Mick Hartley

An article in Nature – yes, that Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals…Beyond the trans/cis binary: introducing new terms will enrich gender research:

“Are you transgender?” Participating in a study for their public-health class, neither Alex nor Luna knew how to answer. Alex uses they/them pronouns and identifies as agender. They are also among a growing number of young people who have been raised in a gender-neutral manner: their parents did not refer to them as a boy or a girl until they were old enough to choose for themselves. Whatever genitals Alex was born with is not common knowledge. If you are agender and were never assigned a gender, does that make you transgender?

As for Luna, today she identifies as a woman, which aligns with the gender she was assigned at birth. But this is a recent development: Luna identified as a boy for as long as she can remember and, after coming out as trans, lived openly as one throughout her childhood and adolescence. As a woman who has detransitioned, she often feels that she has more in common with transgender women than with cisgender ones, whose gender identity corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth. Although Luna doesn’t call herself transgender, she fears that answering ‘no’ to the study’s question means that her gender trajectory and experiences will be erased.

How to deal with these seemingly intractable problems? Yes, there is hope.

Scientists need terms that are flexible enough to capture the nuances of people’s experience, that leave space for language to evolve and that are nonetheless pragmatic enough to be used in research.

The term ‘gender modality’ could enable researchers to broaden their horizons.

A person’s gender identity is their sense of gender at any given time. By contrast, gender modality refers to how a person’s gender identity relates to the gender they were assigned at birth. It is a mode or way of being one’s gender.

The best-known gender modalities are ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’, but the term allows for other possibilities, such as ‘agender’, which includes those who do not identify with any gender, and ‘detrans’ or ‘retrans’ for people who have ceased, shifted or reversed their gender transition. The term also makes space for gender modalities specific to intersex individuals, gender-questioning people, people with dissociative identity disorder and people with culture-specific identities (see ‘Many ways of being’). Gender modality serves a similar purpose to sexual orientation, which describes a facet of human existence and makes space for orientations beyond gay and straight.

But a word of caution, lest our enthusiasm carries us away.

Gender modality is not a panacea. Rather, it is one piece in the toolbox of those who engage in research involving human participants, whether in the medical, biological or social sciences. Its power lies in what people make of it. Our hope is that researchers and others will play with it, stretching it and exploring its full potential. Rather than foreclosing the evolution of language, gender modality welcomes it.

Not everyone is male or female. Not everyone is cis or trans. The sooner we make space for these truths, the better. And inviting scientists to adopt the concept of gender modality will hopefully foster research that better reflects the intricacies and nuances of our increasingly gender-expansive world.

The first step in science should never be to assume that something is correct. It should be to engage with the world in front of us — in all its magnificent complexity. Researching gender should begin with critically engaging with current language and concepts. Thoughtfulness, flexibility, curiosity and empathy are what science needs.

Some kind of connection with reality? Is that something science needs?

Apparently not.

One of the authors, Florence Ashley, is "metaphorically a biorg witch with flowers in their hair!" 

Florence is a transfeminine jurist, bioethicist, public speaker, and advocate. They are the author of the acclaimed book Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body (CLASH Books, 2024).

[Via Jerry Coyne.].