think that entire fields of human knowledge can be discredited by virtue of having unsavory characters (who in this case aren't considered particularly innovative or influential even within their fields, which you'd know and instead know more about those who actually are/were if you cared about this area of study beyond regurgitated talking points from those who hate it on principle), then you just ought to reject the entirety of human knowledge because there are a hell of a lot more sex pests in the history of thought than just those you consider heinous enough (read: disagree with enough for entirely different reasons) to act like anything they may have any tangential relationship to is hogwash. It smacks of, dare I say it, "cancel culture"?

That's a lot to infer from a funny joke post!

Honestly though my views aren't that far from what you'd expect them to be, except that I would be willing to throw out the "contributions" of sex perverts if it seems likely that their perversity had an influence on their thought (I'm a Nietzschean in that way so not much of a "gotcha" there). But the vast majority of philosophers lived in time periods when people kept those things to themselves, so we'll never know.

Anyway, like most people I've never had a reason to question my gender role (except to ask myself whether I was performing my role well enough), so it's not my place to say whether gender-nonconforming people are valid or not. I can only remark, what I'm sure doesn't surprise you at all, how strangely it strikes me that some people's inner experience would be so different from their biological experience. I understand a mother's worship of the Great Mother, but a eunuch's? Very removed from my own understanding.

Admittedly my response was a lot to extrapolate from yours and may have seemed rather extra, but when there are people around these parts that take that sort of thought at face value one figures that one can't be too careful.

The failure to communicate these experiences so directly as an embodied idea is, I feel, the primary reason why it's (understandably) so hard for people like you to understand, if these vastly idiosyncratic experiences can be generalized into a whole, the ideas from which gender non-conformity emerges. I didn't think much at all of gender at large or my own assigned gender until I began experiencing physical gender dysphoria in my mid-teens, and my relationship to my own gender and the expressions of others is in constant flux atop the foundational principle of aspiring to a feminine ideal.

I cannot fault you for seeing my practices of identity in much the same way that Catullus did, or the experiences that lead you there. I only ask that it may be recognized, if begrudgingly as he did amidst his revulsion at one's "hatred of Venus" and fear of the Great One, without intentional offense against it. As much as I yearn at some times to have lived in a time where there was a state cult just for people like me, there's also a part of me that finds it alien and impersonal to perform oneself in a publicly-sanctioned manner; I trust those close to me with a much more intimate understanding of my identity and my faith than I care to outwardly present.

I will say this much towards your confusion: as one barred from birth from knowing the form of divinity most intimately in the most hallowed functions of body, my interpretation of divinity is itself aspirational. My yearning for an ideal of the Great Mother's image in woman emerges from the same impulse as my worship of Her original qualities embodied in creation. My devotion to that sacred principle exists "as above, so below", within my physical experiences and the broader workings of nature that are its macrocosmic implications.

(I'm not actually a eunuch–I'm currently up to my neck in the red tape that surrounds sanctioning a professional to administer one's ultimate sacrifice–but I don't mind being called one and sometimes call myself that.)

[Matt24]

Gender is a spectrum, so technically, infinity.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Zero

OP, this is an AMERICAN forum. We speak ENGLISH here.

I am ITALIAN and I know there are two genders: masculine (like metal and regret and glasses) and feminine (like fear and gunpowder and chairs). You are invalidating my lived experiences.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Only one, and it's located in the Netherlands:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_(stream)

[progressive85]

I'd say only 2

I don't honestly give a rat's ass... and that's my honest answer.  Who cares?  There's more to a person than their genitalia.

And when a man can be pretty, girly, and gay, it kinda doesn't even matter anymore.  The John Wayne stereotype of what a man should be is shattered.  Even John Wayne didn't act like that 24/7... maybe he had a side to him that nobody ever saw...

Point is that there are very masculine dudes who have their own feminine sides, maybe they want to dress up in lingerie.... to each his own I say. 

Let people be what they want to be.  Life is too short to psychoanalyze gender and sex and all of that mumbo-jumbo.