Gender systems can affect what personal experience of one's own gender and how they fit in society?
Gender identity Gender identity is one's personal experience of one's own gender. Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth, or can differ from it completely. All societies have a set of gender categories that can serve as the basis of the formation of a person's social identity in relation to other members of society. In most societies, there is a basic division between gender attributes assigned to males and females, a gender binary to which most people adhere and which includes expectations of masculinity and femininity in all aspects of sex and gender: biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression. In all societies, some individuals do not identify with some (or all) of the aspects of gender that are assigned to their biological sex; some of those individuals are transgender or genderqueer. Some societies have third gender categories.
Difference theory Difference theory has roots in the studies of John Gumperz, who examined the differences in cross-cultural communication. While difference theory deals with cross-gender communication, the male and female genders are often presented as being two separate cultures, hence the relevance of Gumperz's studies. In her development on the difference theory Deborah Tannen in particular drew on the work of Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker and their 1982 paper "A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication", which itself drew on the work of Gumperz. Mary Talbot makes reference to the term "gender-specific culture" in her critique of the difference theory, and this idea of genders being culturally separated is embodied by the 1992 publication "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus". Difference theory is often compared with dominance theory and deficit theory, and together with the more contemporary dynamic theory they make up four of the theories most widely referred to and compared in the study of language and gender.