Gender

This article is about the overall concept. For other uses of the term Gender, please see Gender (disambiguation).

Gender is a biological distinction among traits or individuals as being male or female. This usage is common across the Animal Kingdom and to some extent in the Plant Kingdom as well. Intersexual and asexual traits can be found in both kingdoms, however, making distinctions of an organism as either male or female not always meaningful or accurate.

Among humans, the concept of gender is complex and more recently the study of gender expression has shown that gender identification is multivariate and, in the case of transgender or transsexual persons, may not be aligned with anatomical determinants. Sexual orientation is a distinct characteristic from gender identification. Cultural and political affiliations between minority groups, as found in the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) designation, may inadvertently conflate gender with sexual orientation. Conceptualizing gender as a spectrum rather than as a dichotomy gained increased acceptance in the late twentieth century.