Wednesday, January 22, 2020
GIAHS Survey 2020
I'm conducting a project whereby I survey as many people as I can about their gender identity and pronoun set so that I can spread awareness of what it's like to have a MOGAI gender identity, what it means to them, what pronouns are being used, and why. These results will then be compiled and sorted by gender identity and pronoun, so that not only will people see, for example, that yes, digigender people exist, but here's what it means to be digigender to this individual person. Here's why they use this pronoun set. This way we can educate others when they ask things like "but what does digigender actually mean?" with several responses of people who have that experience. Remember, there is no one way to experience a gender identity, and that's why I'm conducting this survey, in order to highlight the different experiences of everyone.
https://forms.gle/8jEcWqQFYYmGcsJz9
In defense of xenogenders
The concept of "male/masculine" and "female/feminine" are incredibly arbitrary. It isn't even based on a tangible feeling, object, or concept. They're also incredibly broad to the point that the identity is incredibly vague. Some people like to be more specific in how they identify, especially if their identity falls outside of the binary (as the binary is incredibly vague and nonspecific and exclusionary of many expressions and identities).
Let's put it this way. In western culture, we typically classify colors as light, dark, and normal variants of the following colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, white, gray, and black. But there are an infinite number of colors, and each of these aren't one specific color. They're a spectrum. Fun fact. Cyan isn't a shade of blue. Cyan is as different from blue as yellow is to green. Yet people don't recognize cyan as anything but a shade of blue because people are so fixated onto the categories they've learned as a child.
Now let's take a trip to Lowe's and go to the paint section. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand different colors, each slightly different than the others, each with its own name, like Summer Sunshine or Splish Splash (my previous room was painted Valspar Splish Splash, and if anyone asks me the color of my room, I will tell them Valspar Splish Splash, and say for reference it is like cerulean). Now someone can argue that Splish Splash is blue. But you go to the blues and there are about 50 different shades of blue. Valspar specifically named their colors so you know which specific color you're getting, so that when you come back to buy paint to touch it up, you know exactly which color to get, because they recognize that "blue" is a spectrum, and it's necessary to have specific labels to be accurate in what you're getting.
Even outside of commercial paint, let's take artist's paint. It's not brown, it's burnt sienna. It's not orange, it's vermillion. It's not green, it's chartreuse. It's not blue, it's viridian. These colors are necessary in art and chromatically distinct from the single hues that define "true" red, "true" green, "true" blue, etc. One could argue that "oh, chartreuse is just a shade of green. It's a pretentious/special snowflake color name" as that is apparently something I've seen people actually do.
But here's the thing. Certain cultures don't have a word to distinguish red from yellow, and to them, it would be ridiculous to say that they're much different. At the same time, other cultures could have a dozen words for various shades of red, and will look at you weirdly if you say that they're all one red. So trying to say that only the aforementioned color categories are the only valid names is a purely Western concept, when in fact, as we very well know, color is a spectrum. We only think there's only a handful of colors because we were taught certain color categories in our youth, even though there's literally an infinite number of chromatically distinct colors, and even more ways to mix their light together to make an entirely new perceptually distinct color. That's why the specific terms like "cerulean" or "burgundy" or "taupe" are so incredibly important to artists, because art works in the specific color details, and a more accurate, more specific named hue is incredibly important and valued, pun entirely intended.
Furthermore, let's say that I want to specifically refer to the color #2a0673. This color, this color specifically, in hex code, is my boyfriend's favorite color. He specified the hex code to me. This color doesn't have a name. Therefore I'm going to call it "zeebar" or something. Is that word "made up?" News flash, all words are made up. It's called a neologism when a new word is created. The word "website" didn't exist until about 30 years ago, either. Neither did "internet" or "ethernet" but nobody says those words are fake, do they? Yes, the word is made up, but does it refer to something real? Yes, it refers to the specific color, #2a0673. It refers to my boyfriend's specific favorite color. Is it purple? Perhaps from the viewpoint of your closed box obsessed with preconceived categories it is. But really, it is zeebar, and it's still a valid color, whether you like it or not.
