Jesse: "I’ve always understood gender to mostly be something that is imposed on you."
Arguably that's something of a serious if common misperception that tends to cause no end of problems. Try thinking that "gender" refers to or encompasses BOTH personalities AND personality types. The same way that there is, for example, BOTH the personality type "introvert" AND people who actually are introverted to a greater or lesser extent.
From that perspective, introversion is then a single dimension on a multi-dimensional gender spectrum, and we all exhibit higher and lower values of introversion. In addition to which, there are many other personality traits that might also correspond to different dimensions -- there's "The Big Five" for example:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personal…
And one of those five is "agreeableness"; nice comparison of agreeableness for men & women here:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joint_p…
Women tend to be more agreeable than men. We might then say that "agreeableness" is one personality type, one dimension of a multi-dimensional gender spectrum. But we all have different degrees of agreeableness, different values -- 1 to 5 -- of the agreeableness "gender". In addition to which, some of that is probably due to genetics -- nature -- and some due to upbringing and social norms -- nurture.
But not exactly uncommon to talk about gender as both personalities and personality types. For example, see this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP] article:
SEP: "2.2 Gender as feminine and masculine personality ... Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices."
plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/ent…
And the late Justice Scalia at least alluded to the same dichotomy between nature and nurture:
Scalia: "The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/l…
Taking our cue from Scalia, and relative to the agreeableness graph, one might say there's a feminine and masculine half, that agreeableness is a more feminine trait -- women, on average, score higher -- but there is a myriad, a spectrum, of "agreeableness" genders in each half. But, once again, the agreeableness gender type exists in the first place because men and women tend to have -- on average (3.8 versus 4.1, respectively) -- different degrees of agreeableness. Agreeableness is one of a great many "sexually dimorphic" personality types. But the types come from, or are derived from the people, from their actual personalities -- and not the other way around. Even if society may expect, unreasonably, more agreeableness from women than it does from men.
Whole concept of "gender" is a bit of a dog's breakfast, and it is moot how much social value it really has. But it seems the only way forward, the only way off the horns of a painful and problematic social dilemma, is to put the concept on something more in the way a scientific footing. See the "Rationalized Gender" section of my Welcome post for some preliminary elaborations on those themes:
