Sex and gender distinction

The distinction between sex and gender differentiates sex (the anatomy of an individual's reproductive system, and secondary sex characteristics) from gender, which can refer to either social roles based on the sex of the person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity). In some circumstances, an individual's assigned sex and gender do not align, and the person may be transgender, or intersex.

The sex and gender distinction is not universal. In ordinary speech, sex and gender are often used interchangeably. Some dictionaries and academic disciplines give them different definitions while others do not.

Among scientists, the term sex differences (as compared to gender differences) is typically applied to sexually dimorphic traits that are hypothesized to be evolved consequences of sexual selection.

Sex

Anisogamy, or the size differences of gametes (sex cells), is the defining feature of the two sexes. By definition, males have small gametes (sperm); females have large gametes (ova). In humans, typical male or female sexual differentiation includes the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, the type of gonads, the sex hormones, the internal reproductive anatomy (such as the uterus in females), and the external genitalia. People with mixed sex factors are intersex. People whose internal psychological experience differs from their assigned sex are transgender or transsexual.

The consensus among scientists is that all behaviors are phenotypes—complex interactions of both biology and environment—and thus nature vs. nurture is a misleading categorization. The term sex differences is typically applied to sexually dimorphic traits that are hypothesized to be evolved consequences of sexual selection. For example, the human "sex difference" in height is a consequence of sexual selection, while the "gender difference" typically seen in head hair length (women with longer hair) is not. Scientific research shows an individual's sex influences his or her behavior.

Sex is annotated as different from gender in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it says sex "tends now to refer to biological differences". The World Health Organization (WHO) similarly states that "'[s]ex' refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women" and that "'[m]ale' and 'female' are sex categories".

The American Heritage Dictionary (5th ed.), however, lists sex as both "Either of the two divisions, designated female and male, by which most organisms are classified on the basis of their reproductive organs and functions" and "One's identity as either female or male," among other definitions.

History

From the Renaissance to the 18th century, there was a prevailing inclination among doctors towards the existence of only one biological sex. In some discourses, this view persisted into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even at its peak, the one-sex model was supported among highly educated Europeans but is not known to have been a popular view nor one entirely agreed upon by doctors who treated the general population.

Gender

In the Oxford English Dictionary, gender is defined as, "[i]n mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.", with the earliest example cited being from 1963. The American Heritage Dictionary (5th ed.), in addition to defining gender the same way that it defines biological sex, also states that gender may be defined by identity as "neither entirely female nor entirely male"; its Usage Note adds:

Some people maintain that the word sex should be reserved for reference to the biological aspects of being male or female or to sexual activity, and that the word gender should be used only to refer to sociocultural roles. Accordingly, one would say The effectiveness of the treatment appears to depend on the sex of the patient and In society, gender roles are clearly defined. In some situations this distinction avoids ambiguity, as in gender research, which is clear in a way that sex research is not. The distinction can be problematic, however. Linguistically, there isn't any real difference between gender bias and sex bias, and it may seem contrived to insist that sex is incorrect in this instance.

A working definition in use by the World Health Organization for its work is that "'[g]ender' refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women" and that "'masculine' and 'feminine' are gender categories." The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used to use gender instead of sex when referring to physiological differences between male and female organisms. In 2011, they reversed their position on this and began using sex as the biological classification and gender as "a person's self representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual's gender presentation." Gender is also now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.

GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) makes a distinction between sex and gender in their most recent Media Reference Guide: Sex is "the classification of people as male or female" at birth, based on bodily characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, and genitalia. Gender identity is "one's internal, personal sense of being a man or woman (or a boy or a girl).

Some feminist philosophers maintain that gender is totally undetermined by sex. See, for example, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, a widely influential feminist text.

The case of David Reimer who was, according to studies published by John Money, raised as a girl after a botched circumcision was described in the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. Reimer was in fact not comfortable as a girl and later changed gender identity back to male when discovered the truth of his surgery. He eventually committed suicide.

History

Gender in the sense of social and behavioral distinctions, according to archaeological evidence, arose "at least by some 30,000 years ago". More evidence was found as of "26,000 years ago", at least at the archeological site Dolní Věstonice I and others, in what is now the Czech Republic. This is during the Upper Paleolithic time period.

The historic meaning of gender, ultimately derived from Latin genus, was of "kind" or "variety". By the 20th century, this meaning was obsolete, and the only formal use of gender was in grammar. This changed in the early 1970s when the work of John Money, particularly the popular college textbook Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, was embraced by feminist theory. This meaning of gender is now prevalent in the social sciences; although in many other contexts, gender includes sex or replaces it.

