Are genderless Pokemon, especially most Legendary Pokemon, considered non-binary?

Question

From the start, genders of Pokemon (except for Nidoran) are ambiguous as they lack any info about it until Gen 2 where not only gender has been introduced but breeding as well. You can tell by looking at these symbols ♂️ or ♀️, especially during battles. However, some Pokemon such as Magnemite and Voltorb do not seem to have any gender at all and Legendary and Mythical Pokemon like Mewtwo, Mew, Lugia, and Ho-Oh often fall in this category.

Comments

Non binary? What is that?

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Could we have explanations as to why this is downvoted?

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Possibly people don't have the decency to flag these kind of things. Or maybe people are jerks and just downvote for no reason.

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All pokemon are just code in a game. So their all binary.

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You should definitely answer with that.

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If you have multiple genders but each one still needs to be either male or female, are you still binary?

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The answer is no, there’s no mention of nonbinary in any official Pokémon media. When a Pokémon is genderless, it’s simply genderless; that’s how it’s been worded in hand guides, games, etc. Those Pokémon typically don’t have a breeding group

As a nonbinary, genderless and nonbinary aren’t the same. Genderless *can* fall under nonbinary, but not always

I’d also like to add that gen 2 came out in like 1999, when gender identities weren’t as well known or established as they are today. What gamefreak meant by genderless was likely “sexless”; the inability to have reproduction i.e “desexing a dog”. Today, genderless means someone who does not belong to a particular gender identity, rather than not having sexual organs. Nonbinary and genderless people can still reproduce. Gender =\= sex (reproductive organs)

It would be idiotic to apply LGBT, human, terms to a 90’s videogame about fighting animals.

I’m not posting this as an answer right now but I might later when I can pull up the proper sources

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so nonbinary is you think you dont fall into the two gender categorys and a legendary doesnt have a gender so it wouldnt be classified as nonbinary

Answer 1

Though the terms sex and gender have been used interchangeably since
at least the fourteenth century, in contemporary academic
literature they usually have distinct meanings. Sex generally refers
to an organism's biological sex, while gender usually refers to either
social roles based on the sex of a person (gender role) or personal
identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness
(gender identity).

• From Wikipedia

Using this definition, the male/female/genderless trichotomy falls under the concept of "sex", which is separate from one's gender. In this case, the word "genderless" should be more aptly named "sexless", as in unable to reproduce, whereas "non-binary" is a term recently coined as meaning "one that does not identify as belonging to the man/woman gender dichotomy". Does this distinction apply to Pokémon? Perhaps, though it is very much a human-made distinction that was only popularized recently, and one may argue that only those in the Undiscovered egg group are truly "sexless", as others can still breed with Ditto.

In any case, considering Game Freak is a Japanese Studio and that the first Pokémon games were released in 1996, they likely didn't have the concept of "genderless" as modern western cultures do. The terms "gender" and "sex" were interchangeable, and they probably didn't intend it to be ambiguous. Therefore, the answer is no: GF didn't create the Pokémon World with modern western cultural/social constructs in mind, hence the concept of "non-binary" does not exist in the Pokémon Universe. Calling a Magnemite "non-binary" is like calling a magnet "non-binary"; it just won't make sense.

Funnily enough, Maushold is also "genderless". Maybe they just didn't want to classify it to avoid suggesting gay couples?

Comments

Eyyo isn’t this just my comment