Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Gender Expression

Gender expression is a mutable social portrayal of one’s self. For trans people, such a tool for self-portrayal can be critical to self-actualization and social communication. Important to understanding gender expression as it pertains to transness are its material manifestations, social contexts, and implications for wellness.

Expression can refer to any way an individual occupies and adorns their own body and relates to other bodies. Below is an inexhaustive list of tools people often use to express gender:

  • Hair (style, length, color)
  • Labels (names and pronouns)
  • Clothes (cut, colors, patterns)
  • Social actions, interactions (sharing emotions, touching, facial expressions)
  • Jewelry (piercings, metals, cuts)
  • Roles and labor (career choices, family and relationship roles)
  • Makeup (face and body makeup, nail polish color, feature accentuation)
  • Activities, hobbies (sports, games, personal interests)
  • Speaking (cadence, voice inflection, volume, tone)
  • Smells (odor strength, origins, inspirations)

Gender expression is constitutive of social markers a person places on their body (clothes, jewelry, makeup, scent) and social markers they use to relate to others (speaking style, body language, types of labor). Depending on the culture and environment, these markers are coded as masculine, feminine, neither, or both. In the modern United States, markers often coded as feminine are dresses, colorful makeup, and expressive speaking styles. Those often coded as masculine are knee-length shorts, affinity for sports, and a blunt manner of speaking. Notably, there are countless markers that are not often gendered as masculine or feminine or are most often gendered according to context; some examples of this are crewcut T-shirts, concealer, ponytails, jeans, sneakers, careers in retail, and interest in education. Marker gendering is a subjective practice and often very personal; all gendered markers are subject to contextual interpretation. Beyond binary terms, manifestations of these markers in concert with one another create a composite image of one’s gender expression at any given moment.

Gender Expression as Distinct From Gender Identity

Gender identity is the way one conceptualizes and labels one’s own sense of self. Gender expression is an (often circumstantial) social manifestation of one’s gender. Gender expression and identity are related insofar as there are cultural associations and expectations for certain identities and expressions (e.g., the expectation that someone identifying as a man would express their gender in a masculine way). However, there are no unprecedented combinations of gender identity and expression. One can be a transgender man without taking any measures to socially or medically transition, wear dresses and makeup, and still consider oneself a man, likewise for a cisgender man who wears dresses and makeup and does not consider themselves transgender in any way. A lack of concordance between gender expression and identity is not incorrect, nor is it necessarily temporary; gender expression can be a small piece of how an individual conveys their gender identity.

For many people, both trans and cis, it is important to have social “concordance” between gender identity and expression. A disparity between the two can cause significant distress. For trans people, this distress is often referred to as gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria can be a source of serious health consequences for trans people and is sometimes characterized by a sense of discordance between identity and expression.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution