You Can Pick From 71 Genders on a Social Network. What Does That Actually Mean?

"For a lot of people this change means nothing. But for a small group of people it means the whole world."

Editor's note: This is the third year in a row that QDaily has run a June LGBTQI Pride Month series. Last June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that same-sex marriage is legal nationwide. At the same time, more and more people began investing in the "pink economy" and betting on this market, while also signaling their own political correctness by voicing support for the community... But this June, a gay bar in Orlando was the site of the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. For the LGBTQI community, things are neither as bad as people imagine nor as good. This year our LGBTQI Pride Month coverage tries to take a wider view. We will keep following this community, but we will also look at gender in the broader sense — which is usually the ground on which sexual orientation eventually forms, and out of which the LGBTQI community arises. Over the next three weeks we will publish five articles. This is the first.

In 2014 Facebook made the biggest change to user profile information in its history. It took the gender field, which until then offered only male and female, and expanded it to 58 options. Cisgender (a person whose self-identified gender matches the biological sex assigned at birth), Pangender (someone who identifies as a mix of many gender traits, a little of each), Two-Spirit (a person embodying both genders) — all of these became genders a user could choose on Facebook.

Most people who knew nothing about the topic were shocked and confused. Are there gender options besides male and female? Are these people born this way, or is it a psychological disorder? Is this physiological or psychological? And does any of it have anything to do with me?

Facebook programmer Brielle Harrison worked on the project and was also one of the people it was for. After the feature launched she changed her own gender from Female to Transwoman. "For a lot of people this change means nothing. But for a small group of people it means the whole world," Harrison said.

In 2004 the newly founded Facebook did not make gender a required field at sign-up; a name, an email address and an occupation were enough to get you a profile page. By 2008 gender was something you could no longer skip when you registered, and next to male and female the list once held an Easter egg: if you knew how to code, you could pick "hack my gender."

By 2014, 56 non-traditional genders with theory behind them had replaced the joke. This year the total reached 71.

The New York Times answered this platform's gender overhaul with the headline "Who Are You on Facebook Now?" GLAAD, the gender organization that has been doing this research since 1985, supplied the theory behind Facebook's list, and its former vice president Allison Palmer explained why the options were needed: "For people who really do use these words to define themselves, they should be able to express that on Facebook." Brielle Harrison, the product manager who ran the project, was more certain: "Our sign-up page looks a little more complicated now, but all of it is tied closely to the future."

Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford, once wrote in the science magazine Nautilus: "The dull, fixed idea that an organism is always male or always female — biologists have known plenty of exceptions to that for a long time." His examples included hermaphroditic organisms and the wrasses and clownfish that switch sex according to their surroundings. But this biological idea is not the same as the non-traditional Facebook genders discussed here, which stress a social gender that is not satisfied with reproduction and the body alone.

So what is social gender? How did these categories come about? Why did Facebook put them in its personal gender field? Why do people say these social genders have to do with the future? What effect might they have on American society? We took these questions to Zhou Yi, who studies gender at the University of California, Davis.

Q: QDaily

A: Zhou Yi, a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She studies the production and consumption of Chinese women's online fiction, and is a guest editor for the Society for East Asian Anthropology section of Anthropology News.

Q: What do you make of the non-traditional genders Facebook began rolling out in 2014? Are they fairly far ahead of their time?

A: Judging by the situation in the U.S., I think this expansion of gender categories is ahead of its time linguistically. If you pulled a few of the terms out of the air today, even those of us who do gender research might not be able to answer, because they are so finely divided.

Let me make a comparison. Starting this year all University of California campuses revised their application system to give applicants more gender options. Even so there are only six: Male / Female / Transmale / Transfemale / Genderqueer / Different Identity.

In my own daily gender research I use Transgender, Intersex and Queer besides Male and Female. Compared with Facebook's list, that is still far fewer.

