Gender Overview

When a child is born, a doctor or midwife takes a quick glance at the baby’s genitals and declares the baby a boy or a girl accordingly. But in day-to-day social situations, we don’t flash our genitals at each other! Instead, we determine the gender of other people in the first seconds of meeting by unconsciously observing and analysing a huge number of different gender-associated cues like clothes, body shape, voice, face shape, mannerisms and behaviour. We also signal our own gender using these cues. For the majority of people, these different gender-associated cues all match up closely with the gender they actually identify as, but for a minority not everything matches up as expected.

It can feel uncomfortable and difficult to suddenly try to think in depth about something usually determined easily without any conscious thought. But a useful way to think about gender without causing too much of a headache is to use the diagram shown below which separates gender into three different scales:

Your Physical Body includes all aspects of your gender-related biological structure: not only your genitals but also your internal reproductive system, your chromosomes and your secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts, facial and body hair, voice, and body shape.

Your Gender Identity is your internal sense of where you exist in relation to being a man or a woman.

Your Gender Expression is your external gender-related clothing and behaviour (including your interests and mannerisms).

Throughout history, small but significant numbers of people have found that their physical bodies, gender identities and gender expressions do not all line up at one end of these three scales. For every imaginable combination of positions on each of these three scales, there are currently a number of people in the UK for whom that combination is their daily experience of their gender. Unfortunately, while nature loves variety, society tends to prefer similarity so there is often a lot of pressure, in the form of harassment and discrimination, to try to force people not to reveal any gender variance.