by Beth Pritchard

Created on: December 11, 2008   Last Updated: January 07, 2012

First comes sex, this is biological - I am female due to my anatomy. So that's pretty simple. Gender is far more complicated, we tick the m/f box when filling out a questionnaire but what does that really mean? Do we simply decide to define ourselves based on what we were born with? Quite simply no.

The sex that we are born with affects everything about our early development; girls wear dresses and boys certainly don't. Boys are rough and tumble, girls are sweet and gentle. These assumptions affect the way that we treat children from infancy. Have you ever heard the utterance "good boys don't..." these messages sink in. Children learn their behaviour based on these messages. Girls watch mummy and see the things that she does and imitate; by two years old children are already associating themselves with others of their sex. By 5 most of the child's time is spent with people of the same sex and by 8 children are mimicking behaviours that they see in others of their sex. This is what gender is. It is the assumptions surrounding our sexes the way we should behave.

It is hard however to establish how much of our gendered behaviour is down to our socialisation and how much is down to biology. Boys may actually be more aggressive naturally or maybe they are taught to be aggressive. It is virtually impossible to separate and it comes down to the nature and nurture debate, which we will never really answer.

These assumptions about how sexes act are everywhere and deeply ingrained into the very fabric of our society. We may try consciously to challenge some of them, painting children's rooms yellow rather than the traditional pink or blue but would we ever buy a boy a toy doll? With the female rights movements of the 1960's we have far more awareness about female oppression, we will try to allow them into traditionally male roles and we are conscious of sexism towards women. Is it true in the reverse though? Though we are challenging the female gender we are not doing the same of the male, which is causing gender confusion and men feeling that they have no role.

Another point that needs to be mentioned is that there is a traditional path of the sexes in that females turn out one way and men another; however there are people who do challenge this. The extremes being transsexuals -  people who reject the gender that they are born into. However they are only rejecting it in favour of another. It is near to impossible to remove gender totally because we have no idea of what that would be. We only have the male and female genders as examples, what else could we be? It is important to remember though that these roles are not totally natural. This realisation may help us to question them.

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