structural:summarization
Social assignment and gender fluidity

According to gender theorist Kate Bornstein, gender can have ambiguity and fluidity. There are two contrasting ideas regarding the definition of gender, and the intersection of both of them is definable as below:

The World Health Organization defines gender as "the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed". The beliefs, values and attitude taken up and exhibited by them is as per the agreed upon norms of the society and the personal opinion of the person is not taken into the primary consideration of assignment of gender and imposition of gender roles as per the assigned gender.

The assignment of gender involves taking into account the physiological and biological attributes assigned by nature followed by the imposition of the socially constructed conduct. Gender is a term used to exemplify the attributes that a society or culture constitutes as "masculine" or "feminine". Although a person's sex as male or female stands as a biological fact that is identical in any culture, what that specific sex means in reference to a person's gender role as a man or a woman in society varies cross-culturally according to what things are considered to be masculine or feminine. These roles are learned from various, intersecting sources such as parental influences, the socialization a child receives in school, and what is portrayed in the local media. Learning gender roles starts from birth and includes seemingly simple things like what color outfits a baby is clothed in or what toys they are given to play with. However, a person's gender does not always align with what has been assigned at birth. Factors other than learned behaviors play a role in the development of gender.

The article Adolescent Gender-Role Identity and Mental Health: Gender Intensification Revisited focuses on the work of Heather A. Priess, Sara M. Lindberg, and Janet Shibley Hyde on whether or not girls and boys diverge in their gender identities during adolescent years. The researchers based their work on ideas previously mentioned by Hill and Lynch in their gender intensification hypothesis in that signals and messages from parents determine and affect their children's gender role identities. This hypothesis argues that parents affect their children's gender role identities and that different interactions spent with either parents will affect gender intensification. Priess and among other's study did not support the hypothesis of Hill and Lynch which stated "that as adolescents experience these and other socializing influences, they will become more stereotypical in their gender-role identities and gendered attitudes and behaviors." However, the researchers did state that perhaps the hypothesis Hill and Lynch proposed was true in the past but is not true now due to changes in the population of teens in respect to their gender-role identities.

Authors of "Unpacking the Gender System: A Theoretical Perspective on Gender Beliefs and Social Relations", Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll, argue that gender is more than an identity or role but is something that is institutionalized through "social relational contexts." Ridgeway and Correll define "social relational contexts" as "any situation in which individuals define themselves in relation to others in order to act." They also point out that in addition to social relational contexts, cultural beliefs plays a role in the gender system. The coauthors argue that daily people are forced to acknowledge and interact with others in ways that are related to gender. Every day, individuals are interacting with each other and comply with society's set standard of hegemonic beliefs, which includes gender roles. They state that society's hegemonic cultural beliefs sets the rules which in turn create the setting for which social relational contexts are to take place. Ridgeway and Correll then shift their topic towards sex categorization. The authors define sex categorization as "the sociocognitive process by which we label another as male or female."

The failure of an attempt to raise David Reimer from infancy through adolescence as a girl after his genitals were accidentally mutilated is cited as disproving the theory that gender identity is determined solely by parenting. Reimer's case is used by organizations such as the Intersex Society of North America to caution against needlessly modifying the genitals of unconsenting minors. Between the 1960s and 2000, many other male newborns and infants were surgically and socially reassigned as females if they were born with malformed penises, or if they lost their penises in accidents. At the time, surgical reconstruction of the vagina was more advanced than reconstruction of the penis, leading many doctors and psychologists, including John Money who oversaw Reimer's case, to recommend sex reassignment based on the idea that these patients would be happiest living as women with functioning genitalia. Available evidence indicates that in such instances, parents were deeply committed to raising these children as girls and in as gender-typical a manner as possible. A 2005 review of these cases found that about half of natal males reassigned female lived as women in adulthood, including those who knew their medical history, suggesting that gender assignment and related social factors has a major, though not determinative, influence on eventual gender identity.

In 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a webinar series on gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender, etc. In the first lecture Sherer explains that parents' influence (through punishment and reward of behavior) can influence gender expression but not gender identity. Sherer argued that kids will modify their gender expression to seek reward from their parents and society, but this will not affect their gender identity (their internal sense of self).