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Gender refers to cultural characteristics while sex refers to biological characteristics.One's society attaches preferred behaviors and demeanor to that person's sexual identity. IF a person is biologically a male then society prefers that that individual follow a prescribed gender path identified as masculine.If the individual is biologically a female, then the preferred gender behavior is the feminine one. These two words are not synonyms and cannot be used interchanged. Gender is not the same as sex. A person has a biological identifier ( sex) and a cultural indentifier ( gender). OFten times the cultural identifier ( gender) does not match the biological identifier ( sex) . A male sexed being will behave in feminine defined gender or a person with femal biological characteristics will act in culturally identified masculine ways. THese persons are identifed as deviant and are said to be cross-gendered. User:24.181.194.183
I'd be a bit carefull with a word like "deviant" - this is a value judgement, and not exactly a positive one. Not to mention that whether being transgender can justifiably called deviant is quite open to debate.
Nevertheless, you are partially right about sex not being the same as gender - it is not. Unfortunatly, current English usage is not so precise, and gender is increasingly used as a synonym for sex, even when very clearly only the "hardware part" is meant. You might want to have a look at Talk:Gender.
If you want to further participate in the debate, may I however suggest that you sign your entries in the future? It makes reading a debate much, much simpler. That is done with -- ~~~~ It would also be nice if you would get yourself a username, because calling people 24.181 does just not feel proper. -- AlexR 07:23, 15 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If you can access it, the OED page is fairly interesting as it has the earliest record of each usage
