5alive is a user on cybre.space. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.

here's an entirely pointless point:

imagine a graph, X axis is the gender with masculine and feminine as points -1 and 1, Y is how intensely you are that gender with an average at 1.

now of course the two points are placed arbitrarily, that's why it's *socially constructed*.

now add a dimension Z repeating that process for every way of expressing gender

nonbinary conventionally means it's not in some radius around (X/Y) -1;1 and 1;1, or inconsistent in Z, but really everyone is some of it.

5alive @5alive

@CobaltVelvet I've had a thing where I try to explain nonbinary gender in a similar way: First we consider gender as male and female, binary and discrete. This doesn't allow for any variance in gender conformity so maybe gender is a spectrum, the Z-axis. Then we can go further, because having only one dimension implies that masculinity and femininity are opposed and cancel each other out, so we make each its own axis. Then further genders are 3rd, 4th, etc dimensions.

@CobaltVelvet more accurately, in the thing I proposed, any particular gender would be a point in a multidimensional space where each dimension is a sort of gender basis vector that is socially constructed. Masculine and feminine are perhaps just two basis vectors in gender space.

Feels good to meet someone who wants to do the "let social sciences use math metaphors again" thing. I think Derrida or whoever really screwed it up a while ago.