Towards a "geometry" of gender (part 2): Diametric, Complementary, Orthogonal gender

At the end of my last post, in response to Figleaf's "Non-Euclidean gender" post, I suggested a list of seven "gender axioms":

1. Primary sex characteristics axiom
2. Reproductive status axiom
3. Secondary sex characteristics axiom
4. Orientation axiom
5. Partner preference axiom
6. Behavioural gender axiom
7. Displayed gender axiom

Figleaf was criticising gender on the basis that it was prescriptive, or even proscriptive, of people's identities. In turn, I labelled his statement, "attempts to prescribe or even proscribe who you are in relation to all those other descriptive things," as the "diametric postulate".

The "diametric postulate" can be more clinically defined as being the statement that "gender according to one axiom defines gender according to the others". This model of gender can be described as viewing "male" and "female" as diametric opposites on a circle:



In modern Western culture, a lot of the times, "neither" equates to "wrong".

This is also the model that asks us to view gender identity as a straight line, with "completely masculine" at one end, and "completely feminine" at the other.

Another way of looking at gender is the "complementary" model:



In this model, every quality is either male or female, and every person is either male or female. Ostensibly, it's the way that the yin/yang dichotomy views the universe (I'll have more to say on that later). Rather than "othering" those who do not fit in with with the diametric postulate, this model simply insists on using one or other of the gender axioms to declare a person to be in a particular category (regardless of that person's own views on the matter). It is this view of gender that Figleaf attacks when he says:

Stuff like "Oh, you got boobs? Then you gotta wear a top." Even if you've had a mastectomy and don't even *have* boobs anymore. Unless they're man boobs and then you don't. Unless you're a trans man or woman then maybe you do and maybe you don't and then somehow it's *your* fault if *my* rules aren't adequate to your reality. The problem in cases like that is that it's all trying to *construct* these rules about gender in an attempt to tidy up the reality of the other harder and faster axioms that *don't* all just come in tidy distinctions. Or even tidy *gradations!*

There is, of course, another way of splitting up the circle:


In this view, there are only a few essentially "male" or "female" characteristics, but many characteristics that can be possessed without indicating gender (which appears to be the model that Figleaf is advocating). The essentially male or essentially female characteristics would most likely be the primary and secondary sex characteristics in a physical sense. In a social sense, then they could be taken from any of the gender axioms. Thus, it is possible for a person to be "masculine but a little bit feminine" and still remain in the eyes of the person viewing them, both "a man" and "okay".

However, like all the other divisions of the circle, there is an implicit status that gender is a zero-sum game. That is, if you have 100 gender "chips", then if you put 64 chips on "masculine" then the other 36 chips must go on "feminine". If you feel yourself to be half masculine, then the other half must be feminine. So, eventually, they all boil down to the single line with "100% male" at one end, and "100% female" at the other. When they did this experiment at school in our sex education classes, asking everyone to stand somewhere on the line between male and female, it was understood they wanted both genders to have characteristics of the other, and we were expected to stand somewhere near-ish the middle. I didn't want to stand in the middle. I wanted to stand at both ends of the spectrum. I wanted to identify as being both 100% male and 100% female.

Which leads me to a final model for discussing gender, which I call the "orthogonal model":


In this model, male and female are seen as being (in a social sense) not opposites on a line, but as being two independent dimensions. The traditional "diametric" view is seen in this diagram as a red line; for illustration, the green line shows the distinction between being "neither gender" and being "both genders" - in that sex ed class, I wanted to place myself somewhere near the top of the green line. In this model, also, it should be possible to see that physical sex characteristics are a poor predictor of which side of the green line a person might be expected to fall.

How these models, and the axioms presented before, operate in social situations, will be addressed in my next post.