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Gender vs. Sex
Section Title
Gender
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Grammatical Gender:
In many languages, nouns have a grammatical gender. This is often seen in form of an article. The grammatical gender for the same word can vary between languages.
Example for the gender of “the moon”:
- German: Der Mond (male)
- Spanish: La Luna (female)
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Gender Roles & Gender Expression:
Throughout history, certain behaviours, clothing, professions, ways of speaking, and interests have been associated with either being female or male. This is the context in which we speak of a social construct.
For example:
- Male: Strong, pants, beard, fighter, sciences, colour blue, etc
- Female: Soft, patient, clean, caring, motherly, colour pink, etc
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Gender Identity:
In more recent years, this is being defined more clearly and researched more extensively. Where the majority of the population have a gender identity that aligns with their biological sex, this is not always the case. Statistically 1%-2% of the population (studies vary) are transgender.
This is the context in which we specifically do not talk about a social constructs.
Sex
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Biological Sex:
This has to do with more than genitals and chromosomes. Hormones play a huge part when it comes to sex and this already starts in the early stages of pregnancy when the sex of the foetus is determined by hormones.
During puberty, you can see hormones causing specific changes in the body to mature the body.
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Sexual Act:
This means sexual activities of a person; Be it constually with somebody else or oneself.
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Sexuality:
This is the way people feel romantically and/or sexually towards other people. It can also refer to the lack of sexual and/or romantic attraction.
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Sexualising:
Early anti-gay propaganda would try to create an image of LGBT+ people that was solely based on sexual practices and predatory characteristics in order to create a feeling of “us versus them”. This purely sexualised and predatory view of the LGBT+ community is still very common in society and leads to transgender people being sexualised and cast out of families and society as a whole. This has led to mis-information, fear, hate, and hate crime.
Other things to consider
Against popular opinion, sex and gender are not binary.
This has been known in the medical community for a long time but society hasn’t caught up with this, yet. People who are binary (identifying as either male or female) are the majority, even many trans people are binary (male to female / female to male). So it doesn’t come as a surprise that other gender identities like “non-binary” or “bi-gender” have been largely ignored by society although these identities exist and are valid.
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One of the physical manifestations of sex not being binary are intersex people.
Intersex people are born with different variations of sexual characteristics.
An older term, which is not used to describe intersex people any longer, is “Hermaphrodite”. The medical community has moved away from this term as new knowledge came about.
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Our brains are not mysterious grey matter that exists separately from our bodies; they are a physical, a biological part of us.
During pregnancy, the brain - just like other body parts - is impacted by inherited genes, hormones, and other biological factors as it develops.
Knowing how other body parts might not align perfectly with a certain sex, is it surprising that the same can happen to the brain?
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That “brain part” about sex is called gender.
So when we speak about gender identity, then we know for a fact that our gender identity is something we are born with just like any other part of our bodies.
While our gender expression may due to social norms, fashion, or simply because we do or don’t want to fit in, this does not mean that our gender identity changes.
In fact, many transgender people know from a very young age which gender they are and even whether they are or are not binary, even if they lack the vocabulary for it at the time.
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Once people know the terminology, they find accurate ways to express themselves when it comes to their gender. Learning this terminology can happen at different ages, which is why some people only “come out” as transgender way into adulthood while others do as children or teenagers.
This is also why there were seemingly less transgeder people 20 years ago. As the terminology was not as widely spread and known, very few people were able to express how they felt in an accurate way.