Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex i.
Some societies have specific genders besides "man" and "woman", such as the hijras of South Asia ; these are often referred to as third genders and fourth genders , etc.
Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. Today, the distinction is followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences [5] [6] and documents written by the World Health Organization WHO.
In other contexts, including some areas of the social sciences, gender includes sex or replaces it. The social sciences have a branch devoted to gender studies. Other sciences, such as sexology and neuroscience , are also interested in the subject. The social sciences sometimes approach gender as a social construct , and gender studies particularly do, while research in the natural sciences investigates whether biological differences in males and females influence the development of gender in humans; both inform debate about how far biological differences influence the formation of gender identity.
In some English literature, there is also a trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social gender role. This framework first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in This, in turn, came from Latin genus.
