[GauntletWizard]

Numbers are perfectly significant in being themselves large. 70 million is a great market for a set of niche clothing lines, self-help books, sex toys, etc. It's just not enough of a market for governments to spend an extraordinary amount of effort on dealing with the specifics. This is a long-tail number, too; 'Male', 'Female', and 'Other' probably makes sense if you expect 1% of respondents to select other. However, 1% don't select other; They get offended that you don't have Facebook's 72-pronoun list, and even if you do, that doesn't cover their particular favorite.

[copsarebastards]

> However, 1% don't select other; They get offended that you don't have Facebook's 72-pronoun list, and even if you do, that doesn't cover their particular favorite.

Keep in mind that social media generally exemplifies the dregs of humanity. The people who make a fuss about "Other" on the internet are not representative of the everyone in that 1%. I'm pretty sure you don't have enough information to make the statement you did above.

[notahacker]

Given a free and unlimited choice, I'd happily bet the vast majority of this 1% would happily and wholeheartedly select either "male" or "female".

Moreover they'd probably be quite offended if you suggested they didn't belong in those categories, even if the wonders of medical science revealed they had certain abnormalities they might not even have been aware of or otherwise might have attempted to surgically "correct". Men with low sperm counts, men that discover they have a womb in their late seventies after fathering several children and even intersex people who had an operation a very long time ago are probably happier being bracketed as "men" than "somewhere fairly close to male on the gender spectrum", and the same goes for the women not wanting to be considered "further away from female on the gender spectrum" than their sisters because of polycystic ovaries. From this perspective we don't want to redefine gender as a spectrum so much as to accept that our definitions of "male" and "female" need to be sufficiently broad to encompass small quantities of genetic material transferred across umbilical cords and even the odd phenotypical abnormality.

Frankly, arguments against the gender binary are much better rooted in cultural phenomenon like South East Asian Katoeeys and Samoan Fa'afafine who openly define themselves as a third gender rather than medical abnormalities which for the most part people prefer to overlook or even medically "correct" to align themselves with a binary gender identity they feel mentally comfortable with.

[copsarebastards]

> Given a free and unlimited choice, I'd happily bet the vast majority of this 1% would happily and wholeheartedly select either "male" or "female".

True, but sex has medical and social implications that go beyond people's preferred terminology. You've brought up some of these concerns yourself.

> Frankly, arguments against the gender binary are much better rooted in cultural phenomenon like South East Asian Katoeeys and Samoan Fa'afafine who openly define themselves as a third gender rather than medical abnormalities which for the most part people prefer to overlook or even medically "correct" to align themselves with a binary gender identity they feel mentally comfortable with.

I'm not sure what makes you think that nobody in Western countries defines themselves as a third gender.

[notahacker]

> I'm not sure what makes you think that nobody in Western countries defines themselves as a third gender.

I'm not sure what makes you think I think that. But it's certainly considerably rarer.