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Concept
Gender system
Summary
Gender systems are the social structures that establish the number of genders and their associated gender roles in every society. A gender role is "everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male, female, or androgynous. This includes but is not limited to sexual and erotic arousal and response." Gender identity is one's own personal experience with gender role and the persistence of one's individuality as male, female, or androgynous, especially in self-awareness and behavior.
A gender binary is one example of a gender system.
Gender binary
Gender binary is the classification of sex and gender into two distinct, opposite, and disconnected forms of masculine and feminine. Gender binary is one general type of a gender system. Sometimes in this binary model, "sex", "gender" and "sexuality" are assumed by default to align.
In cultures where the gender binary is prominent and important, transgender people are a major exception to the societal norms related to gender. Intersex people, those who cannot be biologically determined as either male or female, are another obvious deviation. Other cultures have their own practices independent of the Western gender binary.
When European settlers first arrived in North America, they discovered different Native American nations had different concepts of sex and gender. In the Native North American society "berdaches" were given that name to identify them as gender variants. The Europeans "attempted to explain the berdache from various functional perspectives...in terms of the contributions these sex/gender roles made to social structure or culture." The term "berdache" was deemed inappropriate and insulting as time passed and awareness increased, so a new term was coined in 1990, "Two-Spirit". There were many roles for male and female Two-Spirits, productive specialization, supernatural sanction and gender variation.
Official source
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