Title: Gender is a Social Construction: Anthropology on Sex, Gender & Sexuality
Headings: Sex, Gender, Sexuality
Sex, Gender, Sexuality
Gender is a Social Construction
What “Gender is a Social Construction” Doesn’t Mean
The Reality of Social Constructions
Clarifying Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Supernumerary Gender
Sex/Gender Frontiers
Gender is a Social Construction–and Beyond
Taking Account of Humans
Updates on Sex, Gender, Sexuality

Content: We are hardly the first or only society to engage in sex operations! Supernumerary Gender
Gender roles and identity have often come as a duality. However, there are a number of societies where “supernumerary gender roles developed that apparently had nothing to do with morphological sex anomalies” (Lavenda and Schultz 2015:378). Many of these cases are from the peoples indigenous to the Americas, which very often had a third-gender (or even fourth-gender) roles for “Two-Spirit Peoples” (which the French denigrated as berdache ). Two-Spirit Peoples typically took on tasks appropriate to the other gender. They often but did not always “cross-dress.” Many had special ceremonial roles in their communities. While some have glossed this as “homosexual,” it really does not correspond to such designation, and many contemporary Native Americans have rejected this gloss. For an elaboration on Two-Spirit peoples, see Two Spirits: A Map of Gender Diverse Cultures. “