the.com/gender
The role you're handed at birth, which you then spend life editing, ignoring, or rewriting entirely.
means The social and psychological dimension of being male, female, or something else entirely — distinct from the biological fact of sex.
from From Latin 'genus' meaning 'kind' or 'sort,' through Old French 'gendre' — the same root that gives us 'genre' and 'genus.' For centuries it was mostly a grammar word, sorting nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter bins. Its leap into the vocabulary of identity is a 20th-century development, when psychologists and later feminist theorists pulled it away from biology to name the learned, performed, social layer of being a man or woman — leaving 'sex' to cover the body and 'gender' to cover everything culture built on top of it.
- vs sex
- sex is biology, gender is the script society writes on top
- old word
- originally just meant grammatical category, like nouns
- spectrum, not switch
- most cultures throughout history recognized more than two
- performed daily
- clothes, voice, posture — rehearsed so often it looks natural