@ Bigbowla532:
It's about as likely that you'd get warts from a toad peeing on you as the toad peeing on you caused your armatar to go missing :P
Zing!
That said I didn't even know that toads urinated, so yeah.
@ crazynaitor:
Why do we have a type of Gender?
...heavens, what a question. It's an excellent question but it's also another difficult one to answer! I'll try to be brief:
Gender is actually based on our common perceptions of sex. It's the set of expectations and values one associates with said sex- which, simply speaking, is male or female. The way we talk about sex and the way it has been defined as pretty much two halves is derived entirely from ourselves, though, given that many of the differences between 'male' and 'female' are directly observable by us, this is hardly surprising.
For humans, I guess it just so happened that we turned out to be sexually reproducing mammals that are almost entirely either male or female, and don't actually change sex by ourselves. That's about as deep as I can go, and after that it's a matter of working my way back:
Technically speaking, sex is actually defined by your genetic makeup. If you have a Y sex chromosome, you're male. If you only have X sex chromosomes, you're female. For about 99.9% of the population, there are two sex chromosomes and their configuration is either XY (male) or XX (female).
However not everybody is this way! While nobody can be YY (it just doesn't work out), various other combinations of X and Y exist where there is one or even two extra sex chromosomes, which can affect the
phenotypic (physiological) presentation. Even though the presentation can be ambiguous, the definition I've given above still stands in a strict sense because they Y chromosome is known as the 'sex-determining chromosome'. Why? Because it contains the info that triggers the changes in the embryo that turn it into a male.
This brings me to sexual characteristics. Primary sexual characteristics are defined by your reproductive organs- usually either a vagina, uterus and ovaries (female) or a penis and testes (male). However, sometimes those chromosomes I mentioned above don't quite work as planned, or something else happens along the way and a hormone or messenger doesn't get the signal right. This can result in different outcomes where it's unclear whether a person is a male or a female or both (a shemale?) or neither, based on what's between their legs. Those who happen to have various extents of
both sets of reproductive organs account for somewhere in the order of %0.001 (as an imprecise figure) of the world's population, which, when you think about it, is a fair bit.
Then there's the secondary sexual characteristics. These are the characteristics that most people would assess when glancing over a person- broad shoulders and a hairy chin? Breasts? Hips? Mannerisms? These have been generalised, perhaps too much, and aligned with the labels 'male' and 'female', and quite often associated with sexuality. It's this part that gives people the most confusion. It's still unclear as to what relation gender exactly holds with sex, seeing as there are many people who do not feel comfortable with their gender specifically, and others still who are not comfortable with their sex, to the extent that they either pretend, or adopt the roles and behaviors of the other sex, or have their sex changed. Mankind has a ways to go in figuring out how this all works.
In short, we have a type of gender because we have trends between the sexes that people as a whole see and judge upon. It's not necessarily correct, but it's what most people seem to think for the time being, until we can accept that exceptions to the rule do exist and this is perfectly natural.
