facetious geometries of gender

[kaberett]

Earlier:

sebastienne: But yeah I thought v-pillows were an obscure pregnancy thing and here's one in Dunelm for £18
kaberett: They're increasingly marketed to "side-sleepers", who are apparently a demographic now
sebastienne: .... There's a sleeping style trinary
sebastienne: (ternary? trinity?)

Which is how I got to, well, this:


The image is a terrible MS Paint-style sketch, showing two objects.On the left is a tetrahedron, with the top vertex is labelled A; the bottom left is labelled NB; the bottom right is labelled F; the bottom front is labelled M. On the right is a triangle, similarly labelled: top left NB, top right F, bottom M.

The context is that I explained that a ternary diagram is something I use in geochemistry, and I get quite Catholic about trinities, so clearly trinary was the way to go.

... but wait, I said, now I want to draw a diagram of a triangle with the appropriately labelled vertices!!! obviously this has the perpetual problem of reducing gender to a component-based system but I'm still really amused by it!!!

The idea being, right, that at the base of the tetrahedron you've got a plane. If we (this is facetious) categorise any given gender as some combination of female, male, and non-binary, that can be represented as a coordinate in said plane. This is similar to how we represent the chemical composition of feldspars: you make a ternary diagram, with the vertices labelled as K₂O/orthoclase & microcline (top), Na₂O/albite (bottom left), and CaO/anorthite (bottom right), and you get a solid solution that hugs the left-hand border of your triangle: in this band, a stable mineral of that composition (with those proportions of potassium, sodium and calcium) exist, and outside it they don't and you instead get a mixture of different minerals. For bonus points, the solid solution is temperature-dependent: at "low" temperatures (less than about 700°C), there's a gap between albite and K-spars (orthoclase and microcline) where there's no single stable mineral and you again end up with a mixture of different minerals. (They're very pretty under the microscope!)

And then sometimes you actually want a fourth vertex, so instead of sticking to a 2D representation you shift to 3D, and a tetrahedron, and this is mostly deployed for what's called CMAS in geochemistry terms, but the point is that A Single Plane might not be enough to represent what's going on; you might want vertical distance too.

ENTER THE GENDER TETRAHEDRON.

I propose (still facetiously) a model in which we've got the base plane of female-male-nonbinary, along with another component, agender. The closer to any vertex your gender experience lies, the more dominant the influence of that vertex. So, for example, you might be up near the agender vertex, with only weak influences from everything else; or you might be on the agender-female edge; or you might be on what's thought of as the "traditional gender spectrum", the male-female edge. Or if you're genderfluid but definitely experience gender you might lie somewhere on the M-F-NB face on any given day, or perhaps your gender amplitude fluctuates but you're definitely never a man, and you wander around the A-F-NB face.

Or maybe you occupy some other plane through this gendered space! Maybe your gender is temperature-dependent! We can take different slices through the tetrahedron at different heights, such that the total gender area corresponds to the total gender strength!

This is thoroughly silly and absolutely not intended to be A Complete Theory Of Anything, but it was an excuse to combine (1) geochemical representations of the world, (2) nerding about gender, and (3) dubious art, so, you know, that's been a very pleasant diversion for me this afternoon.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

*deeply amused*

[kaberett]

:D

[kaberett]

this is a "gender is a spectrum" expansion that speaks to my SOUL, and also, I get to make snide jokes about Unstable Genders in which I poke fun at James Barrett, he of the "non-binary gender is like anarchy, it's inherently unstable and will inevitably collapse into one of either democracy or fascism".

[alexseanchai]

…

well, James Barrett, those are certainly words in a row there

[redsixwing]

"...such that the total gender area corresponds to the total gender strength!"

PFFFFT

It is silly of me to try and find my coordinates somewhere in there and twice as silly to try and find an opposing vertex for A, perhaps to be labeled pangender.

[kaberett]

:D :D :D

[alexwlchan]

*gigglesnort*

[sebastienne]

I am snuggled up in my v-pillow right now chortling about this post.

[kaberett]

GENDER SCIENCE

sleep well <3

[recessional]

This mostly reminds me that I need to do that post about how one of the Hidden Almanac episodes posited a culture where pronouns were not based on any kind of sexually dimorphic range but rather on life-stage and how much that speaks to my soul, combined with realizing a thing about the "try and say femme is just for lesbians again I DARE YOU" events of the summer. /is coherent, really

[cosmolinguist]

Hello from atop the agender peak! I love this idea so much.

[cosmolinguist]

I have seen, like, pride-flag-colored dice and now I want an agender-colored d4 to wear on a string and use to illustrate this concept. :)

[ghoti]

despite the silly, is definitely a helpful explanation to have in ones pocket for explaining people who are still coming around to the idea of 'more than 2 genders'

[fyreharper]

:D

I do have a particular fondness for d4s :)

:starfishes self into the middle(ish) somewhere and swims around:

[azurelunatic]

*glee from somewhere near the top of the femme-nb face*

[batrachian]

Fuck, I have no idea where I land in this model (at least not without serious more brain than can devote on the way to thing) but the MODEL.

Instant headcanon, hits all the good feels and is also Correct. So.

I have mathematical feelings about these shapes

[ursula]

It doesn't make any sense at all to find a single opposing vertex, because it messes up the mathematical progression ;)

There are three natural families of polytopes you could be looking at. One is the simplices, which start with the triangle and the tetrahedron and then go up to the four-dimensional simplex (with five vertices), etc. There's also the family of squares, cubes, hypercubes, and so forth, but squares are square and thus obviously a bad model for gender.

More fun would be cross-polytopes, which start with a diamond and then go to an octahedron (d8), and keep going, always having twice as many corners as the dimension you're in. In this case, you could have a male/female axis, a nonbinary/extrabinary axis, an agender/pangender axis, etc., etc.

Re: I have mathematical feelings about these shapes

[ursula]

Mind you, if you turn all the vertices into facets and all the facets into vertices, simplices go to simplices and the cross-polytopes and the hypercubes swap. So maybe that's a case for the superiority of simplices in this model.

[silveradept]

More models is not bad, even the facetious ones.

[steorra]

Facetious
It has facets.

Re: I have mathematical feelings about these shapes

[redsixwing]

Pfff. It goes 3 vertices, 4 vertices, 5. ;) Vertical axis is none-all; three axes on the triangular section are as laid out above.

I have made an astonishingly bad diagram to prove my thesis.



...I like your final idea but am lousy at drawing things with that many corners without a ruler.

[divulge]

I love this! <3

[fyreharper]

pangender perhaps would be the entire base plane (opposite the A point)?

[fyreharper]

:D :D

[fyreharper]

Also tbh this is pretty similar to how I already tended to map out gender-spectrum Many Axis funtimes, just more equilateral. Suspect this shape actually makes more sense...