Did you know that the City of New York recognizes 31 different gender identities? That’s right… 31! Oh, and it’s not even an exhaustive list, according to the Daily Caller.

Being gender identities, New York City residents can simply choose their identity, without ever having to show proof of gender. So I’m guessing a person could even choose a separate gender for each day of a 31-day month, and that would be… legal. Apparently, you can be fined upto $ 250,000 for failure to use and/or recognize an employee’s, tenant’s, customer’s, or client’s preferred name, pronoun and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification.

Gone are the days when you could just strip someone’s pants, look at their genitals and figure out what gender they are. Aah yes, those were simpler times!

Anyway, here’s the complete list of 31 genders:

Bi-gendered Cross-dresser Drag King Drag Queen Femme Queen Female-to-Male FTM Gender Bender Genderqueer Male-to-Female MTF Non-Op HIJRA Pangender Transexual/Transsexual Trans Person Woman Man Butch Two-Spirit Trans Agender Third Sex Gender Fluid Non-Binary Transgender Androgyne Gender Gifted Gender Blender Femme Person of Transgender Experience Androgynous

I’d never even heard of some of these, so I did some research, and picked out some of my favourites from this list of definitions:

Pangender

A person whose gender identity is comprised of all or many gender expressions.

So basically we-ve got the proverbial jack-of-all-trades here.

Gender Fluid

A person whose gender identification and presentation shifts, whether within or outside of societal, gender-based expectations.

Two-Spirit

American Indian/First Nations/Native American persons who have attributes of both men and women, have distinct gender and social roles in their tribes, and are often involved with mystical rituals (shamans).

Gender bender

A person who disrupts, or “bends”, expected gender roles. Gender bending is sometimes a form of social activism undertaken to destroy rigid gender roles and defy sex-role stereotypes, notably in cases where the gender-nonconforming person finds these roles oppressive.

I gleaned this one of Wikipedia. I just loved the term gender bender. It seems to have a real poetic panache to it. Just out of curiosity though, could I call a man cooking or a woman driving a gender bender?