Grays: An Advocacy of 128 Non-Binary Genders
- queerkey
- Feb 25, 2020
- 3 min read
Gender is a social construct—how characteristics, interests, and mannerisms are judged to be either “masculine” or “feminine” hinges on people believing and reinforcing this exhaustive and mutually exclusive classification as a basis of their shared reality. Developed and institutionalised, the gender binary has been widely accepted as "natural" and made into an inescapable dogma just about hammered into our skulls from the time of our births.
What we have been taught divide men and women are not congenital differences. However, many would argue in the face of that statement by pointing at the seemingly binary nature of our biological sex. After all, there are two sets of genitals, gonads, chromosomes and sex hormones.
But as attractive that prima facie judgement is, intersex individuals show us that not only are a wide range of genital variations possible and natural, variations also exist in every attribute used to assign bodies to the “male” and “female” brackets—facial hair, voice pitch, hormonal levels, chromosome makeup, secondary sex characteristics as well as internal reproductive organs—and that biology is not a sufficient defense for the binary division.
The construction of the gender binary is deliberate for, in our patriarchal and cis-normative society, the system has a very real effect and control on our lives in the way that what we perceive to be real becomes real since it begins to have real consequences, regardless of whether it is the truth or not.
The system dictates how we are to assign roles and values to others, and punishes those who do not fit into gender expectations.
These consequences take the form of harmful archetypes like that of the “weaker sex”, power dynamics that demand rigid degrees of assertiveness and aggression, and further manifest into gender roles such as raising children and taking on care-giving tasks for the feminine, and pursuing a career and being physically strong for the masculine.
Gender is a complex concept as it knits together a myriad of miniscule threads reaching deep into every trench and crevice of our lives, from our personal histories and cultures to our expression, language, status and employment.
In my inquiry to give such an intricate and intangible idea a computational and measurable form, I studied 128 different kinds of non-binary gender identities and expressions, and attempted to build an algorithm that works on three different dimensions of gender– biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression. The distinction of gender from sex is imperative.
Biological sex refers to the anatomy of a person’s reproductive system and secondary sex characteristics, and gender identity is the person’s internal experience and identification of their gender. Gender expression refers to the person’s external expression of their gender in their speech, dress, and actions.
Grays is an advocacy that manifests the 128 gender identities and expressions into an encoding of 0’s and 1’s that even a machine can understand. I attach a mathematical value to their relationship with each other and plot them in a three-dimensional space, with each category (biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression) acting as an axis, in an effort to illustrate the narrative that gender and sex aren’t binary or linear for that matter, that they're multifaceted, that there’s an amalgam of multiple identities, expressions, and attributes which give rise to diversity and numerous possibilities outside of the gender binary framework.
For more information, visit page: https://mya-kiwi.com/project/grays
Regards,
Soumya
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