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There's no answer on what makes a cat not a cat or not, but we can be 'more catlike' or 'less.' To jump from one bucket (cat) to a different bucket (dog, or some other new thing), you need a *lot* of changes to the structure and traits and associations entirely. 2/

And to be clear, I am *absolutely pro* attempting to jump buckets in genderspace, I just also think it's extremely hard to do, because there's a huge amount of traits to strip away. A 3-legged, mutant cat raised by dogs still registers to us as 'cat', tho a weird one. 3/

Gender isn't just a social construct, much as a cat isn't just catlike behaviors. Gender also *includes* social construct, much as catlike behaviors are part of 'catness.' Gender isn't just biology either, and it's also inextricably linked with biology. 4/

Gender is a 'recognized pattern', much like an animal species is a recognized pattern, or a tree, or a table, and it's nonsensical to ask which aspect of the pattern is the true core of the pattern. It's an accumulation of all the things, together, mostly. 5/

A 3-legged, mutant cat raised by dogs still qualifies to us as a 'weird cat' because the vast majority of what we recognize as 'cat bucket' *still applies to the weird cat*. It still has whiskers, and would respond to cat medicine, shares the genome, presumably meows. 6/

So I'm often confused when people are like 'intersex people prove gender isn't binary.' This feels like saying something like 'a cat that says woof proves that the cat-dog dimension isn't binary.' They're taking a single trait out of many and pinning the entire gender on that. 7/

Gender is absolutely, unequivocally binary right now. Maybe one day it won't be, much as maybe we could have cat-dog hybrids with enough advanced tech. But at the moment there are two recognizable, distinct patterns - male and female. 8/

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I think most people who say “gender isn’t binary” aren’t trying to make the claim that there aren’t two clear recognizable poles within gender-space (although some might be.

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it also seems to me that a lot of trans/nonbinary/gender nonconforming people i interact with have definitely gotten into a third or fourth pattern clearly distinct from the two most common ones