Gender and Gender roles are two different things my friend.
Gender would be your physical attributes to define you as a male or female. And Gender roles would be how you choose to act due to or inspite of this.
So someone could be born one gender yet play the other role. And it doesn't have to be sexual based, it could be environmental such as a man and woman that are married, and the woman has a job and the man is layed off from work, the man might have to do the quote womans work / house wife type jobs to help make the family unit work. So for the most part, your role in the house. And what about someone that lives alone? They might have to play both roles of running the house from what is considered house work to things like mowing the lawn and such. So your role around the house doesn't have much to do with gender for the most part.
Now, if you are talking about clothes styling and fashion, that line has been broken years ago due to the 80's Hair bands. During that time, the band members would have huge girly hair styles, and buy the most expensive womans clothes to wear on stage. Yet, they were getting TONS of female groupies despite their female looking appearance. And in todays times for example, this whole Emo thing has really flipped the whole fashion issue as far as gender issue as it seems the males end up wearing girly tight jeans with sometimes makeup and such as well. And the hairstyles follow suit as well, although for the most part it seems that both genders are now wearing each others clothes to follow suit of this fad. And actually, now that I think about it, think of colonial times, men would wear wigs, face powder and other makeup, and wear extra girly type clothes that were considered very gentlemanly at the time. So I am still not sure if clothes or hairstyle have much to do with gender identity due to the culture changes over the years that seem to disregard what we comonly think of as a man and womans outfit.
I could go further and elaborate on hairstyles for a minute. I already mentioned the Hairbands, but lets go back to biblical times. Long hair was all the rage, and even Jesus is depicted to be a long haired hippie as well. But for the most part, long hair was considered a trait of woman as society but times change many things. Woman also started to get shorter boy-style type haircuts to too, so again, hairstyle doesn't have much to due with gender identity either.
Now, let's make it complicated! What about people that are born with both body parts? In the United States, these people are considered to be required to be converted to female on birth if my memory serves me correct. So they are snipped and forced to live the role of a girl from birth on without much say on the matter. In other countries, they treat this differently, but for the most part in other countries people are allowed to have both parts and decide later which role to decide to pursue. I think I caught part of a documentary where someone in the U.S. was born a hermaphrodite(sp) and was converted to female on birth, but later in life towards puberty, regardless of being raised as a girl, they felt that they were still a male. But for the most part, it makes us ask, what is the real difference? Evidently, it seems that Testosterone(Sp) and Estrogen have much to do with the physical developments of person, and for the most part they define the urges people have, and effect the way people think.
In that same documentary, there was a case where a woman ended up neededing testosterone injections to treat some medical problem she had. And the female doctor of the patient had said she had originally thought that men were scum and dogs and so forth. But after treating the female patient with the injects, she noted the patient had started to change the way they thought about things. And for example, the female patient had said even though before as a female when she thought about sex, it was more for the emmotional aspects of the experience, later after she was taking the injections, she started to become more driven with the actual act than the emmotional reasons. The doctor had noted that it seems that hormones themselves tend to be be the primary thing that drive at least the sexual desire reasonings.
And in another example, they took testosterone levels from a few groups of males. The groups were married dads, divorced dads, and single guys. And out of all of those groups, the single guys had the highest testosterone levels. It seems that the exposure to the children actually lowered their testosterone levels somehow. But evidently, this helps the males lower their desires to mate and have more children and caused them to stray less due to the lower levels of Testosterone. Whereas the single males were found to be driven to want to mate much more. This isn't to say there aren't cases of environmental emmotion that cause people to stray due to unmet needs. But for the most part, it seems hormones drive the desires of people.
So lastly, I would say for the most part, your physical anatomy has much to do with your actual gender. But your gender identity can be much askewed due to your role in society, hormone imbalances, and the way you are raised. But as far as science is concerned, if you are a male, regardless of how many cosmetic procedures you have, you will NEVER bear a child directly nor have a period, although I can't imagine why anyone would WANT to have a period. And in the same boat, science hasn't advanced enough for a woman to have a biological attachment that would be used to impregnate another woman. Of course, this isn't to say that alternative methods don't exist. The fact remains that there is really not changing your gender. However, you could change your gender identity. So, I guess what I am trying to say is there is a big difference between gender and gender identity. Gender can not change, but your gender identity is a variable of society.
(Please disregard any "tpyos" or "mespellings")
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