Gender in common usage refers to the distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Currently, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and gender theorists like Judith Butler and Kate Bornstein say that gender is a social construction, that it is "performative," and that one is always in the process of becoming a gender rather than actually being a gender. Additionally, the social "rules" governing gender are always shifting with the culture, making one's "masculinity" or "femininity" a (tacit) agreement among members of a culture, rather than being derived from an innate set of predetermined characteristics. Although gender is often used interchangably with sex, today many do not think that sex and gender are the same thing. Someone whose gender identity feels incongruent with how their physical body (sex) is interpreted by the dominant culture may identify as transgender or genderqueer. While many cultures interpret genders as a binary division (men and women), current gender theorists and biologists like Anne Fausto-Sterling question both the binary structures of gender and even of sex (the ways in which cultures interpret and name the physical body according to social structures).

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Some languages have a system of grammatical gender, a type of noun class system; while nouns may be classified as "masculine" or "feminine", or even "neuter" (e.g., German) in such languages, this is essentially a convention which may have little or no connection to their meaning. Likewise, a wide variety of phenomena have gendered characteristics ascribed to them, by analogy to male and female bodies (such as with the gender of connectors and fasteners) or due to social norms.

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Etymology and usage

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Gender comes from Middle English gendre, from Latin genus, all meaning "kind", "sort", or "type". Ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root gen, which is also the root for "kind", "king" and many others. It appears in Modern French in the word genre (type, kind) and is related to the Greek root gen- (to produce), appearing in gene, genesis and oxygen. As a verb, it is used for to breed in the King James Bible:

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Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. — Leviticus, 19:19

According to Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Protagoras used the terms masculine, feminine, and neuter to classify nouns, introducing the concept of grammatical gender. At least since the 14th century, the word is also used to indicate male or female qualities:

The Psyche, or soul, of Tiresias is of the masculine gender — Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia

I may add the gender too of the person I am to govern — Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

Black divinities of the feminine gender — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Our most lively impression is that the sun is there assumed to be of the feminine gender — Henry James, Essays on Literature

By 1900, this usage was considered jocular by some, perhaps like the modern expression "of the female persuasion". In 1926, Fowler's Modern English Usage suggested that “gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine g[ender], meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.”

In some parts of the social sciences, following a usage shift that began in the 1950s and was well established by the 1980s, gender has been used increasingly to refer to social rather than biological categories, for which the word sex is used:

“Today a return to separate single-sex schools may hasten the revival of separate gender roles” — Wendy Kaminer, in The Atlantic Monthly (1998)

The American Heritage Dictionary uses the following two sentences to illustrate the difference: “The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient.” But: “In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined."

In the last half of the 20th century, the use of gender in academia has increased greatly, and it now outnumbers the word sex in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. However, in many instances, the term gender acts as a euphemism for sex, and the distinction between sex and gender is only fitfully observed.

Sex

Gender can refer to the biological condition of being male or female, or less commonly hermaphrodite or neuter, as applied to humans, animals, and plants. In this sense, the term is a synonym for sex, a word that has undergone a usage shift itself, having become a synonym for sexual intercourse. In a study of scientists' usage of "gender" and "sex", Haig wrote:

'"'Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation."

Social category

Since the 1950s, the term gender has been increasingly used to distinguish a social role (gender role) and/or personal identity (gender identity) distinct from biological sex. Sexologist John Money wrote in 1955, “[t]he term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism.” Elements of such a role include clothing, speech patterns, movement and other factors not solely limited to biological sex.

Many societies categorize all individuals as either male or female — however, this is not universal. Some societies recognise a third gender — for instance the Two-Spirit people of some indigenous American peoples, and hijras of India and Pakistan — or even a fourth or fifth. Such categories may be an intermediate state between male and female, a state of sexlessness, or a distinct gender not dependent on male and female gender roles. Joan Roughgarden argues that in some non-human animal species, there can also be said to be more than two genders, in that there might be multiple templates for behavior available to individual organisms with a given biological sex.

There is debate over to what extent gender is a social construct and to what extent it is a biological construct. One point of view in the debate is social constructionism, which suggests that gender is entirely a social construct. Contrary to social constructionism is essentialism which suggests that it is entirely a biological construct. Others' opinions on the subject lie somewhere in between.

Some gender associations are changing as society changes, yet much controversy exists over the extent to which gender roles are simply stereotypes, arbitrary social constructions, or natural innate differences.

