How Many Genders Are There? (Or, Where is the Logical End of Postmodern Thought and What Do We Do About It?)

This Dude – and so far as I can tell, This Dude is neither the anonymous “CalvinDude” nor the writer of the “Epistle of Dude” – has mined the social media platform Tumblr for an answer to the question, “How Many Genders Are There In 2019?”.

The short answer is 112. Unless you are a regular old male or female, neither of which is listed. In that case, adding those in, there are 114.

But wait, there’s more!

“This Dude” goes on to quote the Tumblr site, saying “All types of attractions may be used as suffixes along with ‘-fluid’ and ‘-flux. Feel free to mix and match your own prefixes and suffixes to create the orientation that best describes you.”

So there you have it. There really is no logical end to the number of “genders” there can be. (And therefore, no end to the acronyms beginning with “LGBTQetc.etc.”

This all comports with the kinds of things that Stephen Hicks said regarding Kant, in his work “Explaining Postmodernism”.

Kant’s point was deeper, arguing that in principle any conclusion reached by any of our faculties must necessarily not be about reality. Any form of cognition, because it must operate a certain way, cannot put us in contact with reality. On principle, because our minds’ faculties are structured in a certain way, we cannot say what reality is. We can only say how our minds have structured the subjective reality we perceive. This thesis had been implicit in the works of some earlier thinkers, including Aristotle’s, but Kant made it explicit and drew the conclusion systematically.

Hicks, Stephen R. C., Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (p. 40, Kindle Locations 1157-1162). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

I tend to have great hope in the midst of this mess. A mainstream conservative writer like Victor Davis Hanson has noticed this phenomenon in a recent article, “Changing Reality With Words”. He gives a few examples (“global warming” --> ‘climate change”; “affirmative action” --> “diversity”; “illegal alien” --> “undocumented alien” --> “undocumented immigrant” --> [simply] “immigrant”) and then summarizes:

Democrats used to self-identify as “liberals.” The Latin etymology means “free,” as in the context of “free” thinkers not burdened by oppressive traditions, ideological straitjackets and unworkable norms.

But the problem with “liberal” is that even conservatives occasionally used the term, as in “classical liberals” who judged issues by facts and reason rather than rigid orthodoxy.

Moreover, “liberal” included little notion of evolution and advancement. So gradually, “progressive” has eclipsed the stuffy “liberal.”

“Progressive” infers an activist, not a neutral, ideology—one that is always moving the country in the supposedly correct direction.

After all, who favors “regression” in any field over “progression,” an inherently positive noun implying beneficial advancement?

A liberal Democrat was once someone seen as a free thinker. But “progressive” implies that one is more action-orientated and has an evolutionary agenda, not just a methodology.

Beware of euphemisms. Radical changes in vocabulary are usually admissions that reality is unwelcome or indefensible.

If Hanson is catching on, and if a cadre of conservative Christians are catching on (i.e., the words “Social Justice” don’t mean what they used to mean), we can be assured that most people, and even some of those on the left, will figure out that things are just being taken too far.

Toward that end, we should not hesitate to use these terms with “scare quotes” – indicating that we understand the Kantian / postmodern / deconstructionist tomfoolery that is going on with them.