Published on 12, July, 2020
A discussion in this forum made me ask myself this question, what's gender?. I googled it but what I found there didn't make much sense to me. I always thought that the gender of the other person doesn't tell me much about who they are. It just informs me about the appropriate pronouns that this person wants me to use with them. Frankly I don't care about figuring out my gender. I was born in a woman's body and I never felt like it's the wrong one. I think I'd feel the same if I was born in a man's body. I have never spent time thinking about this part of myself because I never thought that it's important enough to me. I'll be the same person anyway, no? I don't think it would change much about who I am... Can anyone share how they understand gender?
Gender from a grammatical perspective is in the masculine and feminine (etc.) form of language, objects tend to be described in terms of gender such as ships, it’s modern-day illiterate creep that has confused ‘sex’ with ‘gender’ in grammar. It is ‘sex’ that distinguishes between biological-differences such as ‘male’ and ‘female’, I’ve only broadly alluded to the difference between gender and sex, I have not looked to create a particularly keen definition..
In science, when referring to male or female, gender and sex are identical in meaning. The word gender is often used preferentially to the word sex, as the latter can also refer to sexual intercourse. Scientific usage is not identical to social usage.