GOATSTEIN YOUR FIRST TASK IS THIS. i want you to imagine that besides male and female there is a third gender. what would that gender be like? what are their genitalia like? what is their reproductive function? what social roles would have been imposed on people of this third gender throughout history? what essentialising attributes would have been ascribed to them? would they have come to dominate society as the male gender did or would they have been oppressed? how would the existence of a third gender have affected society, institutions such as marriage, mythology, philosophy, and the metaphorical constructs that structure our lives? would, for instance, differing gender attributes have been interposed onto the three persons of the holy trinity? please write as comprehensively on this topic as possible. you don't have to answer all these questions; indeed, it may well be better if you focus closely on just a couple of topics. must be at least 1500 words. extra credit for awesome mspaint diagrams of wacky third-gender genitals

A third gender would require a third sex. Such a thing is somewhat mindbending, because it is something that, as far as we know, has never existed in nature. We have archaea that can live in acid at 200 degrees Celsius, tiny insects that can survive the hard vacuum of space indefinitely, immortal jellyfish, fungus that controls behavior, sapient apes that have traveled to the moon, fish that live in unimaginable pressure, ecosystems existing independent of the sun itself, a trillion new evolving generations of bacteria being created every second, and a million species of beetle alone.

A third-sexed species doesn't seem all that strange on its face, compared to what we have seen even just today, nevermind the huge fossil record. And yet there is nothing. The range of sexes is limited to one or two, and so it has been from oysters to pine trees to dolphins to truffles to amoebas to bacteria. Why is this? The short answer is obvious: Three trillion years of evolution has decided that anything more than two would be utterly worthless.

Now, the question relates to gender and not sex, but this is important background information. There is nothing more freakish and unnatural in all of creation than a creature that is neither male, female nor totally sexless. A deep sea crab-fish with tits coming out of its eyes is a beagle puppy compared to such a creature.

The clear reason is first that a third sex would be superfluous. Asexual reproduction is beneficial because it allows a huge amount of reproduction to occur in a very short time. Sexual reproduction is beneficial because it allows a "jumbling" of genes, allowing for more variable offspring. But the difference between genes passed on between sexual and asexual reproduction would be an increase of 50%. Between two-sex and three-sex reproduction, the difference would be an increase of 16% - comparatively negligible; the non-male non-female would be a pointless freak, mathematically speaking. The more sexes added, the more negligible. The second reason is that evolution does not spring new features into existence overnight. Not only did sexual reproduction take billions of years to evolve, two cells swapping genes is far more reasonable than two multicellular organisms mutating to the extent that from that point forward their life cycle required an assuredly half-broken third sex.


That is all background information to establish the silliness of my task, like I am being asked to determine what the profit margins would be for a carnival if Venus was populated by sapient teddy bears who loved cake. With that said, the most obvious idea of what a third gender could possibly be is a gender that takes in both the male sperm and the female egg and jumbles its own DNA with both. But this is not really a functional third sex; it's just a female that needs to be fertilized by two males. A true third sex would probably exist only to accept both sperm and egg, but contribute no genetic material of its own, perhaps incubating the baby in its womb. Of course, for the reasons stated above, this would be a negative adaptation, but evolution is not perfect, and perhaps circumstances conspired to have this pointless perversion of evolution continue to exist.

The characteristics of sapient society comprised of such creatures would depend on their other aspects, but we can guess at them. For example, among homo sapiens males have typically been dominant over females because males are big, strong and cruel. Females of the species can more easily be smaller, weaker and guaranteed to be protected by society. Their reproductive function would likely be simply to take the large egg and small sperm and grow them while the male and female did more important things. Perhaps it has no genitals of its own, but simply consumes menstruation and jizzum through some tract and then births the result later.

