The need to introduce the term gender arose with the realization that for individuals
with conflicting or ambiguous biological indicators of sex (i.e., "intersex"), the lived role in
society and/or the identification as male or female could not be uniformly associated with
or predicted from the biological indicators and, later, that some individuals develop an
identity as female or male at variance with their uniform set of classical biological indicators. Thus, gender is used to denote the public (and usually legally recognized) lived role as
boy or girl, man or woman, but, in contrast to certain social constructionist theories, biological factors are seen as contributing, in interaction with social and psychological factors, to
gender development.
