For many cultures, however, the idea of non-binary genders — someone who doesn't identify strictly male or female —the concept is not as hard to grasp. Indigenous cultures in regions from Oaxaca State, Mexico to Samoa and Madagascar have accepted the idea of the “third gender” for centuries.
For Native Hawaiians, gender identities were divided into three: male, female and māhū, the third gender. Some traditional Diné Native Americans of the Southwestern United States acknowledge a spectrum of four genders: feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, and masculine man.
Some societies recognized people who embodied a gender identity beyond the binary, for example, hijra communities in South Asia, two-spirit people among some Native American cultures, waria in Southeast Asia and Fa'afafine in Pacific Islander communities.
The gender spectrum refers to the range of gender identities that exist outside of the traditional binary of male and female. Non-binary genders can include, but are not limited to, agender, bigender, and genderfluid.
Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders (boys/men and girls/women). In cultures with a third or fourth gender, these genders may represent very different things. To Native Hawaiians and Tahitians, Māhū is an intermediate state between man and woman known as "gender liminality".
Islamic Definitions
Classical Islamic law, in terms of assigning legal rules, inter alia, explicitly recognizes four genders among human beings: male, female, DSD/intersex (khunsa), and the effeminate male (mukhannath) (Haneef, 2011).
In contrast to the gender binary, Bugis society recognizes five genders: makkunrai, oroané, bissu, calabai, and calalai.
More than three grammatical genders
Pama–Nyungan languages including Dyirbal and other Australian languages have gender systems such as: Masculine, feminine (see Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), vegetable and neuter. (Some linguists do not regard the noun class system of this language as grammatical gender.)
Kathoey or katoey (Khmer: ខ្ទើយ; khtəəy, Lao: ກະເທີຍ; ka thœ̄i, Thai: กะเทย; RTGS: kathoei; Thai pronunciation: [kàtʰɤːj]) is an identity used by some people in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, whose identities in English may be best described as transgender women in some cases, or effeminate gay men in other cases.
Jewish law, or halacha, recognizes intersex and non-conforming sexes in addition to male and female. Rabbinical literature recognizes six different sexes, defined according to the development and presentation of primary and secondary sex characteristics at birth and later in life.
There are some languages that have no gender! Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, and many other languages don't categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.
There are two biological sexes – male and female. Intersex is a term used for disorders of sexual development (DSD). Gender – the roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society at a given time considers appropriate for men and women to divide labour.
Sanskrit is one of the oldest languages in the world and is known to use three genders: Masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral. The concept of “tritiyaprakriti” or “napumsaka” had been an integral part of the Hindu mythology, folklore, epic and early Vedic and Puranic literatures.
The Qur'an doesn't condemn the Mukhannath or other trans people mentioned within, and neither does the Prophet (pbuh). There are also many Muslim societies today and in recent history that have accepted transgender and third gender individuals, such as the Hijra and the Khwaja sira of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
In some rare but instructive cases, a country name can have a mixed or ambiguous gender assignment. As in French, the assignment of specific country names to gender categories depends on phonological form rather than on meaning.
German, like Spanish, French, and many other languages, has gendered nouns (definite articles: der, die, das), and nouns that refer to people and professions are often binary, with die/der variations.
German nouns—for humans and objects—are all in one of three noun categories: masculine, feminine, or neuter. These categories are unrelated to human gender, sexuality, or identity and are purely grammatical.
- Genderless languages (such as Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian), where there is no grammatical gender and no pronominal gender. Those languages do not generally need a particular strategy to be gender-inclusive, save for the very specific cases that are discussed in the particular guidelines for those languages.
There are many different gender identities, including male, female, transgender, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, two-spirit, third gender, and all, none or a combination of these.
A category (a gender ), present in societies which recognize four or more genders, which is neither cis male nor cis female ; often, such societies consider trans men to constitute a third gender and trans women to constitute a fourth gender, or vice versa.
In Islam, Allah is not depicted as male or female — Allah has no gender. Yet Allah has traditionally been referred to, and imagined by many, as a man. Some Muslim women have begun to refer to Allah with feminine or gender neutral pronouns.
The Bugis ethnic group of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, recognizes three genders beyond the binary. Calalai refers to people who have female sexual characteristics but present in traditionally masculine ways, often cutting their hair short and dressing in men's fashions.
To sum up: in the case of an intersex individual, if it is not known whether he is male or female, it is not permissible for him to get married; if it becomes clear that he is male, then marriage to him is valid, so long as you seek advice in such a case from a trustworthy doctor who specializes in hereditary matters ...