As with every intellectual endeavor, absent an ethical grounding and intellectual discipline, ignorance can look a lot like enlightenment.
I've been reading a lot of what passes for scientific research on sexuality and how and why scientists and medical professionals are now saying there are likely thousands of genders and the male/female binary has never been factual.
My journey of inquiry has been interesting, to say the least.
When I read through the papers, it certainly seems to this non-scientist layman, they rely heavily on the idea that the exception proves the rule. Of course, there have always been men who, at an emotional level, like Shania Twain, feel like a woman and women who, at the same emotional level, feel like a dude - and the lengths these scientists will go to satisfy those emotions are amazing.
Far from adhering to the scientific method, too many of today's "researchers" have fallen victim to Lysenkoism - providing "research" that confirms a desired outcome whether that's what the research supports or not. Given what we witnessed during the covid "pandemic", it is hard to argue that there is not a lot of goalpost moving in today's "scientific" community.
For example, in almost every discussion of gender fluidity I have read, the introduction of hermaphroditic or "intersex" births is used as evidence that gender is a spectrum, not binary.
Several years ago, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling proposed that intersex births (where there conditions that are in some sense “in-between” the two sexes) were on the order of 1.7% of the population. To use that number today would mean there are over 5.9 million "intersex" Americans walking around, and for me that just doesn't seem plausible.
According to Leonard Sax, a psychiatrist, practicing physician, and noted authority in the gender wars, Fausto-Sterling inflated the "intersex" category by expanding the definition (not unlike the way the word “gender” has been expanded over the past seventy years or so to include behaviors rather than just biological characteristics). Sax notes:
"The available data support the conclusion that human sexuality is a dichotomy, not a continuum. More than 99.98% of humans are either male or female. If the term intersex is to retain any clinical meaning, the use of this term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female.
The birth of an intersex child, far from being “a fairly common phenomenon,” is actually a rare event, occurring in fewer than 2 out of every 10,000 births."
So, while although intersex births are a biological reality, they are statistically unusual and therefore not normal. They are an anomaly, and that exception does not prove the "rule" that gender is a spectrum.
Gender is also not a "social construct".
I find the idea that it is interesting and it seems to be based on the same "logic" expressed in a 1961 book by influential psychiatrist Thomas Szasz called The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, Szasz insisted that mental illness is not a real biological phenomenon but merely an invention of society.
That's certainly going to come as a surprise to mentally ill people who have been successfully treated with various drug therapies.
In his 2020 paper titled Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax also noted how study after study shows gender is NOT a social construct and proving that the brains of boys and girls are hardwired differently.
But there are "inventions of society" at play here.
Humans often deify things they cannot currently comprehend. Primitive civilizations from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Aztecs and Incans ascribed natural events beyond their current level of understanding to gods they invented as explanations.
In doing so, they gave power to the priests and shamans who claimed to be emissaries who could communicate with those invented gods and being able to commune with the gods means you are always safe from the wrath of those gods, plus you have status, influence and power.
Beware the priests of our newly invented Gender Gods.
Two sexes. Anything else is nothing more than feelings. Men have always run the gamut between having feminine characteristics, and "he-men" types. Women, between tomboy and girly-girl. That's nothing new, and certainly no reason to try to fit into the opposite sex.
From what I understand of babies who are intersex, it's simply not clear, on sight, if one is a male or female. Rather than guessing, or "assigning," why not test their chromosomes?
And, when it comes to chromosomes, based on what I've read of various anomalies, those people generally have worse problems than gender,
Bottom line: basing a biological reality on feelings is nothing more than pseudoscience.
You're conflating sex with gender. The two are not synonymous. From the actual scientific authority on the issue: https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender-people-gender-identity-gender-expression