Historical theories of gender (Bach 2012; George & Briggs manus; Godman 2018; 2021) claim in different ways that gender is a historical kind. I examine the prospects of such theories of gender in terms of their theoretical grounding in cultural evolutionary theory and their ability to do justice to the experiences of trans* people, especially non-binary people, with gender.

I argue that those historical accounts proposing that gender kinds are culturally reproduced lineages of women, men, non-binary people, etc. (cf. Bach 2012; Godman 2018; 2021) have unrealistic empirical implications and cannot do justice to the complexity of the experiences of trans*, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people do with gender. There are no culturally reproduced lineages of women, non-binary people, etc. but rather at best culturally reproduced lineages of individual gendered traits and practices.

Furthermore, I argue that a multi-level analysis, i.e., acknowledging the different levels of (social) organization on which evolutionary processes occur, is necessary when looking at the cultural evolutionary processes surrounding gender. This enables viewing gender categories as features of social groups that depend on the cultural reproduction of social practices and gendered traits of individuals, and divorcing the membership conditions of gender categories from cultural reproductive processes.