LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Definitions of sex and gender

Current local debates regarding sex and gender could benefit from some social scientific clarity. Definitions matter, and there’s no point in speaking the same language if you’re using different dictionaries. Furthermore, a good definition of something is halfway to understanding it.

Sex is based on anatomy and biology, by which persons are described as male or female. It includes sexual organs, chromosomes, and hormones, and is given by nature (ascribed). Gender is social norms assigned to sex, by which persons are described as masculine or feminine. It is nurtured by and learned from socially constructed culture (achieved), including ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Sexual identity is a person’s subjective sense of being male or female, while gender identity is a person’s subjective sense and personal enactment of being masculine or feminine. Various types of sexual identity are included in the 2SLGBTQIA+ acronym.

Types of gender identity include cisgender–a person who identifies with their sex based on visible anatomy; transgender–a person who does not identify with their sex based on visible anatomy; gender fluid–a person whose gender identity is not fixed and shifts over time, or depending on the situation; and gender dysphoria–a person who is deeply troubled, confused, and conflicted about their gender.

Transsexual is a dated, more specific term that until recently referred to individuals who underwent medical or surgical transition to align their physical bodies with their identity. Transgender is the current, preferred, inclusive umbrella term for anyone whose internal gender identity differs from their sex.

As the saying goes, sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears.

Both sex and gender are spectrums, not binaries. Intersex persons, formerly known as hermaphrodites, are born with a mix of male and female sexual organs, chromosomes, and hormones. These physical attributes are sometimes externally visible, and other times internal, invisible, and unknown even to the persons themselves.

All cultures have sexual scripts, the learned guidelines that define what is erotic, and stipulate what are appropriate sexual desires and behaviours – the social norms of when, where, with whom, why, and how it is appropriate to feel, express, or enact sexual desire.

Accumulated empirical evidence of sex and gender diversity is historical (looking back into our own culture), cross-cultural (looking sideways at other cultures), and social psychological (looking at social processes that produce them).

Historically, notions of gender evolved from the egalitarian fertility goddesses of hunting and gathering societies, to the patriarchy of males controlling females as private property beginning in the agricultural revolution, to males governing the public sphere and relegating females to the private sphere during the industrial revolution. In response, there have been four waves of the women’s movement over the past two hundred years, the most recent of which has challenged all notions of gender as merely performative.

Anthropologically, ethnographic research has documented how in some cultures, both males and females were what Westerners would deem feminine, in other cultures both males and females were what we would deem masculine, and in still other cultures males were feminine and females were masculine. Sex and gender ambiguity has been common to many cultures. For example, the Bugis people of Indonesia have five categories of people: cisgender males, feminine males, masculine females, cisgender females, and bissu who are a perfect combination of maleness and femaleness considered to have special spiritual powers.

Social psychology details the institutionalized processes through which males and females learn to become masculine or feminine according to expectations current to their society. Multiple agents of socialization, including religion, enable them to develop gender identity and learn gender norms, such as traditional Western notions of male instrumentality and female expressivity.

In summary, even sexuality, while being natural, is socially constructed and controlled. In contrast, gender is not natural; gender is nurtured. The multiple differentiations of sex and gender are indeed complicated, and best not denied, reduced to a binary, or treated heavy-handedly. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what some belief systems do.

And as the sociological axiom goes, that which is believed to be real is real in its consequences.

Noteworthy addendum for Christians: according to the more detailed second creation account in Genesis 2, if interpreted literally, the first human was a sexually ambiguous “earthling” (ha adam in Hebrew). The first male (ish) and female (ishshah) were subsequent secondary formations.