You're not the same person you were ten minutes ago. None of us is.
We change our attitudes, our careers, our relationships. We change our outlook, we change our minds, we change our sympathies. Yet when someone changes hir* gender, we put hir on a television talk show. Well, here's what I think: I think we do change our genders. All the time.
Maybe it's not as dramatic as some tabloid headline screaming "She Was A He!" But we do, each of us, change our genders. In response to each interaction we have with a new or different person, we subtly shift the kind of man or woman, boy or girl, or whatever gender we're being at the moment.
As a society, our attitudes about gender are in a period of transition. The very nature of gender is up for grabs as people from all walks of life are beginning to question just how much of our gendered behavior is genetically pre-determined, and how much is merely the result of social pressure. In our colleges and universities, postmodern academics and queer theorists are claiming that gender is performance. And a growing transgender movement seeks to position gender as an identity we build for ourselves, rather than something we're born with. It's a far cry from the not-so-distant past, where the gender-as-biology theory was rigidly enforced.
— Kate Bornstein, author of "My Gender Workbook"
* hir: non-gender possessive