Defining the Difference: People should be open-minded about gender identity and expression because it’s a construct that means different things to different people

There was a point in time when my best friend thought they were transgender — they believed their gender didn’t align with their sex assigned at birth. 

When they told me, never once did I think of them as a different person or as some complex in-between gender. It just meant that I would be spending the next few months pinching myself if I used the wrong pronouns until I knew I was calling them what they wanted to be called. 

I understood that the gender they aligned with didn’t change their personality, but instead gave them a sense of clarity about who they were at their core — and I just wanted to help them get there. This is the mindset everyone should carry.

Coming out and adjusting to those changes were my friend’s way of honoring their self-expression, and it’s different for every person who experiments with their gender identity. Gender as a whole is an umbrella of different identities, which means that there are more than just two ways — male or female — to identify yourself. 

Up until the coming-of-age of Gen Z, “male” and “female” have been the textbook terms for both sex and gender. As our generation has grown increasingly comfortable expressing ourselves, we’ve realized that this vocabulary is, quite frankly, garbage.

There’s a standard set of gender rules — males are expected to dominating and females are expected to be compassionate — that everyone is presumed to hold, especially in terms of self-presentation, but that little box is too compact for the billions of different people in the world. 

Contrary to popular belief, gender and sex are not the same thing. Sex refers to the biological differences between genitals, while gender refers to the spectrum of self-expression. 

Gender has nothing to do with anatomy. It doesn’t exist on any biological level. Though gender identity and gender expression are different things, both are based on a person’s understanding of self, not what their body looks like.

Unlike gender identity, gender expression is the way a person conveys themselves. This can be through their hair, clothing, social roles or mannerisms and doesn’t have to align with their gender identity, which is how a person believes themselves to be. Some people may think that being a man and liking to wear dresses is too confusing, but so what? That’s their problem. 

It shouldn’t be anyone else’s business if a nonbinary person — someone who doesn’t identify with the binary of male or female gender — dressed in floral skirts with pink sweaters last week but switched to jeans and a plaid flannel this week.

Gen Z is often known for fighting against the social constructs controlling our society through social media, however the rebuttal against different gender identities commonly asks us to refer back to science, biology or plainly that “gender is what’s in your pants.” 

This might be a bit of a shocker — gender a social construct, but so is the idea that “male” and “female” are the only two biological sexes. 

As for sex terminology, people who are defined as intersex are usually forgotten by society. Intersex is another umbrella term used to describe a number of different anatomical sexes that don’t fit under the accepted “male” or “female.” According to the Intersex Society of North America, at the birth of an intersex child, their parents most commonly choose a typical “male” or “female” gender for the child to avoid trauma or confusion later in life. This often leaves children with intersex conditions at a higher chance of gender transition, or to be transgender. These people — and every transitioning person — should feel safe and accepted to transition at their pace. 

Where most people fall flat on the difference between sex and gender is in their terminology — most gender identity terms that people are familiar with are incorrectly used as umbrella terms for other identities. For instance, transgender is often a term falsely used to describe people who are genderqueer, bigender or polygender. 

Nonbinary people have been accepted and acknowledged in many different cultures throughout history. Native Americans call someone with both masculine and feminine spirits two-spirits, and Hijras — neither a man nor a woman in Indian culture — are officially accepted by Bangladesh and Pakistan as a third gender along with “male” and “female.”

Because gender is complex and abstract, it’s best to be as open-minded as possible. A person’s identity doesn’t always have to be understandable or simple to you for it to be the right identity for them. 

Forget what you think you know about the variances among sex and gender because we all have at least one major similarity — we all want to know who we are. For some, discovering their gender identity can be a difficult journey that leads them down a different path. If that means that you have to ask what the difference between drag and transgender is, so be it. 

People need to realize that a person doesn’t change just because their labels do. Though my best friend realized their gender expression is just more masculine than feminine and they weren’t actually transgender, that experience made me discover that I couldn’t care less about their gender. Their gender identity has no effect on me, and I love them regardless of their labels.