Legal status

A person's gender as female or male has legal significance -- gender is indicated on government documents, and laws provide differently for women and men. Some examples of how gender is legally relevant: many pension systems have different retirement ages for men or women; in many jurisdictions, certain sexual offences can only be committed by men (e.g. rape); and usually marriage is only available to opposite-gender couples, whereas a civil partnership is often only available for same-gender couples.

The question then arises as to what legally determines whether someone is male or female. In most cases this can appear obvious, but the matter is complicated for intersexual or transgender people. Different jurisdictions have adopted different answers to this question. Almost all countries permit changes of legal gender status in cases of intersexualism, when the gender assignment made at birth is determined upon further investigation to be biologically inaccurate -- technically, however, this is not a change of status per se, rather it is a recognition of a status which was deemed to exist unknown from birth. Increasingly, jurisdictions also provide a procedure for changes of legal gender for transgender people.

Gender assignment, when there are any indications that genital sex might not be decisive in a particular case, is normally not defined by any single definition, but by a combination of conditions, including chromosomes and gonads. Thus, for example, in many jurisdictions a person with XY chromosomes but female gonads could be recognised as female at birth.

The ability to change legal gender for transgender people in particular has given rise to the phenomena in some jurisdictions of the same person having different genders for the purposes of different areas of the law. For example, in Australia prior to the Re Kevin decisions, a transsexual person could be recognised as the gender they identified with under many areas of the law, e.g. social security law, but not for the law of marriage. Thus, for a period it was possible for the same person to have two different genders under Australian law.

It is also possible in federal systems for the same person to have one gender under state law and a different gender under federal law (e.g. suppose the state recognises gender transitions, but the federal government does not).

In feminist theory

During the 1970s there was no consensus about how the terms were to be applied. In the 1974 edition of Masculine/Feminine or Human, the author uses “innate gender” and “learned sex roles”, but in the 1978 edition, the use of sex and gender is reversed. By 1980, most feminist writings had agreed on using gender only for socioculturally adapted traits.

Other languages

In English, both sex and gender are used in contexts where they could not be substituted (sexual intercourse; anal sex; safe sex; sex worker; sex slave). Other languages, like German, use the same word Geschlecht to refer both to grammatical gender and to biological sex, making the distinction between sex and gender advocated by some anthropologists difficult. In some contexts, German has adopted the English loan-word gender to achieve this distinction. Sometimes 'Geschlechtsidentitaet' is used as gender (although it literally means gender identity) and 'Geschlecht' as sex (translation of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble). More common is the use of modifiers: biologisches Geschlecht for sex, Geschlechtsidentität for gender identity and Geschlechtsrolle for gender role etc. In Swedish, "gender" is translated with the linguistic parallel "genus" also in sociological contexts, thus: Genusstudier (gender studies), genusvetenskap (gender science). "Sex" however, only signifies sexual relations, and not the typical Western dichotomy, a concept for which "kön" is used. A common distinction is then made between "kön" (sex) and "genus" (gender), where "kön" only carries the supposedly biological connotations. In earlier literature, and occasionally in non-academic contexts, the word "könsroll" (lit. "sex role", but contextually translated as "gender role") can be seen.

Gender in language

Natural languages often make gender distinctions. These may be of various kinds:

• The asymmetrical use of terms that refer to males and females. Concern that current language may be biased towards males has led some scholars in recent times to argue for the use of more Gender-neutral language in English and other languages.
• The traditional use of different vocabulary by men and women. See, for instance, Gender differences in spoken Japanese.
• Grammatical gender, the codification of gender into more or less general inflectional rules for turning a word that refers to a man into a word that refers to a woman, or vice-versa. For example, in the words actor and actress the suffix -or denotes "male person" (masculine), and the suffix -ress denotes "female person" (feminine). This type of inflection is very rare in modern English, but quite common in other languages, including most languages in the Indo-European family. Normally, English does not mark nouns or other words for gender, although it does express gender in the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. In such languages, some nouns, often many, may have a grammatical gender that does not relate to their meaning. For example, the Latin word Sol (Sun) is masculine and the word Luna (Moon) is feminine, but in German the opposite occurs: Sonne (Sun) is feminine, and Mond (Moon) is masculine. This is why the terms "masculine" and "feminine" are generally preferred to "male" and "female" in this context.