People often get confused about the difference between sex and gender— especially because the two terms are often used interchangeably! Maybe you’ve never thought about what these terms mean before or perhaps you’ve heard many conflicting explanations. Part of the reason why talking about these concepts is confusing is because our everyday experiences are largely structured according to what is called the “gender binary.” Think about the last time you purchased clothes, whether in person or online. The store or website where you browsed was likely divided into at least two sections— one side for men and boys and the other side for women and girls. This idea that there are only two genders— male and female—is so woven into our daily life that many people often take this idea for granted. But human beings are complicated! Limiting the human experience to only two different options not only fails to account for the diversity of the human experience but is linked to widespread oppression and violence against people for whom the gender binary fails to capture their lived experience.
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“Gender is what’s between your ears; sex is what’s between your legs.”--- Uhhhh… Not Really
You might have heard this catchy explanation differentiating between gender and sex as concepts. The idea behind this statement is that gender is something that is socially constructed, whereas sex is connected to a person’s biology. When we say gender is socially constructed we mean that people create or “construct” gender as an idea. This doesn’t mean that people simply wake up and choose what their gender is like they might pick out their favorite accessory for the day. Rather, when we talk about something being “socially (or culturally) constructed,” we’re thinking about the way that different groups of people, different periods of time, and different societies shape the way that a concept is understood. A question you can ask yourself to think about whether something is socially constructed is, “has the meaning of this concept or idea changed over time and across different cultures?”
Let’s clarify with an example. When you think about what color is associated with femininity or girls, what is the first color that comes to your mind? You probably immediately thought of the color “pink.” That’s because the society we are living in today has constructed the association between the color pink and femininity. But this association between pink and femininity is actually pretty new when we look at it historically. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that we begin to see ideas about colors being appropriate for one gender or the other start to emerge, and initially, pink, “a more decided and stronger color,” was designated as a color for boys, whereas blue, as “more delicate and dainty color,” was deemed more appropriate for girls.
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“Okay, so gender is connected to and shaped by the ideas that different cultures have about what it means to belong to a particular gender, but sex is connected to your biology. That must mean that there’s a clear, scientific way of telling one person’s sex from the other, right?” Again, not really…
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You might think that while gender is complicated, someone’s sex should be easy to determine based on whether a person has a penis or a vagina. While it’s true that medical professionals often assign a person’s sex at birth based on what type of genitals that person has, human biology contains far too many variations to easily fit into two different groups. Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University Professor Emerita and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has spent her career researching the biology of gender. She summarizes her vast body of work in the following way:
In my work, I argue that the two-sex system embedded in our society is not adequate to encompass the full spectrum of human sexuality. Discrete buckets – like “nature” or “nurture”, “boy” or “girl” – are too simplistic for the inherent messiness found in nature. As I have argued in The Five Sexes and The Five Sexes Revisited, the boundaries separating masculine and feminine seem harder than ever to define. Some find the changes under way deeply disturbing. Others find them liberating. While the legal system may have an interest in maintaining only two sexes, our collective biologies do not.
Looking at the history of gender and sex testing in the Olympics helps to emphasize how human biological diversity refuses to be constrained to the categories we create for it. Lindsay Parks Pieper’s Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports traces the history of sex and gender testing at the most elite levels of sport— the Olympics— from 1930 to the early 2000s. Repeatedly, Pieper’s text charts how the tests that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) developed to definitely prove whether or not a particular athlete was a woman (justifying such testing by linking it to the idea of “fair play”) failed. No matter what aspect of biology they looked at for the test, the IOC was not able to draw a clear line between male and female athletes. This resulted in the IOC adopting arbitrary guidelines to distinguish between the sexes, which according to Pieper, “Rather than bolster fairness, drawing an arbitrary line between men and women actually promoted discrimination. For over half a century, female athletes deemed medically different by sport organizations faced unjust exclusion.”
Although the IOC officially stopped gender verification of athletes in 1998, we’ve recently seen an expansion in calls for sex testing in sport as a way to oppress transgender athletes at the secondary and collegiate levels. As of June 1, 2021, Florida became the 8th state to sign legislation banning transgender women and girls from competing on school-affiliated teams.
A Way of Visualizing Human Complexity: The Sex Spectrum
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Scientific research repeatedly shows that humanity’s gender and sex expression is far more complex than the idea of the gender binary can ever adequately capture. This infographic created by Scientific American provides one illustration of the incredible diversity of human sex diversity. Thinking about gender and sex variation in terms of a spectrum has been a popular way of thinking about gender and sex identity beyond the gender binary.
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