Or why it’s time to separate gender identities and roles from biology.
I’ve written this piece to address two separate issues. One being the everyday belief that gender and sex are synonymous, but also the increasing assertion that I’m seeing in trans circles that sex is an artificial social construct, just as gender is. It expands on my previous post, so apologies for the repetition.
A lot of dictionaries still define sex and gender as the same thing. If you look up ‘woman’, you will see it defined as something along the lines of ‘adult female.’ Though note the empahsis on ‘adult.’ Below is why I feel this is outdated.
Some key differences between sex and gender.
Sex is universal. Every culture has a concept of ‘male’ and ‘female’ that is broadly defined as ‘has penis’ or ‘has vagina.’ That’s not to say that sex is a binary. There are intersex people (often born with neither typically male nor typically female sexual organs) and transsex(ual) people who have achieved a physical state contrary to their birth sex (or sometimes somewhere between male and female) through hormones and surgery. But the binary fits well over 90% of the population perfectly. Men with feminine traits and women with masculine ones are far more common.
Sex is tangible. It takes a brief physical examination to establish the sex of most humans, animals, and even some plants. There are key indicators that differentiate between male and female. Gender is not tangible. It is a societal role. Age and species are both factors (you wouldn’t call a 6 year old female human a woman. You wouldn’t call a 20 year old male horse a man, either.) Sex/gender is relevant, too, but once you begin to distinguish between them, you hit a fork in the road. Which one actually matters? What’s between your legs, or your own sense of masculinity or femininity?
Some cultures already have roles for people who don’t fit neatly into the gender binary. But even though Western society still clings to the binary, it already acknowledges at least four separate gender roles: boy, girl, man and woman. Boy is distinct from man as girl is distinct from woman. At exactly what point does one become the other? Well that’s a thorny question in itself. What’s clear is that girls, boys, men and women each have traditionally different societal roles: clothing options, behavioural options, career options etc.
Sex roles remain constant throughout the world (at least in the sense of male and female.) Gender roles vary wildly (a woman’s role in Saudi Arabia being very different from that of one on the UK.)
I believe the key here is to keep sex about sexual (rather than asexual) reproduction. The method by which most advanced animal lifeforms, and even many plants, reproduce. It takes an egg and a sperm or a pollinated flower to create new life. It’s a mechanism that creates genetic diversity by ensuring that plants and animals mix their genetic material, rather than just constantly replicating their own (note: the human ‘true hermaphrodite’ – with fully functional male and female sexual organs and able to fertilise themselves – is a myth.) Sex is about the two sexes (male and female) required to make this happen. Primary sexual organs are the body parts that make this mechanism possible. While ‘sexual activities’ covers quite a broad spectrum, ‘having sex’ generally refers to direct stimulation of those primary sexual organs, though not necessarily in ways that lead to reproduction. Sexuality is about whether you’re interested in ‘having sex’ with the same and/or other (not opposite) sex. (As an aside, let’s stop confusing matters by inventing new sexualities for every conceivable preference.) These are important points of reference, but let’s not get things back to front here. That your anatomy is normally associated with sperm producer or egg producer is what makes you male or female. This doesn’t mean that being unable to do either of those things (due to fertility issues) negates your sex. It doesn’t mean that arriving at it through surgery negates it, either.
Gender, on the other hand, is a belief system. It’s something we’ve invented, and which varies from culture to culture. We traditionally expect it to align with biological sex (and yes, the crossover of pronouns between gender and sex usage is confusing) but nowhere is this written in stone. There’s just a general understanding that males and females have different clothing options, different behavioural expectations, different career opportunities. None of which need to be directly connected to what’s in your underwear. This is gender. It has no rational basis, it’s just been that way for so long that most people don’t bother to question it.
Of course you’re free to identify as you please on an individual level. My concern here is that we’re constantly eroding the points of reference. It’s useful for discussion purposes to be able to distinguish ‘man’ from ‘male’ and ‘woman’ from ‘female.’ If we make them both mean the same thing (either from the perspective that they are both sexual abolutes, or from the one that says both are social constructs) then we lose valuable means of discussion. When someone seriously suggests ‘person with a penis’ and ‘person with a vagina’ as everyday terms in place of ‘male’ and ‘female’, you know you’ve crossed the line from ‘political correctness’ to ‘political correctness gone mad.’
