If you follow my stuff on social media you might have seen this little picture I drew ages ago, and a number of folks have wanted me to explain this a little bit.
The thing is that saying "gender is a spectrum" is as dated as saying "gender is either one of two positions" (being man and woman). If you read gender theorists like Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, and queer theorists like David Clines, transgender theorists like Zinnia Jones, you start to see that gender is not as simple as traditional models of gender portray things.
Gender and sex are entirely created out of whole cloth. They are social constructions in which several genetic, physiological, psychological, behavioural, and sociopolitical aspects are randomly grouped together and assigned to individuals at birth purely based on secondary sex characteristics. If you have a penis at birth, you are assigned man, if you have a vagina at birth you are assigned woman. If you are intersex doctors will often try and "fix" the "problem" by performing unnecessary cosmetic surgery often doing great harm to intersex individuals. This process of assigning gender to people at birth comes from the notion that the only valid genders that exist are "man" and "woman".
Reading David Clines however we see that "man" and "woman" exist on their own axes. Men have to be "real men" / "strong men" / "sexual men" / "aggressive men" / "rich men" / "promiscuous men" in order to achieve the unreachable goal of being the "ideal" man. Women by contrast have to be motherly, subservient, fertile, etc. in order to be the "ideal" woman. These "greased poles" as Clines calls them are created for the explicit purposes of creating hierarchy not only of men over women, but among men and women. Nobody is ever statically the "ideal" of their gender, it is something you must maintain through ritual and traditional behaviour that is seen as reinforcing of what it means to be your assigned gender. To avoid these things is stigmatised. The woman who does not want children, the man who cries, the woman who wants a career, the man (in western culture at least) who puts on make up: these things subvert the gender roles and places undue stigma on people for not living up to the societal expectations of their gender. It is for this reason that I write "approaching man" and "approaching woman", because no human being performs masculinity and femininity in the same ways. You might identify as a man, but you never perform "man" as society dictates. This is deliberate. You might identify as woman, but you never perform "woman" as society dictates. This is deliberate. These concepts are deliberately constructed so that individuals would fail at them no matter what they do. This is why gender is so heavily policed and gatekept. This is why transgender people are so heavily stigmatised. This is why nonbinary people are s heavily stigmatised. This is why intersex people are so heavily stigmatised. This is why queer people throughout the LGBTQIA+ are so heavily stigmatized. Queering is essentially the act of performing gender improperly or identifying outside of these gender norms. There is nothing wrong with wanting to perform gender and identify as one of two discreet points, but the problem comes in when "man" is unduly privileged over "woman", when cisgender is unduly privileged over transgender, when binary is unduly privileged over nonbinary, when heterosexual is privileged over homosexual, when monosexual is privileged over bi/poly/asexual, etc.
It is for the same reason that the "gender spectrum" doesn't serve us either. The gender spectrum suggests that "man" and "woman" are fixed points and the only space people can exist or move through is a distinct line between those two points, but as transgender people, nonbinary people, intersex people, agender people, genderqueer people show us, the volume is far more complicated than this, since there really isn't a right way or a singular way to do transgender. If agender to demi-woman to woman is a single axis, then agender to demi-man to man is an adjacent axis, but at the same time we have to consider genderqueer people who exist on an axis pointing away again in its own direction. This already creates a volume that is far more complex than merely "man" or "woman" or a unidimentional spectrum. It's further complicated by the fact that agender people may not decide to belong in this space, they may consider their gender its own axis.
People are also in reality, very rarely, singular evens that happen at discreet points. People occupy multiple points along this line. Despite social pressures for men and women to be constantly performing their gender most people can't live up to those standards 24/7. People occupy nebulous spaces within their own volumes and for many people this is far more complex than a single, unchanging dot in a textbook somewhere. For some people they may occupy larger gender spaces, for some people they may occupy multiple spaces. This is a personal expression of what it means for every individual to express themselves as they see themselves to be sexual and gender creatures. Each one of these expressions is valid and important. The problem comes in again when certain expressions are privileged over others: male over female, cis over trans, binary over nonbinary, etc...
The things I have explained are even further complicated by issues such as race, and class, and culture. Black men in colonised situations were often infantilised, called boys, as a part of their oppression. Black men were said to be "not really men" and a lot of the times "not really human". Religious people claimed they didn't even have a soul. Black women were coded as animalistic, masculine, not "properly" feminine. Gender abuse of this kind has complicated the larger human space in that people of colour are reclaiming gender in new ways. Poverty is another way that shapes gender identity in that poor men are coded as failed men, poor women are coded as unwanted, unkept. Class codes gender in ways that restricts access to validation and legitimacy for many peoples. Transgender people who do not have health care, wealth, safety to get the medical treatments they need are coded as falsely transgender. We see gender abuse in cis gay male culture with "no fats, no fems". People who struggle with physical disability or mental illness are treated as non-viable partners or failed examples of their gender. All of these things that impact on and complicate gender make gender a far larger space than we give it credit for.
I will fail to explain this properly because gender is a subject that is far more complicated and far more personal than I can give credit to in a few paragraphs. But there are a few things I'd like you to take away from all this:
a) The gender binary is a lie. An outright lie.
b) The gender spectrum doesn't really do justice to the complexity of gender.
c) There is no "right" or "wrong" way to do gender. The only way to do gender is being true to yourself.
d) You do not have the right to police or gatekeep another person's gender, especially if your gender holds privilege over them. Police your own gender.
e) How people self identify is valid, end of story.
Some background stuff for you (I'll fix this list when I get the energy to make it look like a real bibliography):
Zinnia Jones' "Gender Analysis" on Youtube: HERE
Judith Burler's "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1995) New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415389556. [reprinted 2006]
David Clines' "Intersted Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Old Testament" (1995). JSOT Supplements 205. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
Angela Davis' "Women, Race, & Class" (1983), ISBN 0-394-71351-6.
and "Women, Culture & Politics, Vintage" (1990), ISBN 0-679-72487-7.
Audre Lorde's "Sister Outsider" (1984) Crossing Press ISBN: 978-1580911863
Scott Lauria Morgensen's "The Biopolitics of Settler Sexuality and Queer Modernities" 2010
Robert Morrell's "From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler MAsculinity in Colonial Natal" 2001 ISBN 1 86888 151 2
Zackie Achmat "Apostles of civilised vice: 'Immoral practices and unnatural vice' in South African prisons and compounds, 1890-1920" 2008, HERE
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