what does it mean to identify as a gender
Gender identity Gender identity is one's personal experience of one's own gender.[1] Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth, or can differ from it completely.[2] 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.[3] In most societies, there is a basic division between gender attributes assigned to males and females,[4] 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.[5] In all societies, some individuals do not identify with some (or all) of the aspects of gender that are assigned to their biological sex;[6] some of those individuals are transgender or genderqueer. Some societies have third gender categories.
Gender symbol The two standard sex symbols are the Mars symbol ♂ (often considered to represent a shield and spear) for male and Venus symbol ♀ (often considered to represent a bronze mirror with a handle) for female, derived from astrological symbols, denoting the classical planets Mars and Venus, respectively. They were first used to denote the effective sex of plants (i.e. sex of individual in a given crossbreed, since most plants are hermaphroditic) by Carl Linnaeus in 1751.[2]