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The distinction between sex and gender is a concept that distinguishes sex, the biological makeup of an individual's reproductive anatomy, from gender, an individual's lifestyle often culturally learned. This distinction is not universal. In ordinary speech, sex and gender are often used interchangeably. Some dictionaries and academic disciplines give them the different definitions and others do not.

Sex

Sex is annotated as different from gender in the Oxford English Dictionary where it says sex "tends now to refer to biological differences, while . . . often refers to cultural or social ones." The American Heritage Dictionary, 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. It also refers to a usage note associated with the gender entry.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).

History

Since the Renaissance until the 18th Century, there was prevailing an inclination among doctors towards the existence of only one biological sex. In some circles, this view persisted into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, even at its peak, the one-sex model was a view among European people with high education. It is not known to have been a popular view nor one entirely agreed with by doctors who treated the general population. And, "he ways in which sexual difference have been imagined in the past are largely unconstrained by what was actually known about this or that bit of anatomy, this or that physiological process, and derive instead from the rhetorical exigencies of the moment."

Gender

In the Oxford English Dictionary, gender is defined as, "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. It is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary (5th ed.) 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; sex." and " One's identity as female or male or as neither entirely female nor entirely male", with a Usage Note saying, "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 "'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." However, the Food and Drug Administration uses "gender" instead of "sex" when referring to physiological differences between male and female organisms. "Gender" is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.

The Gay and 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, an important and 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 sexual 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.

Transgender

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 biological sex does not match up with which gender 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.

Feminism

The sex/gender distinction is endorsed by many feminists. Separating the two counters the argument that biology is destiny. Instead of one's future depending on his/her biological features it can depend on his/her social features. The distinction allows feminists to accept forms of natural sexual differences while criticizing gender inequality.

Limitations

However, some feminists go further and argue that neither sex nor gender are strictly binary concepts. Judith Lorber, for instance, has noted that many conventional indicators of sex are not sufficient to demarcate male from female. For example, not all women lactate, while some men do. Similarly, Suzanne Kessler, in a 1990 survey of medical specialists in pediatric intersexuality, found out that when a child was born with XY chromosomes but ambiguous genitalia, its sex was often determined according to the size of its penis. Thus, even if the sex/gender distinction holds, Lorber and Kessler suggest that the dichotomies of female/male and masculine/feminine are not themselves exhaustive. Lorber writes, "My perspective goes beyond accepted feminist views that gender is a cultural overlay that modifies physiological sex differences I am arguing that bodies differ in many ways physiologically, but they are completely transformed by social practices to fit into the salient categories of a society, the most pervasive of which are 'female' and 'male' and 'women' and 'men.'"

Moreover, Lorber has alleged that there exists more diversity within the individual categories of sex and gender—female/male and feminine/masculine, respectively—than between them. Hence, her fundamental claim is that both sex and gender are social constructions, rather than natural kinds.

A comparable view has been advanced by Linda Zerilli, who writes, " Wittig is critical of the sex/gender dichotomy in much feminist theory because such a dichotomy leaves unquestioned the belief that there is a 'core of nature which resists examination, a relationship excluded from the social in the analysis—a relationship whose characteristic is ineluctability in culture, as well as in nature, and which is the heterosexual relationship.' Putting sex in nature, gender in society, Wittig suggests, enabled feminists to interrogate the cultural construction of femininity; but this strategy also allowed dominant discourses to acknowledge the distinction without rethinking the foundations of their diverse theoretical enterprises and their concepts of subjectivity...."

References

1. Prince, Virginia. 2005. "Sex vs. Gender." International Journal of Transgenderism. 8(4).
2. Oxford English Dictionary (draft revision (online) Jun., 2010), as accessed Aug. 22, 2010, sex, noun 1, sense 2a.
3. "Sex differences in the brain's serotonin system". Physorg.com. Retrieved 2013-04-24.
4. "Emotional Wiring Different in Men and Women". LiveScience. 2006-04-19. Retrieved 2013-04-24.
5. USA (2013-03-25). "Frederikse ME, Lu A, Aylward E, Barta P, Pearlson G. (1999)". Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Retrieved 2013-04-24.
6. Women Have Greater Density of Neurons in Posterior Temporal Cortex /Sandra Wittelson / Journal of Neuroscience #15 (1995).
7. Lacqueur, Thomas Walter, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1st Harvard Univ. Press pbk. ed. 1992 (ISBN 0-674-54355-6), © 1990), p. 134 (author prof. history Univ. Calif., Berkeley).
8. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex, op. cit., p.  (italics added).
9. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex, op. cit., pp. 150–151.
10. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex, op. cit., pp. 68 & 135.
11. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex, op. cit., p. 243.
12. Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed. (online) 1989), as accessed Aug. 22, 2010, gender, noun, sense 3b.
13. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 5th ed. 2011, gender, sense 2 and Usage Note, accessed Jun 10, 2013.
14. What do we mean by "sex" and "gender"? (World Health Organization (WHO > Programmes and Projects > Gender, Women and Health)), as accessed Aug. 24, 2010 (no author or date & boldfacing omitted).
15. Guideline for the Study and Evaluation of Gender Differences in the Clinical Evaluation of Drugs
16. Haig, David (2004). "The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex: Social Change in Academic Titles, 1945–2001" (PDF). Archives of Sexual Behavior. 33 (2): 87–96. doi:10.1023/B:ASEB.0000014323.56281.0d. PMID 15146141. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
17. Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. ‘’GLAAD Media Reference Guide, 8th Edition. Transgender Glossary of Terms”, ‘’GLAAD’’, USA, May 2010. Retrieved on 2011-03-01.
18. Benewick, Robert and Green, Philip, Shulamith Firestone 1945–, The Routledge dictionary of twentieth-century political thinkers (2nd Edition), Routledge, 1998, pp. 84-86. ISBN 0-415-09623-5
19. Rosario, Vernon. 2009. "The New Science of Intersex" The Gay & Lesbian Review
20. Adovasio, J. M., Olga Soffer, & Jake Page, The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory (Smithsonian Books & Collins (HarperCollinsPublishers), 1st Smithsonian Books ed. 2007 (ISBN 978-0-06-117091-1)), p. .
21. Adovasio, J. M., et al., The Invisible Sex, op. cit., p. 170 & see pp. 185–186.
22. Adovasio, J. M., et al., The Invisible Sex, op. cit., p. .
23. ^ Davidson, Megan. 2007. "Seeking Refuge Under the Umbrella: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Organizing Within the Category Transgender. Sexuality Research & Social Policy.
24. Mikkola, Mari. 2011. "Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender." The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
25. ^ Lorber, Judith (1993). "Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology". Retrieved on 8 May 2013.
26. Kessler, Suzanne (1990). "The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants". Signs, Vol. 16, No. 1: 3-26.
27. Zerilli, Linda M. G., The Trojan Horse of Universalism: Language As a 'War Machine' in the Writings of Monique Wittig, in Robbins, Bruce, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1993 (ISBN 0-8166-2124-1)), pp. 153–154 (n. 35 (citing Wittig, Monique, The Straight Mind, in Feminist Issues, vol. 1, no. 1, Summer, 1980, p. 107) omitted) (author asst. prof., poli. sci. dep't, Rutgers Univ., & ed. teaches, Eng. dep't, Rutgers Univ., & coeditor, Social Text) (em-dash surrounded by half-spaces in original).

Notes

1. Monique Wittig, feminist theorist and author of Les Guérillères, a lesbian feminist novel

See also

• Gender equality
• Stereotyping

• Feminist theory
• Gender
• Gender studies
• Feminism and history
• Sex