Gender systems

Gender systems are systems of gender roles in societies. 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.

Gender binary is one example of a gender system. A gender binary is the classification of sex and gender into two distinct and disconnected forms of masculine and feminine. It can describe a social boundary that discourages people from crossing or mixing gender roles, or from creating a third form of gender expression altogether. It can also represent some of the prejudices which stigmatize intersex and transgender people. The gender binary often involves gender roles and gender identities as a means of identifying a place for someone to fit in a male or female role in society.

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 deviations come from lesbian, gay, crossdressing and transexual people. 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 tribes 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. Some widespread features of the variety of gender roles are: transvestism, cross-gender occupation, same sex (but different gender) sexuality, recruitment to different roles, special languages, ritual roles, and associations with spiritual power.Cross-dressing was the most visible marker but has proven a variable and less reliable indicator of status as a Two-Spirit. However the main interest is that these people are an accepted portion of their society. In some cases they were even given special respect and various honors. The roles varied greatly between tribes. For example, a male variant might have to wear male clothing during warfare, but women’s clothing any other time. These gender roles were often decided at a young age. If a boy was interested in women’s activities, or vice versa, a gender variant role would likely be undertaken in adulthood. “In some societies, same-sex sexual desire or practice did figure into the definition of one’s gender variant role, in others, it did not.” In the case of the Navajo, there were four genders: man, woman, masculine female-bodied nádleeh, and feminine male-bodied nádleeh. Intercourse between two people of different genders, regardless of biological sex, was not stigmatized. However, any sexual relationship between two of the same one gender was considered homosexual, and was strongly disapproved of. In the majority of Native American societies however, biological sex played no part in any gender variant role.

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