So, in light of the couple topics on the forum that brought misunderstanding an bigotry to the forefront of the discussion, here's a diagram I made a while ago, that helps understand how things actually work. I'm looking for a good graphist to improve it, there are things I still don't like about it, but it's still pretty accurate.



So imagine each of these rows is like one of those sliders you see on music recording equipment. Each individual is born with what we can call an innate range, which is the limits the slider can't go beyond. And then, during the course of your life, your slider will be at some point or another, inside this innate range.

All rows behave separately. It's very important to understand. As a society, we have this impression that sex and gender are the same thing. It's like every sexual caracteristic is represented by a switch, and when chromosomal sexual determination is made at conception, if you have XX, all the switches go to female, and XY pushes them all to male. We now know that this is nonesense, thanks to countless studies disproving it, and it's very well summed up by Sapolsky in the video Spearthrower posted earlier.


Now let's take each row and review it.

Biological sex is the only row in this diagram where the innate range is very narrow, almost linear. Actually, the only reason it's not linear is because of some cases Sapolsky mentions, especially one I talked about 6 years ago on this forum. It's still important to remind people that they accept the wide range of human caracteristics when it comes to size, wheight, skin/hair color, behavior, and everything else but biological sex. I'm wondering if 1900 years of religious indoctrination has anything to do with this
Anyway, biological sex is mostly finite, and can be described as an aggregation of about 20 sexual caracteristics, each of them coming in more than 3 options. The result simply can't be binary.

Gender identity is harder to quantify. Gender is a social construct of how percived biological male and female should behave. For those who don't accept/can't understand that definition, try to explain to me the biological reason why male are blue and female pink. Or why male are supposed to have short hair and female long hair (now, and not 300 years ago). I'll wait.
It's not biological, because it's a social construct.
Now how is it possible for a social construct to be internalized at birth ? I don't think we have the answer to that question yet. I think there are epigenetics factors at play here, but no evidence for that yet. We still have evidence that it is, and that should be enough for anyone claiminig to be rational.
And so depending on the individual, the innate range for this row can be relatively small inside the blue or pink area, straddle on the 2 or 3 or be in the grey area altogether. Just natural variability at play.

Gender expression is more simple. It's basically the gender to show to other people. It obviously can be linked to gender identity, but not necessarily, as it can be tied to the acceptance of other people. A closeted trans woman will express herself as male, for example.

Romantic attraction is the combination of gender and biological sex you can fall in love with. Regardless of who you are, you can be attracted or pushed away by either biological characteristics or "types", which can be seen as gender subcategories.

Sexual attraction is more akin to what we call "physical attraction", and it may or may not be different from romantic attraction. But it CAN be different, therefore it needs its own slider. Like if you're into big dicks/boobs, that's doesn't go into the romantic attraction thing

Sexual behavior is to sexual attraction what gender expression is to gender identity. Your sexual behavior is obviously highly dependant on your sexual attraction, but can be altered by the lack of suiting mates, being under the influence of substances, religion, etc.

And finally there's the relationship type, which is pretty much self-explanatory.

Once you've identified where all of your sliders are, their combination can help you find the label that suits you best. Like if your biological sex is in the blue and your gender identity in the pink, you're a trans woman. If your biological sex is M, romantic attraction F, you're a heterosexual male.

There are dozens labels out there, and this graph helps understand why there are so many, and where one might stand.

You can share this image as much as you want.

Romantic attraction is the combination of gender and biological sex you can fall in love with. Regardless of who you are, you can be attracted or pushed away by either biological characteristics or "types", which can be seen as gender subcategories.

And in a society not repressed by a guilt-based religion, the potential variations here can become difficult to envision.

In Thailand, for example, Adams are males presenting as males who are romantically and sexually attracted to Toms, that is, females who present as males and today often have gender surgery, and a Dee is a female presenting as a very cutesy/girly female who also likes Toms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_id ... n_Thailand

Thai social studies have identified 18 gender identities and roles running back through recorded history, although of course some of them are really only minor subdivisions.

Part of the presentation of gender in Thailand involves language, because there are many gendered language expressions in Thai - the most obvious of which is 'kha' (female) or 'krub' (male) as a polite phrase to end a sentence, and these are used as part of that presentation of gender when there is a discrepancy between sex and gender. Then you have softer versions of these you'd perhaps use with your children or sweet-heart, such a 'ja' - but 'ja' is also used exclusively by some of the gender identities. It's rich and colourful and completely opaque to an outsider.

The simple binary is very much a product of that guilt-based Christian history which positively revels in diametric binaries simplifying the world for the ignorant medieval peasantry who apparently intellectually still exist.