Quick Guide on When to Use ‘Sex’ or ‘Gender’

If you're not up for the 12 minute read, here are the highlights

Last week I published a story about how sex and gender defy clean distinction but remain nonetheless worth distinguishing. It’s a long read. By no means long enough to cover the issues in any comprehensive way, but a bit of a commitment for the reader in a hurry.

I thought I’d give a brief list of the main points for anybody who is interested. I believe the topic is important. More so as I now notice that the practice of using gender when sex would be entirely more appropriate has reached epidemic proportions.

My aim isn’t to strip this complex issue of nuance or to pretend there aren’t ambiguities. I want to provide a quick guide for readers’ convenience, and an invitation to read my longer story for an introduction to the nuance and complexity.

Sex or gender?

Here is as simple an account as I could achieve of what is meant by sex, gender, and gender identity. Many would argue with this account, but I think we need to start somewhere.

• Sex refers to biological status as male or female. Not just in humans but all manner of living things.
• Males produce only sperm. Females produce only eggs.
• The vast majority of humans fit snugly into one of these two categories, but there are some people who don’t.
• Gender is an aspect of human social identity, with far more variation than is typical for sex.
• Gender can vary on a variety of scales, including dimensions like femininity and masculinity.
• Gender can also entail categories. Woman and man are gender categories or gender identities.

In summary, if we are talking about female versus male, or the relatively rare cases of people who have both male and female characteristics, we are talking about sex. So it makes little sense to talk of ‘gender differences in pelvic anatomy’.

More than two?

• Societies commonly recognize more than two gender categories.
• The gender categories of woman and man often align with the sexes female and male respectively.
• But very often they don’t. “Many people’s deeply-felt sense of being a woman, a girl, a man, or a boy, does not correspond to their biological sex (often referred to as their ‘sex assigned at birth’)”.
• Many people have a deeply felt sense of not fitting the binary man-woman categories. They may identify as genderqueer, gender-neutral, agender, or gender-fluid.

How do sex, gender, and gender identity arise?

One way to negotiate the apparent tangle is to consider whether we are talking about a biological trait or a social/cultural one? It’s easy to see how sex is largely biological. It isn’t hard to believe, as many do, that gender is social and cultural. That is to say that people acquire gender.

The problem is that while humans find it easy to separate in their minds biological causes like genes and hormones from social ones like culture, learning, and socialization, the world isn’t that straightforward. Not by a long, long shot.

The ancient nature-nurture wrestling match is part of an ongoing tension that has simmered since Plato and Aristotle debated where ideas came from. Short answer: the dichotomy is always and ever false. Humans develop through an ongoing interplay between biology and social context. That seems to be true for gender and gender identity, and likely to some extent also true for sex. Don’t @ me!

I hope this guide helps you, if you’re new to the sex versus gender discussion, or simply confused. It’s an important discussion because it shapes the most fundamental aspects of family life, politics, and human institutions. It influences people’s acceptance and treatment, and their senses of themselves. And it also shapes our understanding of how bodies work, why they get sick, and how they respond to treatment.

If you want to know more then you might need to jump to the long read.

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