Peanut butter and jelly. Chocolate and mint. Cake and ice cream. These are all things that exist on their own, but are often paired with and thereby associated with each other. They just naturally go together. Some things are just like that — intrinsically tied, always influencing each other. Some of these things are inconsequential, like the kind of ice cream bought at the super market. Others are important to how we discuss and define our existence as people, like gender and sexuality.
Gender
Gender is not as simple as the sex a person is assigned at birth equating with gender. There are many ways to experience gender, both as a person who identifies as their assigned gender at birth (cisgender) and as a person who does not identify as their assigned gender at birth (transgender). As genderspectrum.org puts it, “Generally, we assign a newborn’s sex as either male or female (some US states and other countries offer a third option) based on the baby’s genitals. Once a sex is assigned, we presume (assign) the child’s gender... Gender identity is our internal experience and naming of our gender. It can correspond to or differ from the sex we were assigned at birth.”
Gender in the western world is thought of as being black and white, no shades of gray line, with male being on one end and female being on the other. Social…