An expansion of gender terms as fine-grained as Facebook's can easily trap people in a mental loop: as though the moment a company stops adding gender terms, it has become politically incorrect. A lot of my American students say history cannot run backward, we cannot return to an age with only two genders, so the only thing left to do is keep adding terms.

Q: You just said "history cannot run backward, we cannot return to an age with only two genders, male and female." What is this history that cannot run backward?

A: First, the gender we are talking about here is social gender — Gender in English. It is not determined by reproductive organs and it is not innate; it is something you learn and acquire. That process involves talking and interacting with other people. A lot of people go into a physical space — a gay bar, say — see this group, feel a likeness to them and find their own kind. Only then do you build a sense of self and an awareness of your social gender.

Before the concept of social gender existed, you can imagine people's understanding of gender as a box. Inside the box, genitals, gender, sexual orientation and sexual behavior lined up perfectly. The first thing social gender did was break the myth of that box: these things can fail to line up.

Take an example. Plenty of people have sex with people of the same sex without considering themselves gay. Craigslist.org, the American equivalent of 58.com, has a Casual Encounters board in its California section. Many men there who call themselves "straight" are looking for one-night stands with other men. Before sex they watch straight porn, and during sex they curse and insult women they have slept with before. Here their sexual orientation, their sexual behavior and their social gender are all separate — which breaks the logic of the box.

Social gender is partly meant to wake people up to the fact that sex is complicated.

Of course, sexual-orientation identities (Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual) and Intersex (an individual with two sets of chromosomes) now also get discussed alongside social genders like Transgender and Queer, which is where today's LGBTQI comes from.

Q: So how did this social gender come about? How has it developed?

A: In the U.S. the second wave of feminism arrived in the 1970s. Like the first wave, it fought for women's rights such as equal employment and legal abortion. It also began separating biological sex (Sex) from social gender (Gender), and analyzing how the patriarchal system had constructed womanhood in a way that made gender inequality look natural and legitimate.

By the 1990s, when the third wave came, people gradually began stressing how gender, class and race intersect, and the concepts we now call Queer and Transgender appeared — social genders that take apart the male-female binary.

The two waves can be read as one step up from the other. During the second wave people held that male-to-female transgender people were not women: they were born with male genitals, they were treated as male within the surrounding culture, they had enjoyed male privilege, they had been raised and schooled as boys and had already internalized patriarchy. So they were shut out of second-wave feminist language and its program of action. Mainstream feminists at the time also had no intention of taking lesbians into their ranks. That had much to do with the high-pressure social climate of Cold War America: they did not want to be seen as too radical, filed away as Marxists and put down by the government, so they deliberately kept their distance from lesbian groups. Meanwhile more and more Black women were joining the feminist movement, criticizing white feminists for ignoring class and race. It was in the middle of all this argument that the third wave arrived, bringing in more groups — transgender people, Black feminists, lesbians — and with them many more gender terms entered both the academy and everyday life.

When you talk about young people today you also have to account for the internet — online and offline culture shape each other. Researchers of my generation or older would probably call ourselves Women or Female. But many of my 18- and 19-year-old undergraduates write Cisfemale (one of Facebook's 56 non-traditional options) when they put their gender on a paper. So they are already using internet language on purpose, and there is no way to tell whether they met this gender vocabulary online or offline first. All you can say is that as young people work out their sense of gender, a company like Facebook understands the mind of young Americans better — and it has its own interest in expanding capital: the more users it draws, the more investment it can raise.

Q: So the concept of social gender moved out of the academy into everyday life long ago?

A: Yes. Facebook taking this vocabulary and putting it to work is itself one way into everyday life. And plenty of gender activists are not scholars at all; they are members of these groups, transgender people and others. What they are fighting for are their own rights.

Q: But if it has reached everyday life — say someone takes their social gender to be transsexual, and the person they are talking to has never heard the word. Put the other way round, these terms are being invented all the time and never settle into a fixed state. Is that right?

