That was my thought as well. That many sexes, if they can be called sexes, basically means everyone would have a single indeterminate sex. Imagine filling a form and selecting your sex among a 20K list of names.
You wouldn’t be choosing between 20k it’s in four sets of 9, 32, 9, and 9 so each would have four descriptors that would make up their mating configuration
Excuse me, but that’s like saying “my sex is 20x10x10x10”. The combinations are still in the thousands even if you use different notation. It’s like representing male/female as 0/1 and saying it only uses one bit, but everyone still hast to remember the name and expectations associated with that bit.
A sentient species with so many sex combinations would not bother to name each one, or attach specific sociocultural traits to all of them. Humans, for example, know like 10-20k words, passing sex ed would be like reaching master level in a foreign language. It would be a tag with less meaning, like age, height, or blood type are.
There are more than 20K cities/towns to choose from and most forms have auto-complete for that. So I think we could make it work and if it was an essential part of your identity, I imagine people would come to recognize most of them just by name over time
“Look, I’m glad someone’s having fun, but I’m not memorizing that set of pronouns!”
When you have that many sexes, I think everyone would just use they/them. Don’t want to assume incorrectly.
That was my thought as well. That many sexes, if they can be called sexes, basically means everyone would have a single indeterminate sex. Imagine filling a form and selecting your sex among a 20K list of names.
You wouldn’t be choosing between 20k it’s in four sets of 9, 32, 9, and 9 so each would have four descriptors that would make up their mating configuration
Excuse me, but that’s like saying “my sex is 20x10x10x10”. The combinations are still in the thousands even if you use different notation. It’s like representing male/female as 0/1 and saying it only uses one bit, but everyone still hast to remember the name and expectations associated with that bit.
A sentient species with so many sex combinations would not bother to name each one, or attach specific sociocultural traits to all of them. Humans, for example, know like 10-20k words, passing sex ed would be like reaching master level in a foreign language. It would be a tag with less meaning, like age, height, or blood type are.
There are more than 20K cities/towns to choose from and most forms have auto-complete for that. So I think we could make it work and if it was an essential part of your identity, I imagine people would come to recognize most of them just by name over time
If my species had 20K sexes, sex wouldn’t be an essential part of my identity. It would be like my fingerprints being part of my personality.