Sex: male or female. A penis or a vagina, as they say. A rule with the only exception being chromosomal mutations.
Through that, a third answer: intersex.
Gender: man or woman. This time, the answer isn't black and white and scientifically verifiable but more ethereal and abstract. What is a woman, truly? A concept as far as the imagine takes it. Receptive but strong minded. Imaginative and prone to being blue. Sometimes reticent other times bubbly. Nurturing and caring. Lovely and fragile yet fierce and powerful. Yearning and mellow. And what is a man? A provider. A leader. Hard headed and rough. Protective and knowing. The sun to her moon. Bright bold and always striving to be the best. To exert and prove himself. Dominant. The will to acheive.
Yet these are all adjectives, messy labels with vast and somewhat contradicting connotations, some unappealing to the energy signature (which to me as a spiritualist is what gender is defined by) that it is the descriptor of. Some men might identify wit woman's desciption and some women might identify more with man's.
How did you know you were always a girl? they ask the child who wears a pink dress but has an XY chromosome has not undergone the drastic surgery of getting her penis removed.
She twists her hair between her finger. "I wanted to play with Barbies. I wanted to do makeup like at mommy." To her mother she shoots a grin, full of positive delight at all the attention she is getting. Could that be apart of the equation? The Oedipal complex being inverted into the Electra? (Psychologists don't have a real answer to that but that point may be way left field anyway.)
They do, however, have some answers. Apparenty trans people, or those who identify as the opposite gender from the sex they were assigned at birth, have brains that are more similar to those of the gender they claim to be. There is neurological evidence backing their existences and validity.
Transgenderism has been on the rise- it's supposed that the more media attention it garners the more children are realizing their own suppressed identities- and with that, new divergences from cis-gender normalcy are sprouting up labelled under the umbrella of queer or non-binary.
Gender neutrals are both gender. Agenders are neither. Gender fluid people feel like their gender is so flexible that it flows from male to female back to male from hour to hour or day to day.
Then you get people who like to get extremely specific: demigirl, demiboy, fluidflux, vocigender, etc.
That is where you have the popular meme "there are 89 genders" and the conjecture that if tjere are so many, and some are even laughable, like feeling like a cloud or switching genders when you see a certain colour, people think that anybody not identifying as male or female is crazy or doing it for attention. Period.
Not only is this hurtful and stigmatizing, but it is hypocritical that male to female and female to male trans advocates can show such detest at fellow members of the LGBTQIA community.
You are telling me that you have no idea whatsoever what it feels like to be in the middle on a certain spectrum? To not fit into either role? Or to fit perfectly well into both, too well for you to say which is really you since they are both so natural and befitting. Or the opposite where either labe makes you feel uncomfortable and dysphoric like you are wearing the wrong skin and it is too right for you. While there aren't 89 genders, there are definitely more than 2. I mean, that much should be obvious for anyone who uses science to fact check; there are more than two biological sexes. But some people cling to the olden way, either because of an imagined duty to fit into an idealistic caricature of a person with views that make them seem superior and accepted by all, or because they ultimately fear change.
But self-expression is a beautiful thing, and as we chug on towards enlightenment, we must learn to not judge and to always run after the truth no matter how frightening and isolating it could be.