So what does this all have to do with genders and xenogenders, you may ask me. Gender, much like color, is a spectrum. In fact, it's more complex than a spectrum. You can represent all visible light in a 3 dimensional cube, where one axis is hue, another axis is saturation, and another axis is brightness. Alternatively you can represent it as percent red, percent green, percent blue. Or, a 4D cube with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. But as explained below, gender is a Hilbert Space, an arbitrarily large, effectively infinitely dimensional Euclidean space, each which axis is a spectrum. But let's pretend we PCA-ed the hell out of the gender matrix and reduced it down to a 1D spectrum, where each wavelength is one form of gender identity. Trying to say there are only two genders is like trying to say there are only two colors, red and blue. Sure, can every color be essentially classified as "essentially red" or "essentially blue?" Roughly, yes. Is it accurate to say that yellow is "effectively red" or that green is "effectively blue?" No. They are chromatically distinct colors, just like every point on the spectrum. Is it accurate to say that a femme non-binary person is "effectively female" or a masc non-binary person is "effectively male?" No, because they're "chromatically" different gender identities. It's even possible to have an identity that isn't masculine or feminine, just as it's possible to have a "color" that's outside the visible spectrum. Can we see UV light? Not unless you're a tetrachromat. Do UV wavelengths still exist? Obviously they do. Same with the non-binary identities. We can't see some of them in the spectrum of male and female, but that's because they exist outside the ranges of that spectrum, just as UV and IR exist outside the visible light spectrum.
Xenogender identities, like stargender, frostgender, and digigender, are the "maroon," "tan," and "lavender" of colors. Those colors are chromatically distinct from red, brown, and purple. The mentioned genders are likewise "chromatically" distinct from male and female. Now, you may ask me, "why can't we just have a third category for non-binary, instead of having so many special names for genders?" Let's put it this way. This would be like trying to classify a color as either red, green, or blue, as opposed to just as red or blue. There are still an infinite number of chromatically distinct colors that some people need more accuracy than just three categories to describe. And just like with zeebar, where a specific color doesn't have an existing name, we have to create a new gender term for a gender identity that definitely exists on the spectrum of genders; just one that doesn't yet have a name.
But what about people taking on 100 different gender identities? Let me tell you, you can mix colors across the spectrum to get a distinctly new color, and that new color can be chromatically broken down as the weighted sum of the intensities of the other colors that make it up. And just as this is a chromatically distinct color, so too is the "chromatically" distinct gender identity.
In summary, gender identity is a lot like color. You can be weird and argue that there are only two colors, or you can accept the fact that color and gender are both spectrums, each with distinct qualities along the spectrum. Vermillion is just as much a color as orange is, and digigender is just as much a gender as male is.
Let's put it this way. In western culture, we typically classify colors as light, dark, and normal variants of the following colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, white, gray, and black. But there are an infinite number of colors, and each of these aren't one specific color. They're a spectrum. Fun fact. Cyan isn't a shade of blue. Cyan is as different from blue as yellow is to green. Yet people don't recognize cyan as anything but a shade of blue because people are so fixated onto the categories they've learned as a child.
Now let's take a trip to Lowe's and go to the paint section. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand different colors, each slightly different than the others, each with its own name, like Summer Sunshine or Splish Splash (my previous room was painted Valspar Splish Splash, and if anyone asks me the color of my room, I will tell them Valspar Splish Splash, and say for reference it is like cerulean). Now someone can argue that Splish Splash is blue. But you go to the blues and there are about 50 different shades of blue. Valspar specifically named their colors so you know which specific color you're getting, so that when you come back to buy paint to touch it up, you know exactly which color to get, because they recognize that "blue" is a spectrum, and it's necessary to have specific labels to be accurate in what you're getting.
