Sociology of gender is a prominent subfield of sociology. Since 1950 an increasing part of the academic literature, and of the public discourse uses gender for the perceived or projected (self-identified) masculinity or femininity of a person. The terms was introduced by Money (1955): Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... 1950 (MCML) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... In philosophy, it is important to distinguish between two senses of identity, qualitative identity and numerical identity. ... Two Seated Men In many societies, masculinity is understood to include open displays of same-sex non-sexual affection and physical contact. ... A bagpiper in Scottish military uniform. ...

“The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism.”

A person's gender is complex, encompassing countless characteristics of appearance, speech, movement and other factors not solely limited to biological sex. This article is about sex, meaning the different sexes; male, female, etc. ...

Societies tend to have binary gender systems in which everyone is categorized as male or female, but this is not universal. Some societies include a third gender role; for instance, the Native American Two-Spirit people and the hijras of India. Look up binary in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Male symbol Male is the sex of an organism, or a part of an organism, which produces sperm. ... Female symbol Female is the sex of an organism, or a part of an organism, which produces egg cells. ... Berdache (from French, from Arabic bardajo meaning kept boy) is a generic term used by some for a third gender (woman-living-man) among many, if not most, Native American tribes. ... Two Hijras bless a baby in a Hindu ceremony. ...

There is debate over to what extent gender is a social construct and to what extent it is a biological construct. At the extremes of these views you have social constructionism which suggests that it is entirely a social construct and essentialism which suggests that it's entirely a biological construct. Social scientists and literary scholars have claimed that many things are social constructions or social constructs, or that they have been socially constructed. ... Social constructionism is a sociological theory of knowledge developed by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. ... Social scientists and literary scholars have claimed that many things are social constructions or social constructs, or that they have been socially constructed. ... Essentialism is the belief and practice centered on a philosophical claim that for any specific kind of entity it is at least theoretically possible to specify a finite list of characteristics, all of which any entity must have to belong to the group defined. ...

Gender associations are constantly changing as society progresses. For example, the color pink was considered masculine in the early 1900s and is now seen as feminine.

In feminist theory

During the 1980 there was no consensus about how the terms were to be applied. In the 1974 edition of Masculine/Feminine or Human, the author uses “innate gender” and “learned sex roles“, but in the 1978 edition, the use of sex and gender is reversed. By 1980, most feminist on using gender only for socioculturally adapted traits. // Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical, ground. ... 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ...

Other languages

In Iran, both sex and gender are used in contexts where they could not be substituted ( sexual intercourse; anal sex; safe sex; sex worker; sex slave). Other languages, like German, use the same word Geschlecht to refer both to grammatical gender and to biological sex, making the distinction between sex and gender advocated by some anthropologists difficult. In some contexts, German has adopted the English loan-word gender to achieve this distinction. Sometimes 'Geschlechtsidentitaet' is used as gender (although it literally means gender identity) and 'Geschlecht' as sex (translation of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble). More common is the use of modifiers: biologisches Geschlecht for sex, Geschlechtsidentität for gender identity and Geschlechtsrolle for gender role etc.