The following materials may be of some value for comparison. At least temporarily they can be found here. The revised version is in another article.
In sociology, gender or gender identity describes the sex that a person identifies with. Less commonly, it can describe the gender role that a person identifies with. There is a very small group of people who do not believe that their gender corresponds to their biological sex.
In most people, sex and gender identity are the same: such as in a person who is physically male, and considers themselves male. There are other permutations: for example, a pre-operative female-to-male transsexual may be physically female, but consider himself male (i.e. having a male gender, or male gender identity).
The study of gender identity has also opened up discussion of sex and gender, with some schools of thought arguing that, in some cultures, sex does not always equal gender. In other words, someone's gender identity is not always determined solely by his sex. There is an emerging vocabulary for those who defy traditional gender identity - see transgender and genderqueer.
Sometimes the line between gender identity and gender role is blurry. For example, is a drag queen acting like a woman (i.e. assuming a female gender identity), or acting like some women act (i.e. assuming a female gender role)? In fact, different drag queens describe themselves differently in this respect: the majority of drag queens have a male gender identity, some have a female gender identity, and a few, such as RuPaul, refuse to be categorised.
