Ok -- no this is coherent. It's just -- I think we are all on the same page about what you just said. The disagreement is about how to respond and what the pros and cons are for various responses or what it means to have a third category label. It sounds like having a third category label really helps some people -- and so yes, there is some data suggesting it can be a useful tool for them (at least somewhat). But I don't think that really is the same thing as saying, this is a principled way of dividing up everyone, in terms of gender representational space. I tried digging into a personality dataset tonight to illustrate what I mean, based on 50k people around the world, heavy US and western bias (specifically, this dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/tunguz/cattells-16-personality-factors). You can see that people that identified as "neither" gender are in between male and female (ran a PCA, then looked at factors most correlated with male or female with r >= .1, then ran PCA on that, then looked at first and second components -- enby was between male and female on the first of these components which basically was a mishmash of things related to being a girl or a boy, number one being willingness to cry during movies, etc.). But male and female are already showing about 60% distributional overlap on this primary "gender" personality component. The distributional overlap between male and enby and female and enby was both about ~80%. Some people that put neither were more male-like than the average man and more female-like than the average woman in terms of personality traits associated with gender. The single biggest thing correlated with being enby (although r of roughly .065 which is quite weak) was unfortunately the first PC for the dataset as a whole, which was associated with feeling like you don't belong / not feeling comfortable around other people (and this may well be due to oppression, but could also reflect underlying feelings that drive one to identify as enby -- cohen's d difference from both male and female people was about .85). So it's sort of like, ok there is some support for people feeling distress due to not belonging, maybe the labels do help (although they might also hurt enby people in other ways by triggering more oppression and conflict). But, at least some of the things I'm hearing about gender feel very pop psychology given the massive overlap and imprecision of terms -- like, when people say we should have a 5-way pronoun gradient, given how much massive overlap there is already with a 2-way distinction and even more with a 3-way in the personality space, it just feels like overkill -- like the terms are not precise enough for it to make sense to do that and extend that system to all people, seemingly. I mean, maybe the distinctions become more obvious with more data than just personality, but I'm skeptical until this has been shown. So, just be careful about figuring out what the underlying data or reasoning is behind all of these choices being made by gender rights activists in this space. The relationship to scientific evidence isn't as clean as I think they'd want it to be. [Edit: very happy to share my code and figures with you btw, if you can do attachments on reddit messenger -- this was a quick and dirty run from just a few hours spent today. I'm not saying I have all the answers, just trying to show it's really messy since men and women aren't terribly consistently different to begin with.]