Gender identity

Although this page discusses gender dysphoria, a somewhat delicate subject, it has been written with the aim of being safe reading for people born before approximately 1950. If you find any objectionable content, please feel free to post on the discussion page and the editors will attempt to ameliorate it.

Gender

The first thing you need to understand is that "gender" is not the same thing as "sex". They are often used interchangeably, and indeed in most people they are intercorrelated to a very high degree, but there is a significant portion of the population for which this is not true.

• sex (as in the attribute, not the act) is most commonly used to mean the physical, genetic, or biological male-ness or female-ness of a person.
• gender refers to all attributes which are commonly thought of as "masculine" or "feminine" traits. This technically includes "sex", so you might define "sex" as "one's physical/genetic/biological gender". However, even leaving out "sex", there are many separate aspects to "gender". Again, these aspects are highly correlated in most people -- but not in everyone.

this essay is still under construction