I Don't Understand Why Gender Is So Important To Society

I walk into a truck stop on the way to my job as a warehouse clerk early before my shift, and I ask the cashier before I grab anything if they take checks. She says yes, so I go on, grab some food, and a big travel cup of Lipton raspberry tea, and I go to another cashier to check out.

When I get out my checkbook (yes, I know, it's the 21st century...), and go to another cashier to pay for everything, the cashier sees the checkbook, she says they don't take checks. I bring up what the previous cashier said about checks, she says something to her, and then explains that they only take corporate checks from trucking companies that are on their pre-approved list.

I'm 5 foot 9 inches tall, about 260 pounds (people keep assuming I have a lot of upper body strength because of this, but I don't), and because my job requires me to step outdoors quite often and check seals on shipments coming in and out, I was wearing a thermal camouflage coat, and a orange vest. That combined with my beard, and the fact that my cost was open, and I had one of my favorite wolf/wildlife shirts on, must have made the first cashier think I was a trucker.

I may look rather masculine on the outside, and I've gotten comparisons to the comedian Zach Galifianakis, (famous for "The Hangover" movie series), personally I think I look a little more like the character Aaron Pittman from the NBC show Revolution, but anyway, I don't feel all that masculine on the inside, and it endlessly baffles me why people put so much emphasis on gender, and the gender binary system.

It also confuses me why many people seem intimated by my size, (maybe it's because I don't wear my emotions on my sleeves like most people, and come across as cold and threatening) but that's another discussion for another day.

Societal views on gender have always confused me, even in my fundamentalist days. I didn't understand the fundamentalist obsession with dividing the genders, both with children/teens, and with adults. Why are separate men's ministries and women's ministries necessary? I never understood it, and I never saw anything wrong with female pastors, even then.

Now that I have left fundamentalism, and Christianity altogether, along with ditching the related homophobia, it makes even less sense why gender should matter either to Christianity or to the society at large. Why does society have to put people of either gender in a box, and place expectations on them because of that? Why can't trans people be accepted in this culture?

Better yet, why do people have such expectations of me? I know I'm not a trans person, I don't feel like I should be the opposite gender, but it's kind of hard to explain. I've never really felt proud to be male as some young men seem to be, and I could really care less that I'm male, to me, it was merely a genetic accident of birth. I want to see myself more as just a person, instead of being defined by the way I happened to be born.