The Oxford English repeated this terminology, but added that gender was used only jocularly to mean sex. The more recent American Heritage dictionary advised that, while gender has traditionally been used to refer to grammatical categories, the word has been used in recent years to refer to sexual identity or sex-based social or cultural categories. The past two decades have produced a wide academic literature on Gender, along with corresponding university and college departments, centers, and courses focusing on the correlated issues of Gender Identity and Gender Studies. Typical courses are in Womanist Theory, Women's Studies, Women's History, Feminist Theory, along with Queer and Transgender Studies. Queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault assume that human sexual desire and identity are amorphous, but regulated by compulsory patriarchal heterosexuality which all gender theorists posit as a malign influence.
Gender is the way one is socialized according to some standard of behavior associated with a role.
Some writers on Gender hold that sex itself, while focused on the biological, is really a matter of childhood social construct. This view of the plasticity of sex has created a surgical industry in sex reassignments to cure the condition called gender dysphoria, which is the feeling that the sex assigned at birth doesn't match the gender one feels internally. The body is thus changed to match how one feels inside. The American Foundation for Gender and Genital Medicine and Science along with the International Foundation on Gender Education and the associated Gender Advocacy Internet News all serve the transgendered and gender-variant community, comprising transsexuals and transvestites, all subsumed under the rubric of transgendered persons. Laws have been passed in many states and cities to ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity, gender variance, gender expression, or transgender status.