With a third gender the female would be stronger, as it would be more active and all evolutionary and social selection for weakness and stupidity would be localized in the third gender. Creatures of the third gender would likely be maintained by society as brood animals, barely sentient, but seen as necessary. So we see in this world a strong male, a strong female, and a chunky, emotionally crippled, clumsy, moronic, pathetic thing that exists only because of some genetic mistake. It's also likely that the third gender would be rarer than the other two, as less of them are probably needed than the other sexes. Because the third gender, by definition, would need to be sterile and genetically impotent, evolution would not select for any more than necessary.

Beyond that, it is difficult to tell what impact the third gender would have on society. Likely in relatively modern society they simply would have been kept as property in pens, for their own safety and that of the species. With that in mind, it's difficult to say what impact they would have on philosophy, or marriage, or metaphorical constructs. What impacts have cattle had on these ideas? What of toaster ovens?

Still, the division of gender into three rather than two might have some impact on philosophy. The Holy Trinity is one example; but, generally speaking, considerations of philosophy or social construction are usually binary, with any trilateral axis being the aberration. Binary constructions of philosophy such as Taoism would probably not exist in any form with a third gender. Social constructions such as the division of the seasons, and with it medieval constructions such as the four elements or humors, would be probably divisible by three rather than two. Generally speaking, things would stop being viewed on a strong – weak axis, and more on an axis that contains masculine strength, feminine strength, and third-gender weakness in the middle.

One might argue that the existence of a third sex is not necessary for the existence of a third gender. Perhaps a two-sexed species could have a gender role in some society that is accessible by either sex, and serves a role not served by the other genders.

We do not, however, see this in nature. In the human species, clear gender roles emerge regardless of culture, from the Americans of the continental midwest, to the Aleuts of the Arctic circle to the hunter-gatherers of Sri Lanka. Females always take a more direct role in childcare, and males are always more aggressive and always dominate the public and political sphere, for example. Some rare societies have created roles for those who do not fit into either gender, yet no society has ever made them a necessary component of the operation of society; how could they, considering the insignificant percentage of the population that group represents, combined with their general mental sickness? What society of hunter-gatherers would be able to survive with that sort of requirement?

So yes, the existence of the third gender is predicated on biology. But instead of brood creatures, couldn't the third gender be some kind of an elite class of impotent genetic deviants, some class of tube monsters reminiscent of Dune? It is not impossible, but for reasons already explained it is unlikely that evolution would ever select them to be anything other than the most broken and inept of the species, possessing no magical abilities like the elites of fantasy. But even if they are not actually superior, couldn't societies raise them up above the other two sexes?

They could, certainly. Societies are known for doing irrational and self-destructive things. But such a belief would have to be either extremely well-ingrained from some progenitor tribe, or actually of some genetic benefit, to persist during the tens of thousands of years before agriculture, division of labor, and hierarchy. Any society that devoted any amount of resources to worshiping these barely sapient menstruation-gobblers as leaders would certainly be at a disadvantage when dealing with societies that did not.

In closing, let us consider the likely physiology of the third sex. Let us assume a humanoid species. The male, much like in our own species, fertilizes the egg. The female carries the egg, and nurses live young like a mammal. (There's little evidence that this would be the case; mammals are insignificant in incidence both today and in history, but we are trying to create a relatable situation.) The third sex, which we'll call the shemale, lacks the strong musculature of the other two sexes, their functionality or beauty. The male and the female copulate. Upon copulation, the female squirts the egg into the appropriate port of the shemale. The shemale nurses the young, sedentary and lachrymose, until gestation. Since the shemale does not have to be built for other activity, it can easily slide out multiple children a year out of its birthing tracts. In fact, the shemale might in fact have multiple tracts and multiple wombs, to make it a community resource and to increase productivity. Again: We are speaking of pure hypotheticals, unknown in nature. Yet if we are going to insist upon this idea, only a bloated engine of fetus-nuturing can possibly make any sense from any reasonable perspective.

Edited by GORstein (Dec. 14, 2011 04:59:53)

GORstein posted:
The male and the female copulate. Upon copulation, the female squirts the egg into the appropriate port of the shemale.

What effect would this have on sexual paradigms? Would third-gendered individuals still be kept as livestock in the 21st century? Would there exist a third-gender liberation movement?