Even outside of commercial paint, let's take artist's paint. It's not brown, it's burnt sienna. It's not orange, it's vermillion. It's not green, it's chartreuse. It's not blue, it's viridian. These colors are necessary in art and chromatically distinct from the single hues that define "true" red, "true" green, "true" blue, etc. One could argue that "oh, chartreuse is just a shade of green. It's a pretentious/special snowflake color name" as that is apparently something I've seen people actually do.
But here's the thing. Certain cultures don't have a word to distinguish red from yellow, and to them, it would be ridiculous to say that they're much different. At the same time, other cultures could have a dozen words for various shades of red, and will look at you weirdly if you say that they're all one red. So trying to say that only the aforementioned color categories are the only valid names is a purely Western concept, when in fact, as we very well know, color is a spectrum. We only think there's only a handful of colors because we were taught certain color categories in our youth, even though there's literally an infinite number of chromatically distinct colors, and even more ways to mix their light together to make an entirely new perceptually distinct color. That's why the specific terms like "cerulean" or "burgundy" or "taupe" are so incredibly important to artists, because art works in the specific color details, and a more accurate, more specific named hue is incredibly important and valued, pun entirely intended.
Furthermore, let's say that I want to specifically refer to the color #2a0673. This color, this color specifically, in hex code, is my boyfriend's favorite color. He specified the hex code to me. This color doesn't have a name. Therefore I'm going to call it "zeebar" or something. Is that word "made up?" News flash, all words are made up. It's called a neologism when a new word is created. The word "website" didn't exist until about 30 years ago, either. Neither did "internet" or "ethernet" but nobody says those words are fake, do they? Yes, the word is made up, but does it refer to something real? Yes, it refers to the specific color, #2a0673. It refers to my boyfriend's specific favorite color. Is it purple? Perhaps from the viewpoint of your closed box obsessed with preconceived categories it is. But really, it is zeebar, and it's still a valid color, whether you like it or not.
So what does this all have to do with genders and xenogenders, you may ask me. Gender, much like color, is a spectrum. In fact, it's more complex than a spectrum. You can represent all visible light in a 3 dimensional cube, where one axis is hue, another axis is saturation, and another axis is brightness. Alternatively you can represent it as percent red, percent green, percent blue. Or, a 4D cube with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. But as explained below, gender is a Hilbert Space, an arbitrarily large, effectively infinitely dimensional Euclidean space, each which axis is a spectrum. But let's pretend we PCA-ed the hell out of the gender matrix and reduced it down to a 1D spectrum, where each wavelength is one form of gender identity. Trying to say there are only two genders is like trying to say there are only two colors, red and blue. Sure, can every color be essentially classified as "essentially red" or "essentially blue?" Roughly, yes. Is it accurate to say that yellow is "effectively red" or that green is "effectively blue?" No. They are chromatically distinct colors, just like every point on the spectrum. Is it accurate to say that a femme non-binary person is "effectively female" or a masc non-binary person is "effectively male?" No, because they're "chromatically" different gender identities. It's even possible to have an identity that isn't masculine or feminine, just as it's possible to have a "color" that's outside the visible spectrum. Can we see UV light? Not unless you're a tetrachromat. Do UV wavelengths still exist? Obviously they do. Same with the non-binary identities. We can't see some of them in the spectrum of male and female, but that's because they exist outside the ranges of that spectrum, just as UV and IR exist outside the visible light spectrum.
Xenogender identities, like stargender, frostgender, and digigender, are the "maroon," "tan," and "lavender" of colors. Those colors are chromatically distinct from red, brown, and purple. The mentioned genders are likewise "chromatically" distinct from male and female. Now, you may ask me, "why can't we just have a third category for non-binary, instead of having so many special names for genders?" Let's put it this way. This would be like trying to classify a color as either red, green, or blue, as opposed to just as red or blue. There are still an infinite number of chromatically distinct colors that some people need more accuracy than just three categories to describe. And just like with zeebar, where a specific color doesn't have an existing name, we have to create a new gender term for a gender identity that definitely exists on the spectrum of genders; just one that doesn't yet have a name.
