I’ve recently begun going through a bit of a personal renaissance regarding my gender, and I realized my numbers-focused brain needs something to quantify gender identity, both for myself and so I can better understand others. I also just don’t like socially-constructed labels, at least for myself.

So, using the Kinsey Scale of Sexuality as inspiration, and with input from good friends, I made up my own Gender Identity Scale.

  • Three axes: X, Y, and Z
  • X: Man (not necessarily masculinity), 0 to 6
  • Y: Woman (not necessarily femininity), 0 to 6
  • Z: Fluidity, 0 to 2
  • X and Y axes’ numbers go from 0 - not part of my identity to 6 - strongly identify as
  • Z axis’s numbers go from 0 - non-fluid to 2 - always changing

Example: The average cis-man is 6,0,0, the average cis-woman is 0,6,0, and a “balanced” nonbinary person might be 3,3,1, or 0,0,0, or 6,6,2…

Personally, I think I’m about a 3,2,1 - I don’t have a strong connection to either base gender, but being biologically male, I do identify a bit more as a man. I also feel that I’m somewhat gender-fluid, but not entirely so. I honestly don’t fully understand gender fluidity yet, so the Z-axis may require some tweaking.

Does this make sense? Can you use this to accurately quantify your own gender identity? I wanna know!

  • BumpingFugliesOPEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    OP here.

    Wow, there has been some really excellent, insightful discussion here. Thank you, everybody, for bringing your own perspectives and pulling me further away from my intellectual comfort zone and towards my emotional comfort zone.

    When I came up with this idea, I thought it was genius - a perfect translation of gender identity into a nice, easily-understood series of numbers. I’m beginning to understand now that gender is too complex a subject and too subjective a complex to define in any one specific, consistent way.

    That being said, I’m a dad, and for the sake of my daughter, I’ll always be Dad, no matter what. But that doesn’t mean I have to be a man. I still think I want to raise my kid with the concept of gender, but I’ll let her see by example that that concept needn’t define her in any way if she doesn’t want it to or feel it should/does.