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The word gender derives from the Latin genus, meaning birth, race, or kind, a noun itself derived from the verb gignere, meaning to beget or to be born. In its original sense, gender is a grammatical term denoting a subclass of a part of speech (noun, pronoun, etc.) associated (often arbitrarily) with a sex (male or female) or with neither (neuter).
The modern conceptualization of gender as distinct from sexuality, a groundbreaking insight, was first introduced by the researcher John Money (1956, 1973), who through his pioneering studies of intersexed patients was able to make the distinction. He borrowed the term gender from its provenance in linguistics and introduced it into the medical and psychological literature. Robert Stoller (1968) sharpened the distinction between femaleness and maleness (sex) and femininity and masculinity (gender) and originated the term core gender identity, meaning self-identification as female or male. Catharine Stimpson (in press) defines gender as the “‘complex organization’ that various societies have constructed on the biological differences between men and women and that then go on to regulate them.” She notes that for the individual, gender operates as “a subjective identity, a person's own sense of what it feels like to belong to a sex and to a gender.” Yet, as Stimpson and all observers agree, there are those who feel uncomfortable in their culturally mandated roles—hence their self-identification as transsexuals, transvestites, or she-males.
Money and his colleagues demonstrated that the first and crucial step in gender differentiation is the child's self-designation as male or female, which evolves according to the sex of assignment and has