URNotAlone

What is gender?

July 1st, 2007 9:01 am MDT

From CONUNDRUM, by Jan Morris:To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial.  It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one's step or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries, and hormones.  It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity.  Male and female are sex, masculine and feminine are gender, and though the conceptions obviously overlap, they are far from synonymous.  As C.S. Lewis once wrote, gender is not a mere imaginative extension of sex.  "Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex.  Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.  Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and masculine and feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless."