Gender - What is important?

There are three elements to gender: physical gender, gender identity, gender role and presentation.

Gender Identity
This is internal to the individual. It is about how they consider (or do not consider) themselves. It is entirely hidden from the world, as it is completely impossible to see into someone’s head. What a person considers their own gender identity to be is irrelevant.

Why irrelevant? Because you do not interact with the remainder of the world based on your gender identity. In fact, most people do not even give their gender identity a second thought. Certainly it is not a male/female binary; a black or white choice, but is an infinite variety of shades in all directions, not just female and male. I am not, therefore, even interested in what a person’s gender identity is.

Physical Gender
This is just the physical body that you have and how it compares to the biological ‘standard’ of either male or female. Of course, this is assumed to be a binary, but it may actually be something uch more complicated than that. There are far too many intersex conditions that lay waste to the idea of a physical gender binary. There are many conditions which mean that a person’s body may not fit wholly within the binary. We must, therefore, consider physical gender (or sex) to be a large spectrum as opposed to a binary. Most people, however, simplistically see that external male genitals means physical sex is male and lack of external male genitals makes the individual female.

So far, I have concluded that people can think of themselves (gender identity) across a spectrum of identities and they may have a body that could be on a spectrum with female at one end and male at the other. Female and male are just the extremes of the identity. An obvious question is whether or not there is any correlation between physical gender and gender identity, but I suspect that is a question that may prove impossible to fully answer.

Gender role and presentation
This is the way that a person interacts with the world. It is the way they dress and talk. It is about their mannerisms and deportment. This is the element of gender that actually matters. It matters, because it is how we interact with the world and how the world interacts with us.

In a world in which we have divided everything into a simplistic binary of female and male, we also have divided gender roles and presentation into a binary which correlates with a person’s assigned physical sex, based upon their external genitals.

In countries such as the UK, there is an expectation that women will dress in skirts and feminine clothing; that they will be demure and submissive. Men are expected to be dominant and aggressive, to wear more rugged clothing and certainly not skirts. In Scotland, the traditional dress is a kilt. Call it a skirt at your peril: it is a kilt NEVER a skirt. There are many more elements as well, such as makeup, shoes, ways of talking and so on. There are all these different traits and clothing choices, all of which appear to be divided between male and female.

But why are they divided? Why is it wrong for a man to wear a skirt? What is it that means a woman is demure and a man aggressive? Is this something biologically programmed into us before birth, or is it something that is constructed from societal expectations?