Gender

From Middle English, from Middle French gendre, genre, from Latin genus ("kind, sort"). The verb developed after the noun.

Full definition of gender

(plural genders)

(grammar) A division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech), such as masculine, feminine, neuter or common.
(informal, sometimes proscribed) Biological sex: a division into which an organism is placed according to its reproductive functions or organs.the trait is found in both genders
(informal, sometimes proscribed) Biological sex: the sum of the biological characteristics by which male and female and other organisms are distinguished.The effect of the medication is dependent upon age, gender, and other factors.
Identification as male/masculine, female/feminine, or something else, and association with a (social) role or set of behavioral and cultural traits, clothing, etc typically associated with one sex. Compare gender role, gender identity.

2007, Helen Boyd, She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband (ISBN 0786750545), page 93:One wife I met at a conference was in a hurry for her husband to have the genital surgery because she worried about his gender and genitals not matching if he were in a car accident, ...
2010, Eve Shapiro, Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age (ISBN 113499950X):Thomas Beatie, a transgendered man, announced in an April 2008 issue of the gay and lesbian news magazine, The Advocate, that he was pregnant. ... Moreover, he saw no conflict between his gender and his pregnancy.
2012, Elizabeth Reis, American Sexual Histories, page 5:Intersex people too challenge the idea that physical sex, not merely gender, is binary â€“ a person must be definitively either one sex or the other.

The sociocultural phenomenon of the division of people into various categories such as "male" and "female", with each having associated clothing, roles, stereotypes, etc.

1993, David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, page 187:The annals of colonial history offer relatively few such encounters between women, and it may be that gender has created here a marginal space in which something like an actual dialogue is possible between British and Sudanese.
2004, Wenona Mary Giles, Jennifer Hyndman, Sites of violence: gender and conflict zones, page 28:Gender does not necessarily have primacy in this respect. Economic class and ethnic differentiation can also be important relational hierarchies, .... But these other differentiations are always also gendered, and in turn they help construct what is a man or a woman in any given circumstance. So while gender is binary, its components have varied expressions.
2005, Colin Renfrew, Paul Bahn, Archaeology: The Key Concepts, page 131:Even with some adamant processualists, however, gender has made inroads.

(sociology) To assign a gender to; to perceive as having a gender, or having been authored etc. by someone of that gender.

1996, Athalya Brenner, A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament, page 191:At the same time, however, the convictions they held about how a woman or man might write led them to interpret their findings in a rather androcentric fashion, and to gender the text accordingly.
2003, Reading the Anonymous Female Voice, in The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England, page 244:Yet because texts by â€œfemale authorsâ€ are not dependent on the voice to gender the text, the topics that they address and the traditions that they employ seem broader and somewhat less constrained by gender stereotypes.
2011, Kristen Schilt, Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality, page 147:In an interview, he even noted that he "dressed, acted and thought like a man" for years, but his coworkers continued to gender him as female (Shaver 1995, 2).

From Middle English gendren, genderen, from Middle French gendrer, from Latin generÄre.

Leviticus 19:19 (KJV):Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.