Sex versus Gender

Oftentimes, people who are transphobic resort to one of two arguments: “There are only two genders” or “you can’t be this if your genitals are that.” At the base of every argument is you should act, dress, and identify based off of your genitalia. 

However, such positions are not based in truth. Most people tend to confuse sex with gender, which makes sense. There are very few resources for people to learn what the difference is, especially when this kind of education is lacking in the formative years– when we are able to grasp the concept of different biologies. 

Sex

The most common notion thrown around gender conversations is that there are only two genders. Male and female, boy and girl, penis and vagina. The argument not only reduces a person’s biology and sex to their genitalia, but it’s technically not right either.   There actually are more than two sexes. 

Sex references a person’s biology, typically associated with the male/female binary, characterized by sex chromosomes, typically XX and XY.

One of the key arguments against gender is that one’s gender is based on primary and secondary sex characteristics, and that these only consist of the aforementioned XX and XY variations. However, not only are there people who are born intersex— a fascinating topic, far too intricate for me to do justice to in the space of one article — but there are also people who are biologically male, but born with XX chromosomes, and born biologically born female, but with XY chromosomes.

There are a lot of different variations of sex chromosomes beyond XX and XY. There are trisomy disorders, in which a person is born with an additional X or Y chromosome (XXX, XXY, XYY), and even more rarely, tetrasomies, which adds an additional X or Y chromosome to a trisomy.

These are complicated and difficult topics to understand, but as long as we understand that the sex binary isn’t entirely accurate, we’re on the right track. 

Gender

Gender, on the other hand, can be a lot more difficult to make sense of, for a lot of different reasons. 

Gender refers to the socially constructed roles of each sex in society. If you’ve ever heard the saying “gender is a social construct,” well, it’s right there in the definition. 

Gender roles vary in rigidity based on the culture, and there’s a vast and interesting history of gender roles in different cultures, which I’ll attempt to discuss later. But right now, let’s talk about the gender binary.

Not to be confused with the sex binary, which we’ve already debunked, the gender binary doesn’t really exist either. You’ve heard “gender is a social construct,” but try this one: “gender is a spectrum.” 

A lot of the time, sex and gender tend to align — no cause for concern, no harm done. But as society is progressing past the need for gender roles and into acceptance, a lot of people have realized the terms male and female don’t really fit.

Gender identity is how someone feels in relation to the gender spectrum, and it varies from male to female to somewhere in the middle, or a combination of the two, or neither. 

Why someone identifies a certain way is frankly no one else’s business, but it is important to respect how a person identifies — it’s something that only they are able to decide for themselves. It’s therefore hurtful and immoral to tell them that they’re wrong about who they are or to invalidate their identity— even if we don’t understand it. 

There are a lot of different gender expressions and a lot of different labels to go with them. Before I dive into the main categories of what they are, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who say they don’t understand labels, and that’s okay, as long as we can understand that those labels are important to some people and can provide a sense of community for them. 

The truth is, we don’t have to understand a person’s identity for it to be valid. Whether our lack of understanding comes from ignorance or the inability to grasp the concept, all that essentially matters is respect.