here's an entirely pointless point:
imagine a graph, X axis is the gender with masculine and feminine as points -1 and 1, Y is how intensely you are that gender with an average at 1.
now of course the two points are placed arbitrarily, that's why it's *socially constructed*.
now add a dimension Z repeating that process for every way of expressing gender
nonbinary conventionally means it's not in some radius around (X/Y) -1;1 and 1;1, or inconsistent in Z, but really everyone is some of it.
Tsatnosk
@CobaltVelvet I have a more-than-average mathematical oriented brain, with a tendency to understand stuff in graphs like that or related vectors - and I had to read it twice to understand it. Maybe if there were images along with the explanations, it would be easier to grok?
@CobaltVelvet I do like the idea of graphs and maps of stuff, but I will say that no, I did not totally grok what that meant, to be honest. The radiuses are around what?
@CobaltVelvet I like it, but you are right that people will have an easier time if you add a visual component. Even just a set of still images. My experience is that most people have a hard time visualizing spaces. Is your intended audience STEM types? Or are you making something intended to be more general?
@Vanessa i'm trying to find a use for a skill i get when especially high, but also proving skeptical STEM-types that psychology and sociology can be perfectly rational and represented with math. But maybe just people who understand more easily logical links that way than with a long text.
@CobaltVelvet oh! That's makes sense. And yes, a lot of it seems to be about classification and labelling. I wonder if there are already nice examples out there about binary (or discrete) categories failing when a continuous variable is more appropriate that you could get ideas from. I mean, it seems like the issue is both that it isn't binary/discrete and that it is multidimensional.
@CobaltVelvet
Oh, and of course a lot of people are going to assume the values on the y axis in the first part art inversely related, when that doesn't at all need to be true. Hmm. Or I guess it is more that they are trying to define the two labels as having an inverse relationship in Y but there is no thing to measure that achieves that. Just a bunch of nebulous and ever-shifting stereotyped descriptions. And thus your ever growing set of axis.
@CobaltVelvet
When I think of well-done visualisations of multiple dimensions, I always think of the classic video Not Knot.
@CobaltVelvet I've had a thing where I try to explain nonbinary gender in a similar way: First we consider gender as male and female, binary and discrete. This doesn't allow for any variance in gender conformity so maybe gender is a spectrum, the Z-axis. Then we can go further, because having only one dimension implies that masculinity and femininity are opposed and cancel each other out, so we make each its own axis. Then further genders are 3rd, 4th, etc dimensions.
@CobaltVelvet more accurately, in the thing I proposed, any particular gender would be a point in a multidimensional space where each dimension is a sort of gender basis vector that is socially constructed. Masculine and feminine are perhaps just two basis vectors in gender space.
Feels good to meet someone who wants to do the "let social sciences use math metaphors again" thing. I think Derrida or whoever really screwed it up a while ago.
now honestly, do that make sense to you? relatively to the equivalent typical sociology text? would you read/share more of it?