She/He/They/Me summary

Now that we’ve left behind some of our baggage, we can begin our journey. Right at the start, we find ourselves at a crossroads, with two paths open to us. The first one leads to all of the possible societies in which gender exists. The second one leads to those in which it doesn’t exist. 

Let’s start with the second path. 

As we enter the realm of societies in which gender exists, we arrive at another crossroads – this one branching into four paths. Each path represents a different answer to a single question: How many genders are there? There’s the familiar answer of “two,” but that’s just one possibility. Let’s take a look at the other three. 

First, we have societies in which there’s only one gender. 

After considering the complexities of a society with three or even infinite genders, you might think that having only two of them would be pretty straightforward in comparison. But even with just two genders, there are still plenty of possibilities. 

While the words might stay the same, the actual meaning of “masculine,” “feminine” and their related terms can drastically change between different cultures, eras and groups of people within a particular society, such as races and socioeconomic classes. 

To continue our exploration of two-gender societies, and to see how different cultures can have radically divergent notions of femininity, let’s first return to the contemporary US.

Here, girls are conventionally taught to be nurturing and passive. For example, they’re “supposed” to take care of their younger siblings, and they’re not “supposed” to get their clothes dirty or be “domineering” when they play with other children. 

Now that we’ve seen some examples of gender norms and socialization, we can ask some more fundamental questions: What’s the point of these norms? And why bother teaching them to children in the first place? 

To find the answers, let’s consider a more straightforward question: If modern American boys are being encouraged to behave like leaders and discouraged from acting like nurturers, and if the opposite is true for girls, what kind of roles are the children being prepared for when they grow up into adults? 

Before we set off into the realm of matriarchal societies, let’s remind ourselves of the definition we established in the previous blink: matriarchal societies are societies in which women possess more power than men overall. 

That word “overall” is crucial. If you just looked at the gender distribution of legislative seats in Rwanda, then it would seem like women had more power than men. 

You might suppose that a matriarchal society would look just like a patriarchal society in reverse – with women dominating men, rather than the other way around. But if the anthropological record is any indication, that’s not necessarily the case. 

Now, there’s controversy among researchers over whether any society has ever been truly matriarchal, and debate over what the word “matriarchy” even means in the first place. But there have been some societies in which power has tended to be held more by women than by men. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these matriarchal societies and look at some of their general features. 

Up until now, we’ve been looking at possible answers to the following set of questions: For a given society, is there the concept of gender? If yes, how many genders are there? How are they defined? What are their norms? How are those norms instilled? And which gender has more power? 

The answers to these questions define the broad contours of what gender looks like in a particular society; they shape an overall gender landscape, so to speak. But individual human beings still need to navigate that landscape for themselves, and there are all sorts of possible paths they can take. 

Intersex conditions are much more frequent than you might think. Some estimates put them as occurring in as much as 1.7 percent of the global population – comparable to the percentage of people who have red hair! These conditions also illustrate some other important aspects of gender, so, for both reasons, they’re well worth examining in more depth. 

Ambiguous genitalia is just one of many possible reasons a person might be intersex. Other intersex conditions include having a penis and a vagina, an ovary and a testis, or XXO, XXY or XO sexual chromosomes (unlike the biologically female XX and male XY chromosomes). 

Imagine once more that you were born with a visible intersex condition – but this time, your doctor and family were ethically opposed to the concealment-centered model. As an alternative, they might follow the patient-centered model.

In this model, your doctor and family will choose a gender for you at birth – but it’ll be a provisional one, and they’ll assign it to you with the understanding that you might want to revise it when you’re older. 

Let’s say that one way or another, you’ve established your gender identity: you're a trans woman, cis man, nonbinary person or whatever the case might be. 

But establishing your gender identity is hardly the end of your gender journey; in many ways, it’s just the beginning. From here, all sorts of possibilities open up. We can divide them into two additional dimensions of gender.