Man

Man is one of the two binary genders and, with woman, accounts for the overwhelming majority of people alive. It belongs in a reference work of gender identities for the same reason cisgender does: the unmarked case is still a case, and leaving it out would imply that only unusual genders are genders.

A man is a person whose gender is man. That includes cisgender men and trans men without distinction, since the category is defined by the identity and not by the route to it.

Definition & scope

Man is a gender term. Male is, in careful usage, a term about sex characteristics — chromosomes, gonads, hormones, anatomy — and the two are not interchangeable even though ordinary speech treats them as though they were. The distinction is what allows the sentence “most men are male” to be informative rather than circular, and it is the same distinction that makes intersex variation a fact about bodies rather than a third gender.

The category has internal structure that the word conceals. Being a man says nothing about presentation: a man may be entirely conventional in expression or thoroughly gender nonconforming, and both remain men. It says nothing about orientation, which the orientations vertical catalogues separately. And it says nothing about how the person came to be recorded as anything at birth.

Boy is the same category at a younger age, and male used as a noun for a person is, in most registers, either clinical or dismissive.

History & origins

• Old English: mann means human being, of either sex. The language distinguished the sexes with wer (adult male) and wīf (adult female), per Etymonline.
• c. 1000: the narrowed sense — adult male as distinct from women and boys — is in use alongside the general one, exactly as Latin used homo for a human and vir for a man.
• Late thirteenth century: wer falls out of use and man absorbs its job, leaving English without a distinct word for the general sense. The older meaning survives fossilised in mankind and manslaughter.
• Twentieth century: the sex/gender distinction is drawn explicitly in the clinical and social-science literature, and man is progressively used for the gender while male is reserved for the sex.
• 2021: England and Wales become the first UK census to ask about gender identity as a separate question from sex — the point at which the distinction became a matter of official statistics rather than of theory.

In practice

The practical interest of the category is that it is the default, and defaults are invisible. Most men are never asked to account for their gender, are not read as making a claim by stating it, and encounter the word chiefly in forms and greetings. That asymmetry is precisely why cisgender was coined: without a name for the unmarked case, the marked case looks like the only one with a gender at all.

Where the category is contested at all, it is contested at its boundaries — in sport, in single-sex services, and in law — and those disputes are about the relationship between gender and recorded sex rather than about what a man is.

Psychology

There is no clinical literature on being a man as such, and no diagnosis. The DSM-5 relocated the diagnostic object from identity to distress when it replaced gender identity disorder with gender dysphoria, and the ICD-11 went further in 2019 by removing gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter altogether.

What research does exist concerns masculinity — the social expectations attached to the category rather than the category itself — and its consistent finding is that those expectations vary sharply across cultures and eras while the identity does not.

Prevalence & culture

How common is being a man?

Roughly half of everyone, and the residual uncertainty is smaller than for any other entry in this vertical.

The World Bank's population series, drawn from UN estimates, puts the male share of the world population at 50.3% in 2024, a consequence of a sex ratio at birth of about 105 boys per 100 girls partly offset by higher male mortality at every subsequent age.

That is a count of recorded sex rather than of gender identity, and the gap between the two is measurable and small. The 2021 census of England and Wales, the first to ask both questions, found that of the 45.7 million people aged 16 and over who answered, 45.4 million — 93.5% — said their gender identity was the same as the sex registered at birth, while 262,000 (0.5%) said it was different, including 48,000 trans men. Gallup's 2025 survey puts US transgender identification higher at 1.3%, and the Williams Institute at 0.8% of adults, splitting that population into roughly equal thirds of trans women, trans men and non-binary people.

One caution belongs on the census figure. The Office for National Statistics downgraded its 2021 gender-identity estimates from accredited official statistics to official statistics in development in September 2024, having concluded that some respondents — particularly those with lower English-language proficiency — may not have read the question as intended. The overall population size remains the part of the estimate it holds with high confidence.