There are some words that have so much power, both to make people feel good about themselves and to make them feel terrible, that to use them ethically means to make them complicated, and resist simple definitions. Gender is one of those words.
As a sex educator I can offer a working definition of gender which is what you'll find below. As a human, and someone who cares about other people and supports people's right to define their own experience, I can't say that my definition is the best one or the right one. Hopefully what it is, is a place to start thinking about gender for yourself.
People often confuse the words sex and gender. Sex and gender may be related but they aren't the same thing.
A person's sex refers to an assignment they are given at birth (and sometimes before birth). When a child is born, or when a fetus is viewed by an ultrasound, a medical professional will usually say "it's a boy" or "it's a girl". Most of the time the sex they identify the baby as is based on looking at the genitals of the baby. If they see something that looks like a penis they say it's a boy. If they don't, they say it's a girl. Even though sex often refers to genetics, that is, whether someone has two X chromosomes, in which case they are called female, or an X and Y chromosome, in which case they are called male, it's worth remembering that most of the time no one is looking at chromosomes at all.
Determining sex just by looking makes things much simpler since, when you do look at people's chromosomes, you find out there actually aren't only two options when it comes to identifying sex. Some people are born with two X and one Y, or one X and two Y's (these are just two examples of what is sometimes referred to as intersex). The medical model does its best to force everyone into one of two groups, telling us we are either men or women. But our bodies and experience are both richer and more diverse than that.
Gender is different than sex. Gender refers to many things, including social expectations and stereotypes, our own internal experience, and the ways we express how we feel. Social expectations and stereotypes of gender describe what it means to be masculine or feminine. Just as there is an attempt to reduce our sex to a binary choice of man or woman, in most societies (but not all) gender is understood to be either/or, you are either masculine or feminine. Defining gender in terms of social expectations includes things like "boys do such and such" and "girls like this or that". For adults social expectations and stereotypes about gender result in the belief that "men are from mars and women are from venus". Social expectations and stereotypes make up a lot of how gender is understood in our world, even though they often have little connection to how we feel about gender.
Our internal experience of gender is something different. This refers to the way we feel, think, and experience ourselves as masculine and feminine. When it comes to what gender feels like, because of social expectations some people can feel as if they have to choose. Yet most people have an internal experience of masculinity and femininity, and many people experience gender as something different than either of those, or of somewhere in between. So saying that gender is only about being masculine or feminine isn't really telling the whole story, since most people feel both ways, and some people experience gender as some third thing.
Gender can also be understood in terms of how we present or express ourselves in the world. It might be how we talk or move around or dress. It might be about what kinds of people we spend time with or how we structure our relationships. The way we feel inside about gender may or may not be the way we present our gender to the outside world.
Just as a medical professional assigned us a sex when we were born, other people in the world treat us as if they know what our gender is. But because gender describes an internal experience, it is something that may not match the way we look on the outside, and others often can't know our gender identity without asking. This doesn't stop most of the world from making assumptions based on the way a person dresses or talks or behaves.
Most people challenge gender expectations or roles in some way. We may try to act out a stereotype, but humans aren't stereotypes, and none of us fit expectations of "real men" or "real women" all of the time. Also, to make matters more complicated, the social expectations are always being challenged and changing. What remains constant is that you are supposed to follow someone else's rules.
Of course some of us are better at fitting in than others, or seeming like we are following the rules. It is usually the people who visibly don't fit expectations about gender that are most punished in any culture. Sometimes punishment means being left out, other times it means being the victim of violence.
There are many different terms that people use to describe their gender or gender identity. Some examples include: man, woman, transgender, cisgender, transgender man, transgender woman, transsexual, genderqueer, gender variant, cis-man, cis-woman, Two-Spirit, Third Gender. There are so many different definitions for each of these terms that it's hard to know where to suggest you begin. In 2011 the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force issued a report Injustice At Every Turn which includes a carefully developed glossary in the back.
This is a time of active debate about these ideas and terms for gender. While it might seem easier if we could all agree on one, five, or twelve definitions, the result would never be as useful or good.
