It seems obvious to me that ‘gender’ is a term with different meanings in different reference contexts, but that usually is meant to distinguish where one stands with respect to the reproductive binary of male and female.
The simplest usage is to say you are a male or female, based on genitals. Social order is built around the pairing of males and females, and every aspect of life has masculine or feminine style defined in a society.
There are a few people born whose native anatomical gender cannot be distinguished, and they are surgically assigned as males or females, then are trained like others into the gender performance rules and roles for males and females in their society defining what it means to be a ‘man’ or ‘woman’.
For some intersex babies this assignment turns out to be wrong. A child assigned female may, as ‘she’ grows, understand herself as a man, and, lacking male anatomy, become quite troubled. No one believes her or wants to allow her to live as a man. In another type of exception, a child may have typical male genitals at birth, and later understand himself to be internally wired in ways typical for women.He identifies with women and
These exceptions indicate that our internal sense of social gender, whether we are ‘men’ or ‘women’ is a complex phenomenon, and is not determined by anatomical gender. The external perception of ‘gender’ is a calculation, as you point out, based on our experience and the clues presented.
And, to make matters even more complicated, gender is in the eye of the beholder. One person may regard another as a gender different from the way that person perceives their own gender, Boys are exhorted by parents and others to ‘not be a girl’- which demonstrates that behavior and emotion are seen as sufficient to be thought of as a girl. Females with strong masculinity may see themselves just as purposeful women, while others think of them and relate to them as if men, even if the terms is moderated to ‘mannish’ or ‘domineering’.
Someone said gender is a cluster category- layers of interacting characteristics. In daily life we first attempt to detect someones anatomical gender, as the baseline ‘truth’, and are alert if the look and feel of the person is not what we would expect. But anatomy is only of real interest if mating, or considering who would win a fistfight; when a person seems otherwise to fit the bill of man or woman, we tend to accept them as that gender.
For some trans people, this would be success- to cross over the gender fence within the binary construct. A genderfluid person would like the freedom to enjoy both sides. An androgynous person feels outside the binary, and the natural goal is simply to be oneself without having to be classified.
