Sex and gender distinction

The distinction between sex and gender is a concept that distinguishes sex, a natural or biological feature, from gender, the cultural or learned significance of sex.

Feminism

The distinction is strategically important for some strands of feminist theory and politics, particularly second-wave feminism, because on it is premised the argument that gender is not biological destiny, and that the patriarchal oppression of women is a cultural phenomenon which need not necessarily follow from biological sexual differentiation. The distinction allows feminists to accept some form of natural sexual difference while criticizing gender inequality.

Gender

Gender is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary 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. It was defined in the American Heritage Dictionary (3d ed.) as "[s]exual identity, especially in relation to society or culture", with a Usage Note saying that "[in] practice . . . many anthropologists . . . reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories."

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 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, successfully 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. He eventually committed suicide.

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 . . . [gender] often refers to cultural or social ones."

A working definition in use by the World Health Organization for its work is that "'[s]ex' refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women" and that "'[m]ale' and 'female' are sex categories".

Scientific research shows that no simple distinction between the two can be made and that an individual's sex influences his or her behaviour.

Both as cultural

Some third-wave feminists like Judith Butler, French feminists like Monique Wittig, and social constructionists within sociology have disputed the biological-natural status the distinction imputes to sex, arguing instead that both sex and gender are culturally constructed and structurally complicit.

Popular usage

As popularly used, sex and gender are not defined in this fashion. There has been increased usage of the word "gender" to refer to sexual differences, because of the dual meaning of the word "sex" as a biological feature as well as meaning the act of sexual intercourse.

History

Of gender

Gender, 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.

Of sex

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, "[t]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."

Criticism

According to Linda Zerilli, "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...."

See also

• Gender equality
• Stereotyping