What is gender? When someone says gender, most people think male or female, but those are only two of many genders and two of three sexes. This can make gender confusing to understand. It can help to picture your ideal you: is that person “female”/feminine in your eyes? Masculine? Do they not have a gender, or do they maybe have more than one gender? This is your gender. Biologic sex and gender are not the same. Biologic sex are the parts you are born with such as a penis, vagina or both (this is known as intersex). Gender, however, is how you identify, and some describe it as a spectrum, but I feel that is too linear. To me, gender is better represented on a graph, such as the one below.
On a graph like this, we have Male to Female and Agender to Multigender, as shown here:
Next will be some examples, and depending how each is experienced, it could be a few different genders. The location of the dot on the graph shows how this person identifies. The below represents a demiboy, meaning partially Male/Masculine and partially something else (in this example, it is Male/Masculine and Agender/No gender).
The next example is most likely bigender or a version of multigender (being or flowing between two or more genders), leaning towards feminine.
While I stated what I thought these dots may represent, it really depends on the person to determine how they identify and what that dot means to the person who put it there. The last example is of my gender. I identify as gender-fluid and flow between everything on this chart.
Now I could have made this more personalized and complicated but decided against it, though I hope these examples help people visualize gender more clearly. It is also important to keep in mind that these are only a few of the infinite possibilities out there.