A: You could put it that way. That is why you see this craze for acronyms in the U.S. right now. From LGBT to LGBTQ to LGBTQI and now LGBTQIA, it is a process of invention. As the scope keeps widening, there really is no fixed concept of social gender.

Q: And if there is no fixed concept, different people must understand "transsexual" differently too. Doesn't that produce the sort of muddled argument we saw around the Li Yinhe partner controversy?

A: When we talk about how different people understand "transsexual," I don't take it as a matter of culture in the first place. That rules out two explanations: that different people come from different cultures, so you fail to understand another culture; or that your own culture and your own horizons fall short, so you don't understand.

Social gender has to be discussed together with other social factors. Take the Li Yinhe case. You could study the two camps, the people who backed her and the people who attacked her, by looking at the class each of them belongs to. If a supporter is middle class, they were quite possibly influenced by Western individualism. If not, they may simply be used to seeing women dressed as men in village opera or at funerals in rural China.

So a lot of gender concepts cannot be defined, and don't need to be. Defining something is a way of wiping out cultural plurality and difference. What matters is how people use an identity to interact with others.

Q: One of Facebook's gender options, Two-Spirit, comes out of Native American culture. Can a cultural concept like that also become an extension of social gender?

A: From the standpoint of cultural anthropology, getting that cultural term defined as a gender took a long time. In mainstream Western language Two-Spirit comes out as Transgender. Before Native Americans were colonized, Two-Spirit actually referred to a tribe's shamans, who could be male or female and served as go-betweens for people and the spirits. Within the original cultural system a Two-Spirit person was a healer, so calling it a gender name is not right; it was a state in which gender and dress did not match. But once modern civilization entered these tribes, Native people were told gender was a binary and were then forbidden to practice those unmatched shamanic ideas. Now, with queer culture on the rise, scholars of Indigenous culture are looking for a way out too, so they have read Two-Spirit as a kind of queer. That is how it became a gender name.

This is also where Facebook takes a shortcut. It can lift words out of any other culture and drop them into its own gender categories, but that also means flattening the culture.

Q: Is that because these gender categories are presented online?

A: To a degree, yes. Take Pride Day. Its first purpose was to turn the invisible visible — LGBTQIA people had to perform their many genders inside a space ruled by binary thinking, which meant going out into the world. That is where "coming out" comes from.

Now people can come out online with a flick of a finger, without going out and having that face-to-face, body-to-body exchange and confrontation.

We should not write off the political possibilities of the internet, but online and offline ought to work their way into each other.

Q: Beyond the internet, the American trade book market already has popular guides to social gender — the comedian Sam Killermann's 2013 book A Guide to Gender: The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook, for instance. What do you make of these popular gender books?

A: In my own teaching, popular guides do not come into the classroom. In the American education system gender is a core course, and at the end of term students have to write a 6- to 8-page academic paper, so they need to talk back to earlier scholarship. That leaves a gap in how knowledge travels.

But when it comes to producing knowledge about gender, the academy and the public are fairly close. In the U.S., people who research gender, and Transgender and Queer topics in particular, find it very hard to get tenure — much like the position LGBTQIA people are in: within the structure of power, this group is overlooked. The two sides' political aims line up as well, in the words of this book, in the service of social justice. On top of that, a large share of the people doing gender research have gone into the field themselves, or belong to these groups. So it is hard to say whether the theory runs top-down or the other way.

Q: At the start you said Facebook's 56 unconventional gender terms are progress in language. What about in other respects?

A: First, one shrewd thing Facebook does is keep every gender option beyond male and female in a submenu, a space you have to choose to enter, so more conservative people are spared the discomfort.

Politically, though, Facebook's unrestricted expansion of gender is already having side effects. People tend to equate inventing new words with American multiculturalism, and then equate that with American political correctness.

