Not so long ago, people would have been confused by this question. If, for example, you could travel back in time to 1923, people wouldn’t understand what you were aiming at with your question. At the time, the only use of the term ‘gender’ was in grammar. The word originates from Latin ‘genus’ (via the Old French word ‘gendre’), which means ‘kind’ or ‘sort’. In its earliest English usage, gender referred to grammatical categories that divide words into masculine, feminine, and neuter classes, mainly in languages such as German, French, Spanish, and Italian.
Things started to change, albeit very slowly, in the 1950s when the sexologist John Money introduced the distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in his work on intersex and transsexual individuals. He suggested that gender was an aspect of one's identity that could be socially constructed and conditioned, rather than being purely biologically determined. This was a revolutionary idea at the time, yet acceptance and uptake were slow to come. Throughout the preceding millennia, people had only known two sexes: male (boys/men) and female (girls/women). There have always been cases of intersex, of course, as one can assume that the percentage of newborns with ambiguous genitals has been around 0.1-0.2% throughout the history of our species.
But because people were born with this condition, there was no discussion on why or whether someone would want to change their sex to anything other than what they were born with. Looking around, people would see more or less the same story with all the animals in their environment. There always was a female who would lay eggs or carry the babies and a male whose contribution was providing the sperm to fertilize the eggs. The advancement of the biological sciences as a result of the Renaissance validated this everyday observation, especially when we discovered DNA and chromosomes, which is why we’re talking about ‘biological sex’.
Using a broad-brush approach, we can say that sex is a biological and physiological characteristic that categorizes individuals as male, female, or intersex. Sex is usually determined by physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone levels, and reproductive/sexual anatomy. Gender in a sociocultural sense, on the other hand, refers to the roles, behaviors, activities, and expectations that a society or culture deems appropriate for men, women, and other gender categories. It's about how society perceives individuals, and how individuals perceive themselves. People may identify as male, female, both, neither, or may have a gender that varies over time. Use and understanding of the term still vary widely among different cultures, societies, and individuals, and the historical development and acceptance of this term and concept are ongoing and difficult to predict at this time.
Unfortunately, this understanding of sex and gender as related but, nonetheless, distinct concepts is often forgotten or neglected in everyday use, leading to some of the fierce arguments and battles that surround the topic currently. To make things even more complicated, most people also use ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ interchangeably, even though gender identity refers to one's internal, deeply held sense of one's gender. It's how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. This can be the same as or different from the sex assigned at birth. An individual's gender identity can be male, female, a blend of both, neither, or something different. For example, someone may be biologically male (sex), expected to behave in ways society often associates with men (gender), but internally feel a deep sense of being female (gender identity).
One can sum up the whole situation in one short assessment – it’s a mess and there are no easy solutions. We can’t continue having two sexes, male and female, only. Putting people into either/or categories makes life easy, but it always excludes people who are neither. Just adding a third, undefined option doesn’t work either, because not everyone with a disorder of sexual development has atypical genitalia or is intersex. Replacing ‘sex’ with ‘gender’, which is done more and more in publications and online, creates its own problems. However, it may be the only working solution going forward, even though it makes many people uncomfortable giving up the black or white, right or wrong of the binary system. Biological or genetic sex will not disappear, of course. It has value in healthcare (some cancers affect men more than women and vice versa) and many other areas. However, its time as maybe the most important identifier in people’s lives could be coming to an end soon.
Things started to change, albeit very slowly, in the 1950s when the sexologist John Money introduced the distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in his work on intersex and transsexual individuals. He suggested that gender was an aspect of one's identity that could be socially constructed and conditioned, rather than being purely biologically determined. This was a revolutionary idea at the time, yet acceptance and uptake were slow to come. Throughout the preceding millennia, people had only known two sexes: male (boys/men) and female (girls/women). There have always been cases of intersex, of course, as one can assume that the percentage of newborns with ambiguous genitals has been around 0.1-0.2% throughout the history of our species.
But because people were born with this condition, there was no discussion on why or whether someone would want to change their sex to anything other than what they were born with. Looking around, people would see more or less the same story with all the animals in their environment. There always was a female who would lay eggs or carry the babies and a male whose contribution was providing the sperm to fertilize the eggs. The advancement of the biological sciences as a result of the Renaissance validated this everyday observation, especially when we discovered DNA and chromosomes, which is why we’re talking about ‘biological sex’.
Using a broad-brush approach, we can say that sex is a biological and physiological characteristic that categorizes individuals as male, female, or intersex. Sex is usually determined by physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone levels, and reproductive/sexual anatomy. Gender in a sociocultural sense, on the other hand, refers to the roles, behaviors, activities, and expectations that a society or culture deems appropriate for men, women, and other gender categories. It's about how society perceives individuals, and how individuals perceive themselves. People may identify as male, female, both, neither, or may have a gender that varies over time. Use and understanding of the term still vary widely among different cultures, societies, and individuals, and the historical development and acceptance of this term and concept are ongoing and difficult to predict at this time.
Unfortunately, this understanding of sex and gender as related but, nonetheless, distinct concepts is often forgotten or neglected in everyday use, leading to some of the fierce arguments and battles that surround the topic currently. To make things even more complicated, most people also use ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ interchangeably, even though gender identity refers to one's internal, deeply held sense of one's gender. It's how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. This can be the same as or different from the sex assigned at birth. An individual's gender identity can be male, female, a blend of both, neither, or something different. For example, someone may be biologically male (sex), expected to behave in ways society often associates with men (gender), but internally feel a deep sense of being female (gender identity).
One can sum up the whole situation in one short assessment – it’s a mess and there are no easy solutions. We can’t continue having two sexes, male and female, only. Putting people into either/or categories makes life easy, but it always excludes people who are neither. Just adding a third, undefined option doesn’t work either, because not everyone with a disorder of sexual development has atypical genitalia or is intersex. Replacing ‘sex’ with ‘gender’, which is done more and more in publications and online, creates its own problems. However, it may be the only working solution going forward, even though it makes many people uncomfortable giving up the black or white, right or wrong of the binary system. Biological or genetic sex will not disappear, of course. It has value in healthcare (some cancers affect men more than women and vice versa) and many other areas. However, its time as maybe the most important identifier in people’s lives could be coming to an end soon.
