It throws the very concept of gender into the void, causing all genders to lose all meaning. Of course, that is precisely what a handful of critical gender theorists want. Still, many believe their gender gives them certain rights and protections under the law, but if gender goes, so do their rights associated with it. We cannot separate gender and sex without slipping into absurdity.
How many genders are there? If you Google it, you will get varying answers. Medicinenet.com says there are 74. Google’s AI says, “There are many genders, and the number is infinite. Gender is a person’s internal identification and is not determined by genetics.” What does this ultimately mean? It seems illogical to say that by separating gender from genetics, there are an infinite number of genders; instead, it seems more reasonable to say there are none.
The following analogy might help us understand why this view of gender does not multiply them but eradicates them. If I say there are a limitless number of possible ice cream flavors, therefore, there are no ice cream flavors, you would be right to point out the flaw in my logic. Even if there is no limit to the number of ice cream flavors, that does not mean that each scoop of ice cream does not have its own unique flavor. But this is not what critical gender theorists are doing. To make it fit, we need to adjust the analogy a bit.
A more accurate analogy would be to say there are a limitless number of possible ice cream flavors, but the taste of the ice cream has nothing to do with its ingredients. It is entirely psychological. One’s internal experience solely determines the flavor of the ice cream. In other words, there may be a limitless number of ingredient possibilities that would change the objective makeup of the ice cream, but since ingredients do not determine flavor, each objective recipe has an unlimited number of subjective flavors depending on who is doing the tasting.
In this analogy, the flavor of ice cream has been entirely untethered from any objectivity, which also means it becomes irrational to talk about flavors because any shared experience becomes unattainable. It is no longer possible to point to any ice cream and say it has a specific flavor, as flavor has lost all common reference points and meaning.
This freedom from objective reality is what many proponents of this view of gender find appealing.