How we see ourselves

Me thinks she protests too much.
I'v been reading an article about gender and the difficulty of recognising what gender is about.
Apparently Facebook has 71 variations of gender (part of the descriptive profile) and its growing as people keep adding there own perspective.
Am I a man or a woman is broken down into a whole and complex set of subdivisions which given modern medical treatment can be modified and tailored to suit your proclivity.

 When born and in furtherance of god's wishes and especially the biological sequencing of Y and X chromosomes we physically become identified with the tag male or female, boy or girl. To have these physical characteristics was usually enough and although it was sometimes a struggle, the choice of being a boy or a girl was out of our hands. 

Of course we have moved on and today in this never ending search for the definitive, people demand to be recognised for what they are which includes what they feel they are. The hormone element, the psychological element the physiological element all produce a mishmash of alternatives which in today's world we can chose what we want to be. The tapestry is rich in colour but confusing in shape since the population as a whole, who have been brought up on a diet of stereotyping, try to pidgin hole what they see and understand but are guilty, too often of putting the proverbial square peg into the equally proverbial round hole. Because science can lend a description to a condition doesn't make that condition any the more understandable.
Perhaps fundamental to all this is the concept of "self". We are who we think we are and just because we normally take ourselves for granted, perhaps our gender is, irrespective of self,  an aberration in the process of knowing who we are.