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When we want to know how tall or how short someone is, we can query for his tallness, shortness, or height (neutral measurement unit).
Is there such a neutral measurement unit for the adjectives masculine and feminine?
E.g. When we want to know how masculine or how feminine someone is, we can query for his masculineness, feminineness, or ______ (neutral measurement unit).
Gender wouldn't work, since it seems to suggest only two points, either male or female.
Height, weight, wrist size are all unidimensional criteria that are amenable to objective measurement.
Many other human characteristics are multidimensional, but also subject to objective measurement and description. For example, voice can be measured and described, reflecting primary pitch, overtones, volume and other aspects that make a person sound unique.
Gender and sexual identity is both multifaceted and extremely subjective. It has potentially innumerable elements, and every on of those are subject to a wide range of interpretation by the observer, affected by psychological, social, cultural and personal points of view. Even the biological bases of gender are not dichotomous, and morphological structure, hormonal patterns, DNA and numerous other factors resist a scale that can be simply labeled masculine/feminine. The interplay of those variables do not lead to a straightforward continuum.
Because there is no single or simple scale, the class or category of that scale resists naming.
The most common word for this these days is "gender". There's a good discussion of this word's use in this context over the years, on Wikipedia/Gender.
The adjective I would suggest is gendered. For example:
As a noun, genderedness. For example:
Both these words should be easily understood, although genderedness seems to be more often used in formal writing if the Google results are anything to go by.
It doesn’t make sense to use these words to directly refer to people because it’ll be confused with gender. Instead, you would refer to e.g. the genderedness of someone’s appearance.
In response to bib’s answer — it’s easy to ask questions about the genderedness of someone/something; it’s only satisfactorily answering those questions that can be hard.
