Biological (or “natural”) gender is the distinction in sex between the “male” and “female” of each species. Grammatical gender is the distinction between “masculine” and “feminine,” which is used to classify nouns in languages such as Spanish (el sol, la luna). A third use is for social gender, which is the distinction we make when we use words like “man” and “woman” to classify individuals in terms of their social roles.

Although the biological distinction (“male, female”) underlies the social distinctions (“father, mother”), there is a great deal about the social roles of individuals as men or women that is unrelated to biology. It is in the sense of social gender, through the process of learning how to become a “boy” or a “girl,” that we inherit a gendered culture. This process can be as simple as learning which category should wear pink versus blue, or as complex as understanding how one category was excluded (by having no vote) from the process of representative government for such a long time. Becoming a social gender also involves becoming familiar with gendered language use.