Individual Variation in Gender/Sex Category Definitions

Our research investigated variation in how individuals define 6 gender/sex categories (woman, man, feminine, masculine, female, and male). Evidence suggests that, contemporary understandings of gender/sex are less static and less binary than they have been in the past. However, questions remain about exactly how diverse these understandings are, how that diversity might be reflected in how people define and use gender/sex-related language, and whether understandings of gender/sex are linked to social location, particularly gender/sex or sexual minority/majority status. To further explore how individuals understand gender/sex categories, we administered a brief online survey to a sample diverse by gender/sex and sexual minority/majority status (N = 307) in which participants provided their own definitions of the 6 aforementioned gender/sex terms. We coded participants' definitions for a range of sociocultural and biological content, and for how complex each definition was. We found that participants defined feminine/masculine primarily with sociocultural content, female/male primarily with biological content, and woman/man with intermediate amounts of each, notably contrasting popular perceptions of female/male and woman/man as interchangeable. Cisgender sexual majority individuals included more biological content and less sociocultural content in their definitions of woman/man and female/male than transgender individuals. Cisgender individuals also had less complex definitions of woman/man than transgender individuals. We concluded that contemporary understandings of gender/sex exhibit a degree of heterogeneity that is partially structured by social location via sexuality and gender/sex.