Distinction in linguistics

Since the social sciences now distinguish between biologically defined sex and socially constructed gender, the term gender is now also sometimes used by linguists to refer to social gender as well as grammatical gender. Traditionally, however, a distinction has been made by linguists between sex and gender, where sex refers primarily to the attributes of real-world entities – the relevant extralinguistic attributes being, for instance, male, female, non-personal, and indeterminate sex – and gender refers to a grammatical category, such as masculine, feminine, and neuter (often based on sex, but not exclusively so in all languages), that determines the agreement between nouns of different genders and associated words, such as articles and adjectives.

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, for instance, states

By GENDER is meant a grammatical classification of nouns, pronouns, or other words in the noun phrase according to certain meaning-related distinctions, especially a distinction related to the sex of the referent.

Thus German, for instance has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Nouns referring to people and animals of known sex are generally referred to by nouns with the equivalent gender. Thus Mann (meaning man) is masculine and is associated with a masculine definite article to give der Mann, while Frau (meaning woman) is feminine and is associated with a feminine definite article to give die Frau. However the words for inanimate objects are commonly masculine (e.g. der Tisch, the table) or feminine (die Armbanduhr, the watch), and grammatical gender can diverge from biological sex; for instance the feminine die Person refers to a person of either sex, and the neuter das Madchen means "the girl".

In modern English, there is no true grammatical gender in this sense, though the differentiation, for instance, between the pronouns "he" and "she", which in English refers to a difference in sex (or social gender), is sometimes referred to as a gender distinction. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, for instance, refers to the semantically based "covert" gender (e.g. male and female, not masculine and feminine) of English nouns, as opposed to the "overt" gender of some English pronouns; this yields nine gender classes: male, female, dual, common, collective, higher male animal, higher female animal, lower animal, and inanimate, and these semantic gender classes affect the possible choices of pronoun for coreference to the real-life entity, e.g. who and he for brother but which and it or she for cow.

Criticism of the "sex difference" vs. "gender difference" distinction

The current distinction between the terms sex difference vs. gender difference has been criticized as misleading and counterproductive. These terms suggest that the behavior of an individual can be partitioned into separate biological and cultural factors. (However, behavioral differences between individuals can be statistically partitioned, as studied by behavioral genetics). Instead, all behaviors are phenotypes—a complex interweaving of both nature and nurture.

Diane Halpern, in her book Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, argued problems with sex vs. gender terminology: "I cannot argue (in this book) that nature and nurture are inseparable and then... use different terms to refer to each class of variables. The ...biological manifestations of sex are confounded with psychosocial variables.... The use of different terms to label these two types of contributions to human existence seemed inappropriate in light of the biopsychosocial position I have taken." She also stated that "Pinker (2006b, para. 2) provided a clear summary of the problems with the terms "sex and gender: "part of it is a new prissiness of many people today are squeamish about sexual dimorphism as the Victorians were about sex. The word sex refers... (both) to copulation and to sexual dimorphism..." Richard Lippa writes in Gender, Nature and Nurture that "Some researchers have argued that the word sex should be used to refer to (biological differences), whereas the word gender should be used to refer to (cultural differences). However, it is not at all clear the degree to which the differences between males and females are due to biological factors versus learned and cultural factors. Furthermore, indiscriminate use of the word gender tends to obscure the distinction between two different topics: (a) differences between males and females, and (b) individual differences in maleness and femaleness that occur within each sex."

It has been suggested that more useful distinctions to make would be whether a behavioral difference between the sexes is first due to an evolved adaptation, then, if so, whether the adaptation is sexually dimorphic (different) or sexually monomorphic (the same in both sexes). The term sex difference could then be re-defined as between-sex differences that are manifestations of a sexually dimorphic adaptation (which is how many scientists use the term), while the term gender difference could be re-defined as due to differential socialization between the sexes of a monomorphic adaptation or byproduct. For example, greater male propensity toward physical aggression and risk taking would be termed a "sex difference;" the generally longer head hair length of females would be termed a "gender difference."

Transgender and genderqueer

Main articles: Transgender and Genderqueer

Transgender does not have one definition. Instead it is a group of "identities and experiences of sex and gender variance, changing, and blending." This is when an individual's assigned sex at birth does not match up with the gender with which they identify themselves. Under the umbrella of transgender includes "transsexual people, cross-dressers, drag kings and queens, genderqueer people, gay men and lesbians who queer gender lines, the partners of trans people, and any number of other people who transgress binary sex." These individuals often undergo sex-reassignment surgery, take hormones, or change their style of life to feel more comfortable.

See also

• Gender equality
• Gender polarization
• Sex differences in psychology
• Stereotyping