But what about people taking on 100 different gender identities? Let me tell you, you can mix colors across the spectrum to get a distinctly new color, and that new color can be chromatically broken down as the weighted sum of the intensities of the other colors that make it up. And just as this is a chromatically distinct color, so too is the "chromatically" distinct gender identity.
In summary, gender identity is a lot like color. You can be weird and argue that there are only two colors, or you can accept the fact that color and gender are both spectrums, each with distinct qualities along the spectrum. Vermillion is just as much a color as orange is, and digigender is just as much a gender as male is.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Why is gender a Hilbert Space?
In mathematics, the concept of a Hilbert Space is fairly simple. It takes the notion of 2D and 3D Euclidean spaces, and generalizes them to any n dimensional Euclidean space, often referring to an infinitely dimensional Euclidean space.
Gender is often seen as a binary structure; forget two dimensional. Uneducated individuals are often misinformed in thinking there are only two genders, "male" and "female." Oddly enough, the traits and personalities associated with the concept of "male" and "female" are incredibly arbitrary, yet they're the ones touted to be the only valid genders. They're so uninformed that they reject the medical reality of intersex individuals and their experiences. Some, slightly more woke psychologists suggest that gender is a 2-dimensional spectrum, with one axis being masculinity and the other being femininity. The origin would be seen as one form of androgynous expression (what one would more sensibly call agender) and the further end of y = x is seen as more of a bigender androgynous expression.
The problem with seeing gender as merely a 2D spectrum is that it fails to account for individuals who fall entirely out of the binary, or have an expression that only partially lies within the binary. At the same time, we can't merely make a third dimension that's simply labeled "nonbinary" as there isn't one way to identify as non-binary, just as there isn't just one way to be feminine or masculine. In fact, there's an arbitrarily large, effectively infinite ways to identify, each with a spectrum being from a-(gender) to demi-(gender) to the full gender. The simple masculine/feminine graph also fails to account for the fact that there are masculine females and feminine males, without them being androgynous or bigender, as there's a difference between gender identity and gender expression.
This is why gender is a Hilbert Space. Furthermore, gender isn't a coordinate point, or even a vector within the Hilbert Space. Gender is a tensor. Gender is a parametric equation. Gender is fluid, and not a static feature.
The important thing to recognize is that there isn't a single imaginary portion to the gender; however, despite that, gender is still complex.
Gender is often seen as a binary structure; forget two dimensional. Uneducated individuals are often misinformed in thinking there are only two genders, "male" and "female." Oddly enough, the traits and personalities associated with the concept of "male" and "female" are incredibly arbitrary, yet they're the ones touted to be the only valid genders. They're so uninformed that they reject the medical reality of intersex individuals and their experiences. Some, slightly more woke psychologists suggest that gender is a 2-dimensional spectrum, with one axis being masculinity and the other being femininity. The origin would be seen as one form of androgynous expression (what one would more sensibly call agender) and the further end of y = x is seen as more of a bigender androgynous expression.
The problem with seeing gender as merely a 2D spectrum is that it fails to account for individuals who fall entirely out of the binary, or have an expression that only partially lies within the binary. At the same time, we can't merely make a third dimension that's simply labeled "nonbinary" as there isn't one way to identify as non-binary, just as there isn't just one way to be feminine or masculine. In fact, there's an arbitrarily large, effectively infinite ways to identify, each with a spectrum being from a-(gender) to demi-(gender) to the full gender. The simple masculine/feminine graph also fails to account for the fact that there are masculine females and feminine males, without them being androgynous or bigender, as there's a difference between gender identity and gender expression.
This is why gender is a Hilbert Space. Furthermore, gender isn't a coordinate point, or even a vector within the Hilbert Space. Gender is a tensor. Gender is a parametric equation. Gender is fluid, and not a static feature.
The important thing to recognize is that there isn't a single imaginary portion to the gender; however, despite that, gender is still complex.
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