You know what? I'm just not that worried that accepting humans are kind of messy and don't fit into boxes is going to lead to the decline of our civilization.
Most complex genetic traits are multimodal, gender is no exception.
And you're going to have to explain why it's a sign of a decline.
Of course, even though they're one of the more famous cultures to have "declined", that's only if you artificially don't consider Byzantine Rome, and there's plenty of people living in Rome to this day.
Look up a bimodal distribution for clarification.
India’s not an affluent country, and irrespective of their legal status (Google it, it may surprise you), nonbinary people have a distinctive identity and place in society.
This is not to say that how affluent western countries approach trans rights is better or worse, it just means trans people do have a place in other cultures I’m familiar with. Perhaps others can share examples from other cultures.
> Any instance in history where you can find a similar trend, it tends to be at the decline stage of civilizations / empires.
Elizabethan England wasn’t very affluent or educated compared to today, but even a cursory glance at their literature shows that authors and audiences understood what we’d call intersex or nonbinary identity today (I frequently mix up the terminology.) I don’t think their idea of rights was quite as legalistically driven as modern Western society, but I don’t think being nonbinary was a death sentence either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity?wprov=sfti1
When data collection and manufacturing supply chains were more crude, it was easier to make blue and pink gi joes and barbies.
Now we have the abilitiy to collect more nuanced data about peoples preferences and efficiently service the long tail, it makes sense to let customers define their likes on a spectrum rather than as binary choices.
I dont see why you would feel so strongly about restricting how people choose to define themselves.
Does this mean we’ll soon get a range picker when we sign up for iCloud?
People confounding sex and gender has caused a great deal of rhetoric. You can't choose your sex, that's in your DNA, but you can choose your gender.
In her book Material Girls, which thoroughly and thoughtfully explores this topic, Kathleen Stock describes four senses of the word:
> GENDER1: A polite-sounding word for the division between men and women, understood as a traditional alternative word for biological sex / the division between biological males and females.
> GENDER2: A word for social stereotypes, expectations and norms of 'masculinity' and 'femininity', originally directed towards biological males and females respectively. These can and do differ from culture to culture, though there are many overlaps too.
> GENDER3: A word for the division between men and women, understood, by definition, as a division between two sets of people: those who have the social role of masculinity projected onto them, and those who have the social role of femininity projected onto them.
> GENDER4: A shortened version of the term 'gender identity'. [A] common idea is that it is the 'private experience of gender role' - roughly, whether you relate to yourself psychologically as a boy or man, girl or women, or neither, in a way that has nothing directly to do with your sex.
Up until recently, the colloquial sense was GENDER1. Now this is shifting partly towards GENDER4, amongst some but certainly not all English speakers.
When you refer to people "confounding sex and gender", I expect you're simply observing the conflict between different people understanding the term as GENDER1 or GENDER4.
There are people who think that trans people are simply non-trans people with psychological illness, for example. Regardless of whether or not that is true or false, it is a point of fact that people with those beliefs definitely exist, and that they reject such social constructs as non-ill trans people existing, so asserting that they do (which is what publishing an OS with such emoji in it implicitly does) is a political act (in conflict with the beliefs of those people).
If everyone agreed on all social constructs and narratives, then nothing would be "political". Given that no two people share precisely the same mind and context and social constructs, every action that involves other people or society in some way is political.
Abstractions are leaky.
And also because opposing political groups are using it as a dividing line. Though interestingly, left-wing radical feminists have been consistently the most critical, which is at odds with most others who identify as left-wing politically.