Getting Clear about the Difference between Sex and Gender

Much of current debate about sex and gender is utterly confused, and the confusion comes from not recognizing the crucial distinction between sex and gender. A lot of unnecessary problems could be avoided by keeping this straight.

–from the article

The brilliant French novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir gave Jean-Paul Sartre, her long-term lover, most of his best ideas, the ones that became the philosophical system known as Existentialism. However, this isn’t her only claim to fame. She also, in her seminal 1949 work Le Deuxième Sex (The Second Sex) introduced into general circulation the crucial distinction between sex and gender. It’s astonishing how many people, 75 years later, still don’t understand this distinction, so let me try to clarify it. First, what Beauvoir wrote:

On ne naît pas femme, on le deviant [One is not born a woman; one becomes one].

She was not, of course, saying that one isn’t (typically) born with either male or female genitals. This is true for all but a small percentage of kids (About 1.7 percent of kids are born intersex–with partially male and partially female sexual organs). What Beauvoir meant was that the characteristics associated with womanhood—what roles one plays, how one dresses, what accessories one wears, who one’s friends are, how one sits and walks, and so on—are culturally, not biologically, occasioned and acquired. They are a matter of gender.

In English, we are fortunate enough to have two distinct words that can be appropriated for the following distinct purposes:

We can (and should) use female and male to refer to the biological inheritance—to the biological sexual characteristics that we are born with and that we develop over time based on our genetic programming. These characteristics comprise our sex.

We can (and should) use woman and man to refer to the acquired, acculturated characteristics traditionally ascribed to and associated with particular sexes (to ones taught us by our culture)—to matters like roles, dress, and learned sex-specific behaviors. These characteristics comprise our gender.

So, to update Beauvoir, one is born female or male (i.e., someone with a particular sex) and becomes a woman or a man or some combination thereof (i.e., someone with certain non-necessary, acquired gender characteristics).

Sex is given (in most cases). Gender is not. The genders that people typically acquire vary depending on time and place. Among the Masai, for example, MEN wear elaborate jewelry and brightly colored clothing; engage in small handicrafts; and spend a lot of time in groups, gossiping—precisely the characteristics widely considered in the 1950s appropriate to American WOMEN. No one teaches a person to have a penis or a clitoris, a scrotum or labia majora. These are simply givens (in most cases). Of course, no one typically sits American boys down and tells them not to wear dresses, either. This behavioral propensity is acquired rather than learned based on behavioral models in the ambient environment. Gender is acquired. Sex is not.

By default, gender comes about by what the French Marxist critic Louis Althusser called “interpellation”–unconscious acquisition of cultural norms. But this is not necessarily so. Because it is acquired, gender is open to being modified with some ease. I used to teach the kids in my acting classes how to walk and sit like people of the opposite gender. This was eye-opening for them. In today’s repressive era of the Moms for the Liberty to Constrain Your Liberty, aka the Minivan Taliban and the Ku Klux Karens, I would probably be fired for these exercises, which my students found fascinating and illuminating.

Much of current debate about sex and gender is utterly confused, and the confusion comes from not recognizing the crucial distinction between sex and gender. A lot of problems could easily be avoided by keeping this straight.

For example, it’s important for young people to recognize that they can experiment with gender change or (even better, to my mind) fluidity WITHOUT THIS HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH THEIR BIOLGOICAL SEX. Consider, for example, this fact: Studies have shown that people speak much more nicely to female clerks than to male ones. They use slower and sweeter voices. Well, wouldn’t it be a good idea to speak nicely to male clerks, too? And if boys want to wear makeup, why the hell not? Why is this exclusively for girls? Certainly, male movie stars and politicians do so all the time. My mother took a lot of grief back in the 1960s for wearing pants. Why should young men take grief for wearing skirts or dresses? See, for example, the Islamic thobe, the African dashiki suit, the Sumerian kaunake, the ancient Greek chiton, the Christian priestly cassock or soutane, the Greek funstanella, the ancient Roman and Medieval European tunic, the Sikh baana or chola, the Samoan lavalava, the Japanese hakama, the Palestinian qumbaz, the Southeast Asian sarong, the Indian dhoti or veshti or lungi, the Scottish kilt, and many others.

Recognizing the distinction between sex and gender can lead to a NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM—to people being able to explore freely gender-related options formerly closed to them—roles, ways of acting and speaking, choice of adornments and activities and partners and friends, and so on. And recognizing that gender and sex ARE DIFFERENT THINGS can lead people not to make decisions about medical treatments and changes to their bodies that they might later regret. People can have the freedom to explore alternate gender expressions without going to such extremes until they are old enough and certain enough to do so. They can also explore various sexual orientations without regard to sex OR gender, of course, and have a right to do so.