Posted on August 16, 2025.
In this blog post, I elaborate on some terms I use often on this personal website. Within this text, my aim was to provide a tutorial on what gender, gender norms, and gender identity mean, as they might be unfamiliar to those with a heteronormative background.
I don't mean this in a judgemental tone! It's okay to be straight and cisgender and be a part of the majority - I think what really matters is that you educate yourself or at least, try not to cling on misleading conceptions while forming opinions on the LGBTQ+ community.
Back to the topic, I must admit that gender is a complicated word, and it can refer to gender norms, gender roles, gender stereotypes, gender identity, and gender presentation.
Gender, in the broadest sense, refers to gender norms, hence the common definition is the social, cultural expectations toward a person based on their sex assigned at birth. Your sex-assigned-at-birth can be male, female, or intersex - it's defined by the type of genitals you have at birth.
Gender roles and gender stereotypes largely intersect with gender norms. Personally, I don't make a clear distinction between these three terms.
Usually, our sex serves no purpose outside of the medical context and parents' social conditioning toward us in our childhood. In your daily life, you don't care about the fact that someone is born with a penis to declare that person is a "man," but the way they present themselves in a masculine way: their appearance, voice, and mannerisms.
These traits are called "gender presentation" - it can be masculine, feminine, or androgynous. In this context, masculine means social markers related to the male sex, feminine to the female sex, and androgynous presentation refers to a combination of masculinity and femininity.
Pronouns are another part of gender presentation - they're words used to refer to people in third person, including he, she, they, and it. They're provided more in detail in the next section.
It's time to step into the most important term: gender identity. Ever since childhood, we are exposed to the idea of "gender" - what boys and girls are supposed to do and look like. When our parents, peers, teachers, and the media spread this gender division, we tend to accept these gender norms unconsciously, a process called internalization. Basically, the combination of learning gender norms and the following internalization of one set of gender norms is called gender socialization.
Gender identity is how a person feels about themselves in the context of the internalization of gender norms. In the categorical sense, gender identities are man, woman, and non-binary. The word non-binary is an umbrella term, meaning that it consists of gender identities like agender, bigender, and other terms relating to not being completely a man or woman. The question "What's your gender?" reveals a person's gender identity.
A woman/man is a person who has internalized the female/male gender norms to the point of identification with the category of such, and a non-binary person rejects the both "man" and "woman" labels because they don't feel like those two boxes describe them.
The gendered subset (male or female set) of gender norms a person has internalized doesn't have to match with their sex-assigned-at-birth, as the awareness of the gender division is built while gender norms are taught.
A person who was born female can identify as a man, or a person who was born male, a woman. These people are called transgender. Usually, it's expected that when someone is born with a vagina, they're going to identify as a woman, making them cisgender, but sometimes this is not the case, hence transgender people exist.
Non-binary people can be considered transgender, since the non-binary identity doesn't align with the male or female sexes.
It's important to recognize that while someone might identify as a female, they might not be feminine in terms of gender presentation. Someone's gender presentation is not a predictor of their gender identity while for most people, they tend to align with each other. There are feminine men, masculine women, androgynous men, androgynous women, and non-binary people who can be feminine, masculine, or androgynous. These people are often called gender non-conforming because they don't conform to norms tied to their gender identity.
Similarly, someone's pronouns don't have to align with their gender identity or presentation. A masculine-presenting woman might go with the pronouns they/them. A feminine-presenting non-binary person might go with he/him. An androgynous man might go with she/her... There are no limitations. Some people can adopt multiple pronouns, and some might use unconventional ones, like ze/hir, fae/faer, called neopronouns.
To summarize mathematically,
It's true that for most people, the last three concepts tend to align with each other, but it's kind and human to accept people who are gender non-conforming, transgender, or non-binary. Another truth is that these groups of people face bigotry, systemic injustices, and oppression for how they identify or present. In most cases, asking someone about their pronouns is not only an act of kindness but also a means of resistance, signaling your acceptance of queer people.
The sex and gender identity distinction is a necessary model to explain people's interactions with gender. Not only does it have the perfect structure for making people feel understood, it also fights against gender essentialism, the belief that gender norms and sex are naturally intertwined.
Acknowledging the diversity of people's identities is often frowned upon by conservatives, as it's harder to control people when they aren't in fixed categories while they embrace their differences. The terms, "man" and "woman," are perfect terms to create the male-over-female hierarchy and also prevent people coming together, who live under the rule of the state and corporations' coercive authority.
When "gender" becomes "whatever you make it out to be," it becomes harder to exert control over people and divide them into categories that hate each other. You learn that your genitals don't determine how you want to describe yourself. You see that you don't have to conform to what's been imposed on you, like gender norms. It opens a wider perspective of questioning already existing systems.
Essentially, "men" and "women" are exposed as terms that aren't in contrast with each other. Such a perceived contrast holds no real value anymore because anyone can identify as a man or a woman, completely reject the gender binary, and realize they can present as however they want without conforming to gender norms.
It's no wonder transphobia is real because understanding the transgender existence, the gender and sex dichotomy, and the "More than two genders!" sentiment obviously targets some existing structures. More of what I say here has been touched on in the "Transgender identity as resistance" section of another blog post of mine.
Finally, a life without gender is desirable, and the only way to achieve such a goal under a gendered system is validating people's diverse identities. The moment we divorced gender from sex and let people switch sides even within the gender binary or abandon it altogether, we challenged the patriarchal gender hierarchy, gender norms that harm all of us, and the degradation of women into baby-making machines. We accepted that there's no one way to be a woman or a man.
This defiance costs transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people so much of their lives. For those with gender dysphoria, mental suffering is inherent, but society doesn't do them better and only intensifies their condition. For all these groups, they risk losing their families, jobs, and houses. All because who they are resists the powerful and exposes the failure of gender norms.