But I think this word game has to some extent weakened young Americans' sense of gender, or their capacity to act politically on it. It leaves many of them feeling that American society is already progressive, that we are already tolerant. One of my students said in class that her younger sister, not yet 10, already plays with transgender people, so her view was that America is very tolerant now and will only get more so. Another student said in an anthropology class that we shouldn't talk about being gay at all, because being gay is perfectly normal — in California at least there is no government persecution, so what is there to talk about?

American society has fallen into a strange loop, running the multiplication of gender options in parallel with the multiplication of racial ones. As with gender, a category like Asian now has many choices under it too: White Asian, Chinese, and so on. All of this looks like a hundred flowers blooming, but it covers up a much larger political problem: what matters is not the choice of words but really facing this inequality. Look at the "gender-friendly" restrooms so many people opposed, or the shooting at the gay bar. On gender, American society is nowhere near as far ahead in practice as it is in language.

Here is Facebook's list of 71 genders, for reference only:

Female/Male: female, male.

Adgender / Neutrois / Asexual: genderless. Adgender stresses that gender is not a core part of who you are. Asexual stresses having no feeling about sex at all.

Androgyne / Androgynous: a person who mixes the traits of both genders. The first stresses self-identity, the second stresses outward expression.

Bigender: a person who can move freely between any two genders, including any two of these 71.

Cis / Cis Female / Cis Woman / Cis Male / Cis Man / Cisgender / Cisgender Female / Cisgender Male / Cisgender Man / Cisgender Woman: a cisgender person, whose self-identified gender matches the biological sex they were born with. "Cis" is warmer and more everyday; "Cisgender" is more formal.

Female to Male / FTM / F2M: born female, but now moving toward, or completing the move toward, a male self-identity. The last two are abbreviations.

Male to Female / MTF / M2F: the reverse process.

Female to male trans man / Female to male transgender man / Female to male transsexual man & Male to female trans woman / Male to female transgender woman / Male to female transsexual woman: describes the process a person goes through in transition.

Trans / Trans Female / Trans Male / Trans Man / Trans Person / Trans Woman / Transfeminine / Trans* / Trans* Female / Trans* Male / Trans* Man / Trans* Person / Trans* Woman / T* man / T* woman / T* person: transgender. The opposite of cisgender, stressing the mismatch between the gender you were born with and the one you identify with. It is not an unconventional gender either — it still stresses the process of moving between male and female. Trans* is the broader term, covering crossing gender, changing sex and more.

Transgender / Transgender Female / Transgender Male / Transgender Man / Transgender Person / Transgender Woman / Transmasculine / Transsexual / Transsexual Female / Transsexual Male / Transsexual Man / Transsexual Person / Transsexual Woman: the first set is more formal than "Trans." The second, Transsexual, stresses using medical means during transition to change one's physical traits.

Gender Fluid: a person who flows between different genders; the shift is more like a continuous spectrum.

Genderqueer: a person of queer gender, answering the well-known "queer" theory in gender studies.

Gender Nonconforming: a person who refuses the male-female split; the stress is on refusal.

Neither: like Gender Nonconforming, but without stressing refusal.

Non-binary: like Gender Nonconforming, stressing the rejection of binary opposition.

Gender Variant: a gender in the middle of changing.

Gender Questioning: a person in doubt about their gender, unsure of themselves or unable to find a label that fits; an open state.

Intersex / Intersex man / Intersex person / Intersex woman / Hermaphrodite: an intersex person, someone with the sex characteristics of both male and female because of chromosomes or development.

Pangender: a person who identifies as a mix of every gender, in varying proportions.

Ploygender: also against gender; stresses either a still or a flowing state.

Man/Woman: male/female. A catch-all term.

Two-spirit (Two-spirit person): within the Native North American system this means a tribe's shaman-healer, a cultural concept. Here it means a person of both genders.

Gender neutral: a gender that sits between male and female.

Other: other.

Cover image from davidebonazz