Excellent thought
@godpod This is rubbish logic. Gender as an alias for specifically human sexuality is absolutely a binary, and manliness as an adjective can have degrees. You could even have a manly woman as a reference to some attribute typically associated with men. She would still be a woman because that is a binary type not a spectrum.
In programming terms integers can be sorted and ranked, and strings can be sorted and ranked, but as far as types go they are still one or the other, never both or between.
"It was a difficulty I remember as a child. My love.
It was not what it was supposed to be."
SearingTruth
I love this: "If you can rank it, it's not a binary." A helpful encapsulation. It reminds me of a categorisation I saw by a geneticist of the five known XY chromosomal variations - definitely not 'binary'. I suspect few things are... (even 'dead or alive' includes 'half dead'). It (binary) seems more like a useful shortcut to speed up 1st pass thinking about stuff when you want/ need to be fast. (As I write this I fear it will be considered provocative... or not...? Joke!) π