by FentFan » March 19th, 2012, 11:11 pm
In all the years I've been chatting with and learning about trans individuals online, in order to learn more about myself, I've found that it's pretty clear to see that gender isn't something that's black and white, or even a spectrum of varying shades with male and female on either end, it's far more complicated than that.
By grouping together individuals I've met with various identifications based on how they described themselves, I've more or less gotten it split into a bit of a gender-circle (think the unit circle, from trig, but less well defined)
Obviously, there are the four most well known genders, cismasculine, cisfeminine, transmasculine, and transfeminine, where the only real distinction is the birth sex. I separate trans from cis because there are many transpeople who identify themselves as, for example "a woman born male" or "an XY-woman" rather than simply stating "I am a woman, the same as any cisgendered woman", and the two groups seem to be distinct from one another.
Besides those four, there are two other fairly stark standouts, those who identify as a "Third-Gender" and those who identify as "Agender" (A as a prefix, meaning without, similar to asexual). Third-gender individuals and Agender individuals are distinct, in that both believe they are not the other, and at the same time, have neither masculine nor feminine genders.
With these four, the four "corners" of the circle are made, with masculine and feminine opposite one another, and third gender and agender opposite one another. The way I normally visualize it is with Agender as 0 degrees, feminine as 90, third gender as 180, and masculine as 270.
Beyond there are the gender-fluid identities; bi-gender, tri-gender, and pan-gender. Bi-gender is typically masculine-feminine, but I have met individuals who split differently, as masculine-3rd, feminine-3rd, and a couple who identified as half-gender, mixing in Agender into the mix, in a very confusing way that I still don't totally understand. All of the tri-gender individuals I've met are masculine-feminine-third, though I won't rule out the possibility of someone mixing in Agender. Finally, pan-gender individuals more or less identify as all four, and tend to have the most variation in how they identify at any given moment in time. (note: the orders of identification I've given for bi/tri genders are arbitrary)
There's more, still, but I don't have a good enough understanding of multiplicity and the other genders I've encountered to really want to speak on them. And I'm sure there are more that I've still not seen.
tl;dr: yes, bi-gender individuals are actually more common than those silly surveys would suggest (especially given how inaccurate they are when ever they're about the population of transpeople), if you know where to look.