GUEST COLUMN
Sorting out Sex and Gender
This article is an effort to help see more clearly through the confusion.
- How does “gender” differ from “sex”?
Sex is biological, a function of one’s chromosomes. Gender is sociological or psychological. Common accounts of gender identify it as either: 1) cultural expectations for one’s behavior as a function of one’s sex, or 2) psychological experience of being a particular sex Gender is distinct from but also a product of sex. Just like the brain and the mind are distinct but inseparable (the former being physical the latter metaphysical) so, too, do these accounts indicate that sex and gender are distinct but inseparable. Most definitions of gender say it’s social, meaning cultural expectations of one’s sex (i.e., a traditional social role). It could be construed differently from how we presently construe it. For modern gender activists, the value of this definition is that it would imply gender is subject to change. If gender is social, did society get those general roles right? Does society have the right to dictate social roles? Establishing gender as social doesn’t imply it’s malleable. Many social constructs are fixed. A familiar example is language. Language is a social construct. There are many languages. Both vocabulary and syntax of those languages (e.g., whether verbs require conjugation, whether nouns have gender, whether adjectives precede or follow the noun, etc.) describe a variable world explanation.
Gender isn’t directly a social construct. Indirectly, your experience of being biologically male or female is shaped by society’s expectations for your sex. By this account, gender really wouldn’t be subject to change, at least not by the individual. You can act more or less masculine or feminine, but you are still having the psychological experience of being the sex you are. You can dislike the sex you are, but you are still experiencing the sex you are, not the sex you are not. You cannot say, for example, I am a sex-boy having the experience of being a sex-girl . . . because as a sex-boy your experiences are, by definition, a sex-boy’s experiences. You might note your experiences have more in common with those of girls than boys. And this
might be entirely true, but it is still a boy’s experience (since that is what you are). It indicates a huge overlap in the experience of being a boy and being a girl.
More recent trend is to make gender personal
A more recent trend in gender ideology is to define it as a personal outlook.
The value of this approach is that it seems to make gender subject to personal
control. If I determine my outlook on life, and gender is a function of my personal
outlook, I gain sovereignty over my gender.
Problem with that is…
The first problem this presents is it tries to compel a natural concept (i.e., gender) to yield to personal control, rather than determine whether that phenomenon is already subject to personal control. The second problem this presents is making up a new account of gender doesn’t override the reality of other accounts. However, we ultimately choose to define the term “gender,” and there are expectations society has for people of a particular sex (though that’s a big part of what gender activists hope to eliminate). And there is still the psychological experience of being the sex you actually are.
Redefining the term doesn’t eliminate the reality of either of those previous two concepts. It rips off the language traditionally used to discuss them. One’s personal outlook can’t change one’s social role or psychological experience.
Leave out politics!
The relevant outlook we are talking about is not one’s attitude toward politics, academics, people, the future, etc. It is one’s attitude toward the interactions of the sexes! So it remains a product of our social attitudes about the sexes. One’s
attitude is taking place in the context of existing social attitudes about the sexes. It makes no sense outside the context of those social attitudes.
Getting all dolled up
Consider a teenage girl who dresses up, putting on makeup carefully and deliberately. When asked
who or what she dressed up for, she might respond “Oh, I didn’t do this for anyone else. I did
this just for myself.” Her point is she did it to feel more confident. You only feel more confident when dressed and made-up nicely because of your anticipation about how others see you. It doesn’t depend on the reaction of any one person but relies on the presumed reaction of society.
Blind on an island
One would not gain confidence from presenting this way when stranded on a deserted island or while living in a community of all blind people. Just as this performance doing anything for her is dependent upon the assumed attitudes of others, so are our personal gender outlooks are a function of how we believe they measure up against society. Minus social context, there is no such thing as a gender outlook. Defining gender in terms of personal outlook won’t take away social norms for each sex or the psychological experience of being a particular sex.
Why the push to divorce gender from sex?
Why the current determination to divorce gender from sex? The goal seems to be to assert personal control over one’s gender. Strange goal, at best. And backwards. We all examine the world and try to make it match reality. We examine our ideas to see what they imply. We don’t decide in advance the way we want things to work and then go searching for theories that permit it. We don’t go invent new concepts to conform to our personal preferences or facilitate our social agendas. This approach is intellectually dishonest. It sees truth as subject to our personal preferences.
Gender is a function of sex. No matter how we conceive it, sex is embedded in our concept of gender. We could redefine gender so that it is no longer related to sex, but it would then no longer be gender. We can’t divorce gender from our understanding of and attitude towards the differences (both physical and psychological) between the sexes. Gender would not exist as a concept if there were not generalizable differences between the sexes. If we want some concept of personal identity independent of sex, there are many. But gender isn’t one.
Debunking the myth of “gender assignment”
- When are sex and gender established? It’s odd to ask when sex is established. As sex is a matter of one’s chromosomal composition, one’s sex was established when one’s chromosomes were— at conception. Transgender activists often refer to someone’s having been “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth.” It is frequently ambiguous whether they are referring to sex or gender when they make this reference. But sex isn’t “assigned” at all. It might be “revealed,” “discovered,” “identified,” “recognized,” “acknowledged,” “confirmed,” “verified,” etc. at birth but not “assigned.” To “assign” something is to make it subject to the judgment of whomever is doing the assigning.
