How many Genders are there?

Answer 1

Our gender has various factors:
- our external physical anatomy (male, female, or mixed)
- our sense of being essentially male, female, or in between
- our internal reproductive anatomy (uterus, ovaries, testes, etc.)
- our chromosomes (which can be XX, XY, XXY, XXYY, or a host of other combinations)
- our hormonal profile (varying levels of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone and other androgens, etc.)

Within a single human, almost any mixture of the above is possible.
Examples:
* A woman may have the sense of being female, appear anatomically female, have female reproductive organs, and female hormones, and yet carry extra male chromosomes that inhibit her ability to conceive children.
* A person like my friend Jay might be born with the full appearance of being female, but at puberty begin to grow facial hair, no breasts, voice drop, and have no menses - upon examination, Jay was determined to have no uterus and testes instead of ovaries, internally, and these testes were pumping out hella testosterone - Jay is intersexed.
* There have been cases of people born with ambiguous genitals or boys whose circumcisions went VERY badly, who were surgically rendered into females as infants and given the appropriate hormones for each stage of life and raised by their parents as girls in every respect. In some cases, these 'girls' were never ever told that they were born male or ambiguous, but they have a persistent sense of being male, and fighting every attempt to acculturate them as female. They 'just knew', much as transfolk 'know' that their own sense of their own gender doesn't match their physical equipment.

If I remember correctly, in my human sexuality class in university, we studied TWELVE variations on gender, when different combinations of the above factors constituting gender were all taken into account.

Answer 2

2

Answer 3

How many sexes are there? Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes"

If you can acquire that article, please do. It's a very interesting read and it discusses flaws gender is faced with in a dichotomist society.

The main ones discussed (and generally accepted in the community of theories discussing gender) are the following:

Male
Female
Herm (true hermaphrodite)
Merm (male identified)
Ferm (female identified)

To keep the article short, this should give you a nice base of information if you choose to pursue more research on the topic.
Gender is fluid, in my opinion.. as is sexuality.

Answer 4

Biologically, there are four: male, female, neuter, like the drones in ant colonies and bee hives, and asexual, as in the case of protozoa, which reproduce by splitting. As far as I know, the jury is still out on whether hermaphroditic individuals within an otherwise duo-sexual species constitute a separate gender.

Answer 5

For People:
In a genetic sense 2
In a physical sense 3
Male, Female, and hermaphrodites.
Some like to rationalize homosexuality with other labels too.

Note:
In fungi there are over 5000 kinds of sexes.

Answer 6

17
Yes that if you take into accont
man
women
men who crossdress
women who crossdress
males that see them selfs and femmine
females that see they selfs as mus
males/females that see them self as being the other and don't want to do any thing about it
males / feemales that live as other sex
for males / females that see them selves as the other live as the other sex and do have surgery complete or other wise
then there are the more complex enunch and people that want penectomies etc for both GG males and females
Then there is intersex and that gets more confusing to work it out.

There is not only male and female black and white they is so much grey
Gender is not only about what you have between your legs it is also what is in you head

Answer 7

Three genetic ones. Male, Female, Intersexed. It is impossible for a human to be a hermaphrodite, the correct term is Intersexed because a hermaphrodite must be able to breed with itself.

Answer 8

Three - male, female, intersex.

Gender does not necessarily have much to do with sexual orientation, btw. Orientation runs the spectrum and it's all natural human biology.

Answer 9

"Gender is a concept that encompasses the special psychosocial meanings added to a biological maleness or femaleness. Thus, although our sex is linked to various physical attributes (chromosomes, penis, vulva and so forth), our gender refers to the psychological and sociocultural characteristics associated with our sex-in other words, our femininity or masculinity."
So, according to this definition two.

Answer 10

someone said not to confuse sexual orientation with gender, thats good advice but you made a mistake and did it anyway.

being transgendered is not sexual orientation. it deals with gender hence the name"transgendered" i am a pre-op transsexual and my gender to me is female and im in transition to make my body match my gender. gender is in your mind not between the legs.

i know that sounds very confusing. but please dont confuse transgender with sexuality.