UC Berkeley students answer ‘how many genders are there?’ in viral video
A popular conservative YouTube channel has posted a widely watched video featuring students at the University of California, Berkeley answering how many genders they believe exist.
Will Witt of PragerU recently visited the UC Berkeley campus and asked multiple students on camera questions about how many genders there are and if it was OK for men to use the same bathrooms and locker rooms as women.
“Infinite,” answered the first student in the video, adding that she believed “you can’t put things in boundaries. You can define yourself as whatever you want.”
Other students responded by saying there was “a spectrum of genders,” “five, six, maybe,” “I could not tell you,” and “like 72-plus or something.”
While many of the respondents struggled to name genders other than male and female, the student who said around 72 provided several terms.
“Third gender, cisgender, agender, ciswoman, cisman, and nonbinary/other,” she replied, admitting that she could not name all 72 genders that she believed existed.
Witt asked one student if she believed that a man who identifies as a woman should be allowed to use the women’s restroom.
“Yeah,” she immediately replied, later agreeing with the statement that someone can be considered a woman even if they have a penis.
Witt asked another student if he thought men who identify as women can use a women’s locker room, he responded that that would be OK, provided the women present were also OK with it.
“If they’re not comfortable with it, they might be a little transphobic,” Witt said, the video cutting away from the student as he hesitated to respond to the sarcastic critique.
Posted to YouTube on Nov. 6, as of Wednesday morning, the video has garnered over 550,500 views.
In 2016, UC Berkeley announced that “gender-inclusive restrooms” were going to be “part of all new campus buildings as well as significant renovation projects.”
“More than 40 campus buildings now have gender-inclusive restrooms, and more are on the way,” stated Berkeley’s Public Affairs department at the time.
“Conversion of single-occupant restrooms from gender-specific to gender-inclusive has been actively underway for more than a year, spurred on by a system wide policy change announced by the UC Office of the President in June 2015.”
Last year, a UC Berkeley student senator faced demands that she resign from student government because she refused to vote for a resolution denouncing the Trump administration's proposed rule on Title IX clarifying that gender is a biological identity determined at birth.