But sex isn’t subject to individual discretion. It is a biological reality. And it is established at conception, rather than at birth. People aren’t “assigned” their sex any more than they are
“assigned” the number of limbs and digits they have.
The purpose of claiming that maleness or femaleness was “assigned” is to imply designation (or “assignment”) has no permanence. It might have been inaccurate, or even arbitrary. Maleness or femaleness might be subject to change. While this is obviously not true about sex, it is less obviously not true about gender, either. But even gender is not assigned, per say. IS GRASS REALLY GREEN ??? If gender is a function of social norms, then it’s assigned by society in accordance with your sex. That’s like saying we assign the color green to grass or blue to water. Once we define those colors, we do not “assign” where they apply. We simply acknowledge where they apply. In that sense, gender is a social phenomenon, a function of community attitudes, not assigned individually. It is simply acknowledged collectively as a function of one’s sex. Talk of “assigning” is meant to imply that each individual is separately assigned a gender. And that’s not what society is doing. - What is the point of gender? Why even talk about it at all?
“Gender” is widely used as a convenient euphemism for “sex.” Because sex and gender are so tightly linked, we have traditionally seen little reason to differentiate between them (at least in common conversation). As one follows immediately from the other, intermingling the terms is common. Just like the terms “brain” and “mind” (as when we say someone has a “big brain” but we really mean a sharp mind), so too do we regularly use the term “gender” as a proxy for “sex.” Given that “sex” is both a noun referring to one’s chromosomal make-up, and a verb referring to sexual intercourse, employing the term “gender” in lieu of “sex” avoids any connotation of physical intimacy. Our tradition of using the same terms – “male” and “female,” “boy” and “girl,” “man” and “woman,” etc. – for both gender and sex often obscures which concept we are even talking about. Whenever we encounter the term “gender,” we need to be attentive to see if it is really referring to biology or psychology. It is almost always biology (or sex) that we are really talking about.
With that ambiguity acknowledged, just like we sometimes talk about the metaphysical entity of the mind as distinct from the physical entity of the brain, there likewise is value to sometimes distinguishing the psychological experience of what it is like to be a particular sex from the simple biological fact of being that sex. This is, at least in part, a question
of personal identity, which we generally view as more a function of the mind than of the body.
When we talk about what it is to be a man or woman, we are seldom talking about biology. We are talking about social norms and personal identity. These are meaningful questions to explore.
- Is gender fixed or malleable?
The fact that gender is psychosocial does not by itself indicate that it is subject to change. Our psychological constitution is not entirely within our control. Beliefs are psychological and yet we cannot change them just for wanting to. They are evidence dependent. They cannot be changed without our encountering new evidence (or perhaps reinterpreting old evidence).
If gender is construed as a function of cultural expectations related to one’s sex, then it is subject to being construed differently at different times and places. This makes it somewhat malleable. But it also implies that within any particular social context, it is not subject to revision by individuals. Specifically, it would seem to indicate that one could not change one’s gender because one lacks control over the collective views of one’s society. Gender, as a function of collective attitudes, remains tied to one’s sex. One could lobby to change society’s views regarding gender, but any evolution of those views would apply to all members of a particular sex, not just the activist him/herself. And the activist’s personal gender identity would be dependent upon the culture’s attitudes, not just his/her own.
If gender describes the psychological experience of being a particular sex, then although it is distinct from sex, it still derives quite directly from sex. This account of gender assumes strong similarities among the experiences of sex-males that differ from the those of sex-females. On this account, it would seem possible for a sex-male to state that his psychological experience is more akin to that of sex-females than it is to that of other sex-males.
But this wouldn’t mean that he is actually gender-female while being sex-male. It would simply indicate that the range of psychological experiences males and females have overlaps substantially. If gender is the psychological experience of being one’s particular sex, then whatever experience one has – regardless of how widely it varies from the norm – is a psychological experience of being one’s particular sex (not an experience of being a sex one is
not). This is definitional. To illustrate, let’s presume that there is such thing as being a cat that differs from the experience of being a dog. If there is a cat that possesses more of psychological qualities of dog-ness than do other cats (perhaps even more than the average dog) – perhaps in terms of protectiveness, loyalty, playfulness, etc. – the cat’s experience would still be that of a cat. That’s all it can be, because a cat is what it is. This would simply indicate that there is not as much distance between the psychological experience of being a cat and being a dog as we might have initially supposed. It would mean that there is considerable overlap between the two.
Ask a cat what it’s like to be a cat
Imagine that you asked the cat what it is like to be a cat, and it responded “I wouldn’t know. I’ve
never experienced life as a cat.” You might then ask, “But you’re a cat, right?” It might
reply, “Biologically, yes, I am a cat. But my experience is that of a dog, not a cat.”
Seeking further understanding, you ask “If you are a cat, how could your experience be anything other than that of a cat?” It might then reply, “Because I am not like other cats. I feel more like dogs feel than cats feel.” In this case, we would have to just acknowledge that some cats act/feel like dogs. BUT THEY ARE STILL CATS. That makes more sense than to say that some cats psychologically ARE dogs.
More to come on this subject
Stay tuned for the next in a series of articles on this subject, including discussion of:
How many genders are there?
What do our pronouns refer to – sex or gender?
What is the basis for segregating spaces (e.g., sport divisions, restrooms)?
How should we understand the transgender phenomenon?
Anyone can submit a guest article for consideration. Send your ideas to: ChristianCountyTrumpet@gmail.com.
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