What is gender?

To me it means do you sit down or stand when you’re peeing?

Grammatically, it’s a kind of inflection that generates other inflections in a language.

Socially, it’s a construct that, one might argue, allocates social roles based on sexual dimorphism (in humans, at least).

Biologically, it doesn’t exist. Sex does.

@ucme – why can’t I sit down? Why mustn’t I wipe my willy?

@the100thmonkey Feel free to shit sit down, I know I do when i’m drunk, otherwise i’m gonna get very wet feet & we can’t be having that.

A socially constructed role that is imposed on us by society.

I think gender is the societal behavioral patterns that are stereotypically associated more with one biological sex or another. Thus, one’s gender identification can be different or the same as one’s biological sex.

@janbb Great Answer, I especially like that for children (that is can be different or the same.)

Isn’t Gender simply XX or XY? Gender identification is another matter.

@majorrich Not in current parlance. I believe it is had sociolgoical implications in its current usage.

What’s Jack Palance got to do with it¿

Jack Palance is/was definitely Male.

I personally hold gender and identification as separate matters. It makes my life feel simpler. Gender is in the equipment, and identification is the sociological part of it. Probably too much time filling out paper work. I’ve had a few people give ambiguous answers when I was interviewing them and had to lower the question to “do you have one or not?” because the form only has two boxes.

To me, surprisingly, gender has to do with sex organs and hormones. Women have a uterus (to carry a fetus and/or /baby), mammary glands (that produce milk for babies) and ovaries. Men have testes and a penis for inserting sperm into a female egg. This is, of course, a general statement not used to offend anyone.
Women have and make estrogen; men have and make testosterone. I do not know if women have any testosterone or not but men have more, generally speaking and it really shows itself in the gym. When men lift weights and work out they tend to become muscular quickly. When women do it they become muscular *much*more slowly if at all.
Men are also fantastic at opening jars and carrying refrigerators , not that women cannot do these things too but sometimes men have less of a problem and don’t have a uterus that might have to be removed at some point afterwards.
There are many women who are stronger than men the same size and age but I find this to be the exception.

Isn’t gender a social construct? It determines much of our behaviour.

Like so many post modern debates, the one about gender is corrupted by equivocation.

According to scientific convention, gender is determined by whether you have XX chromosome, or XY chromosome.

But Mother Nature is occasionally inconsistent, and so sometimes aberrations like Klinefelders syndrome, Turner’s syndrome etc show up on the genetic stage.

The presence of these aberrations, demonstrating Nature’s occasionally inconsistensies, allow people to imagine that gender is sort of an arbitrary social convention.

So at that point, people begin to define gender in such a way as to validate their capricious wish as to what gender should be, as if it is defined by society, and not nature.

But the truth is, it all about XX or XY. A rose by another name is still a rose.

Overrated.

says the girl with a beard.

Your biological sex (genitals, chromosomes, natural hormone levels, whether you pee standing or sitting) is your sex, not your gender.

Gender covers several things. It’s partly a social costruct aimed at fitting men and women into prescribed roles. It’s also partly self-identity and self-expression; it’s how masculine or feminine you feel that you are, and how you present that feeling to the world. When your own sense of gender identity doesn’t match your bioloical sex, or the roles prescribed for you by society, that’s what it means to be transgendered.

Gender is basically the characteristics that society/culture decides is masculine or feminine.
Sex is the biological sex… umm ok what @downtide just said… :P