What is gender?

Sometimes it is hard to understand exactly what is meant by the term “gender”, and how it differs from the closely related term “sex”.

Our sex is determined by the sexual organs we are born with - males are born with a penis, females a vagina. Thus the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ relate to biological difference between the sexes. When a baby is born of indeterminate sex, a decision is often made in the first few weeks of life to create (surgically) a sex for the child.

Gender basically relates to the types of behaviours society expects of males and females. We learn these behaviours as we grow through a range of images and messages given to us by parents, schools, friends and the media. Young girls might be given dolls to play with and princess outfits to play in. Boys may be given guns and soldier uniforms. Through this process we grow from boys and girls to men and women, gendered terms that each have very distinct gendered characteristics.

Our expected gender characteristics include:

Boys and girls who accept their gender roles, grow into men and women who can experience very different outcomes. If society expects women to be gentle and compliant and men dominant and strong, then it follows that women will often be at the wrong end of a power imbalance between the sexes, earning less and being at risk of violence that stems from the sense of entitlement that men have. This is discussed in greater detail in the following sections.

Men and women who reject their expected gender roles can experience additional discrimination. Expressive and gentle men are derided and women who reject caring and nurturing roles are criticised. Labels are applied which are often associated with how society sees different sexual orientations A caring man may be labelled as gay; a strong female labelled as a lesbian. In this way we carry other prejudices from society into gender-based discrimination.

In most cases we grow up feeling a sense of comfort or acceptance with our gender (as prescribed by biological sex at birth). However, a small number of us (around 1 in 11,500) find as we grow our prescribed gender is so different from our internal sense of where we exist in relation to being a boy/girl, man/women that we express a wish to live in the opposite, more appropriate gender. In Scotland, those of use experiencing this are referred to as ‘transgender people’.