Gender is a simple but also complicated idea. Gender is how we feel about ourselves whilst we are with other people and whilst we are alone. Gender is seen in how we dress, move, speak and even the things we like to do. These things are based on stereotypes (what people think these things should look like) so a boy should wear trousers, have short hair and play with toy cars.

In the UK and Europe lots of people believe in binary genders – meaning there are just two (boy / man and girl / woman). There are lots of countries and communities who see more than two genders, including some people in Madagascar, Mexico and Indonesia.

When we are born our sex is given to us by doctors based on how our bodies look. There are only two given sexes in the UK and Europe, babies are labelled as either a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl.’ This is a problem because it ignores intersex people whose bodies are outside of what doctors expect.

For lots of people their sex and their gender match, for example, someone may have been given the label of ‘girl’ and their gender is also girl. However, some people are given a sex which doesn’t match their gender, these people are called transgender or gender diverse. They may change their name, their pronouns, or what they wear to match their gender, some even ask for help with medicine and surgeries to change the way they look. These changes may or may not follow what we believe gender to be.

Gender is everywhere, here are some places we see gender:

Where we see gender	Example
Names	Some names are seen as boys name like Jack, Henry and Muhammad. Some names are seen as girls names like Kazumi, Monica or Sarah. Some can be used for boys, girls and gender diverse people like Sam and Ashley.
Pronouns	She / her He / him They / them There are more than these three and they can be used together like she / they.
Titles	Mr / Mrs / Ms / Mx King / Queen Duke / Duchess

Some languages, like French, even give objects a gender too!

There are other examples of gender, but these are based on very strict ideas of what people feel people ‘should’ look and act like. That’s why gender is both easy and difficult to understand.