Gender

Gender

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “gender" is the idea of either being a male or a female, and includes the behavioral or psychological traits that go along with being that. This definition means that you can only be either female or male, depending on what genitals you were born with to go along with one specific gender, meaning someone who is transsexual is still technically the gender that they were born as, no matter how long they have identified themselves as the other sex.

Gender is often just viewed as girl or boy depending on the sex you were born as, but PFLAG National has a different idea of gender, classifying it as traits “often influenced by societal expectations, that classify an individual as male, female, a mixture of both, or neither”. This created a new idea of how gender is assigned, stating that a person can be both or neither, showing that gender is not defined by genitalia and can be decided by the individual. The idea of societal expectations playing a part in the decision of what gender a person is could also mean that a person could not be going by the gender that they personally prefer because they would not be going with the ‘societal ideals’.

Going along with this definition, UC Berkeley Gender Equity Resources Center believes that gender being used as a classification is “a socially constructed system” making it something that can change over time depending on the person’s choices and situations. 

Works Cited

Gender Equity Resource Center. UC Berkeley, n.d. Web. 27 Aug. 2015. 

"Gender." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2011.

Web. 27 August 2015.

"PFLAG National." PFLAG National. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Aug. 2015.