You’re 100% right that is the most logical extension from the basis of 1 bit m-f - I completely overlooked that!
I’m glad to stumble upon someone on the internet who has the same crossover of programming, math, and gender (so unlikely! I know!) as well as silly humour in this regard :D
I was more approaching it from a programming perspective than a mathematical one - we could theoretically “label” all the gender experiences (perhaps just with the name of the individual that experiences it)
Of course this would be like labeling different variations of the sine function, and other functions, to use the analogy you made
The thing thats represented by the label may be discrete or continuous or anything
To be clear, I’m not attempting to represent gender as a continuous spectrum between Man and Woman - I’m throwing the gender binary out entirely and imagining each gender as some arbitrarily defined thing, ie for some people its a sine function (again to use your analogy) with different coefficients
If one wanted to represent the “gender space” as some 1d number line or 2d space with cartesian axes, then absolutely you’d need to fulfil the infinite and continuous criteria and I agree with you.
Though, to ramble a bit, I don’t know what you’d use to label the axis/axes because we sure as hell can’t use Man to Woman when agender folk exist, and we can’t even use Man to Woman and Agender to Allogender because some folk would fall outside of those axes still.
Sure but thats their experience of gender right? Their experience of gender will never be “not their experience of gender” even if it changes from instant to instant
I guess in theory as there will only ever be a finite number of individuals, there will also necessarily only ever be a finite number of different gender expressions, so finite discrete probably works. (Not to say that peoples experiences of gender are fixed and equidistant, but more so that you could have a “gender enum” with an entry for each individual)
Of course, trying to say how many bits this would require is almost impossible because theres always going to be more people and more genders, but it is technically finite.
In any case, bagsies on (leading zeros)100101001
Hell yeah although you might want to construct an identifier from like, name and surname and datetime of birth?