It’s unfortunate that boys and girls have been stereotyped into these roles, but the key now that we’ve come to realize this is changing it. A simple thing like refraining from asking if a new baby is a boy or girl helps reconstruct our world as a place where people are more the same than different and gender is only a small piece of who we are, and more importantly, who we can become. Our gender does not need to hold bearing on who we are or who we can become. Once we slot a child into a pre-determined category it’s hard to break out of that and for others to see them any other way.

There’s a difference between sex and gender — the first *is* biological, the second is sociological. Both are a continuum and research by Kinsey, Klein, and others describe this and its implications.

Some women identify as more ‘masculine’ on this continuum than some men — and it’s fluid. At different points in a person’s life, their gender identity may lean more or less towards one end of the continuum.

re: testosterone: some individuals who identify as men do have more testosterone than some who identify as women, but there are plenty of women who are stronger than some men. The argument that men are stronger than women is a fallacy that has been used to keep women out of certain types of work (firefighting comes to mind). It also takes a very Western perspective. In parts of the world where women are primarily responsible for physical work it is supported by the argument that women are stronger — men just are not physically capable of bearing the same loads as women. Again, socially constructed.

The enjoyment of activities will have much less to do with the amount of hormone in a person’s body than their experiences and context — which is always socially constructed.

I like your open-mindedness, so I was surprised to read comments that seemed absolutist with regard to this topic.