As far as I’m concerned, gender division currently exists because it has existed for a long time and we humans have a difficult time with change. That being said, there have been periods of time with greater and lesser discernment between different genders.
The need to differentiate between sexes and genders may be a fairly fundamental thing for humans, though… The desire to classify all things. We enjoy conveying details to each other, some more efficiently than others. Let’s say… I wanted to tell someone about the human with breasts and a vagina, who entered the room. It would be easier to simply tell them about the woman who entered the room. Unfortunately, though, this is also an over simplification… After all, perhaps the woman entering the room is a non-op transgender woman and doesn’t have a vagina and possibly doesn’t have breasts either. I suppose I lost track of where I was going with this… But it does seem to me that it conveys more information if I were to say that the non-op transgender woman entered the room, rather than telling someone that the human with breasts and a penis entered the room.
All of this being said… There is definitely a movement toward accepting people who do not conform to gender stereotypes. So hopefully we’re approaching a day when the norms are indeed more fluid and intertwined.
@elbanditoroso: Some women have penii… And some men don’t.
@Seek: Precisely.
@ibstubro: I’m curious about a couple of your statements… Whites think differently from Blacks and Muslims think differently from Christians are of a particular curiosity for me. Especially when compared with the initial statement that men and women “fundeelopmentally” think differently. (I assume you mean fundamentally?) Anyways, it’s sometimes true that the brains of men and women simply behave differently… But research has shown that most brains demonstrate a mixture of characteristics that are “typically” reserved for one sex or another. The research I’m referring to found that, “maybe 6 in every 100 of the brains they studied were consistently a single sex. Many others had a patchwork quilt of masculine and feminine features that varied widely from person to person.” So I assume you must be talking about something besides the fundamental brain functions of the two sexes… So I must ask, in what way do men and women fundamentally differ in the way they think? Apply the same question to the other two comparisons you made.