Gender Isn't The Same Thing as Sex (Except To the Extent That It Sort of Is...)
We like simplifications when we find ourselves wanting to explain complex things to people who have less need to understand them that we have need for them to have that understanding. Especially if they aren't in our social sciences class and don't need a good grade from us at the end of the semester!
So it's not unsurprising that in explaining gender issues and gender politics and gender identity and whatnot, we've often tended to present it something like this: GENDER ISN'T THE SAME THING AS SEX. SEX IS BIOLOGY. SEX IS THE BODY. GENDER IS SOCIAL AND MENTAL, IT'S IN YOUR HEAD, IT'S ABOUT BEHAVIOR AND IDENTITY, AND IT ISN'T THE SAME THING AS SEX.
That enables us to explain why a person who has, for instance, Xy chromosomes, and the body parts that are conventionally described as penis and testicles, or which would be identified as such by the overwhelming majority of disinterested average people asked to identity them, at any rate, isn't necessarily "a man". Why some of us consider ourselves to be "women" instead. Or genderfluid (perhaps sometimes men, sometimes women, depending on how we feel). Or nonbinary (perhaps not relating to that whole "are you a man or a woman" thing at all). Or some other variation entirely. So we say to our audience of mainstreamish ordinary people, ACCEPT THIS. LET PEOPLE DEFINE THEMSELVES, GENDER-WISE, DON'T ASSIGN THEM BASED ON YOUR ASSESSMENT OF THEIR BODY BITS. BECAUSE GENDER ISN'T THE SAME THING AS SEX. And those of them who are tolerant of diversities and respectful of other folks' experiences often nod and add this to their list of socially appropriate attitudes and, at least in socially liberal diversity-tolerant circles, that becomes The Truth and they themselves begin to correct other folks who conflate sex with gender.
Except, well, it IS a simplification and like all simplifications it is on some occasions an OVERsimplification, one that can make some explanations and elaborations even more complicated. Like when someone asks why, if gender isn't sex, someone with a male body who identifies as a woman wants sex reassignment surgery: isn't that the body? Or when you're trying to explain that yonder person, who identifies as a woman, considers herself to have a clitoris, considers her body to be a female body, even though she was assigned male at birth (AMAB for short) and has Xy chromosomes and body parts that would be identified by the overwhelming majority of other people (who had not been informed otherwise) as penis and testicles and whatnot. We begin retreating from our original distinction, saying things like "Well, actually SEX is also a matter of perception, the interpretation and categorization of the physical is a social process, maleness and femaleness are themselves social constructs". And the people who were on board with the notion that SEX IS BIOLOGY AND GENDER IS SOCIAL look back with glazed eyes and perhaps ask, "So sex and gender are sort of the same thing after all?" and perhaps add, unnecessarily, "... I'm confused!"
Well, what I'm about to do here is probably ALSO an oversimplification on some level, but I think it may be a useful second level that's worth a mental climb that I don't think will be too bad.
First off, yeah, GENDER is social and mental. But is isn't unaffiliated with SEX which is biological and of the body. Gender is basically a set of generalizations (a more loaded term is "stereotypes") based on observed sexual differences. Gender is also affected by other social stuff, factors that aren't strictly biological. For example, social systems tend to try to control individual people's reproductive behaviors, because either too much or too little reproduction can play havoc with resources, and for that matter so can too random versus more narrowly channelled into specific situations. The more that the social system is defensively poised on the edge of a threat to its survival, the more tight this control tends to be. Well, one form that this control takes is the promotion of ideas about what the sexes like and want and what their "nature" disposes them to do, whether in fact those ideas are close reflections of the real actual generalized behavior of those sexes or not. Sexual propaganda, you could call it. You can see how that makes gender MORE than just generalizations about SEX, yes? But for the rest of this discussion, that's just a side issue. For now let's just put an asterisk next to where I said GENDER is a generalization about SEX and the asterisk means there's some distortion involved for various social reasons and now let's go back to the simple bit about generalization.
Here's how generalization renders gender out of sex:
First, it's BINARY. Because in general there are two sexes and since we're generalizing we ignore the exceptions and we say we have MALE and we have FEMALE. Two dots.
Then we focus on differences. Men are "this way" and women are "that way". We compile a list of characteristics and separate them into male and female. Orange and green. Him over here and her over there. And because he's over here, from his perspective she is in THAT direction, whereas because she's over there, from her perspective he is in THIS direction, and thus the directions THEMSELVES, the over-there-ness versus the over-here-ness, that becomes gendered. In yon direction lies the female characteristics, the feminine stuff. Over thereabouts, that direction means masculine, the male characteristics.
Now let's toss up a less generalized diagram that reflects the same reality but doesn't oversimplify it as much:
Here we see two populations, the male population in one color and the female population in another, and we still see an overall tendency, a sense that in general the females are "more over this way" and the males are "more over that way", but we also see that there is overlap. And that makes immediate sense, we all know that some individual women are more this way than others and that any characteristic is manifested some of the time by all of either sex and quite often by some of either sex and so on.
Now comes the fun part. Let's zoom in:
This is a mostly-green region of the "population" diagram, zoomed in with an orange point circled to draw your attention to it. Let's drop our awareness into that location and look around us and make some generalizations FROM THIS PERSPECTIVE:
• Compared to the diagram as a whole, who "we" are is definitely quite strongly off in a "green direction". Most of the dots who are like us (i.e,. in our general location) are "green".
• Generalizations about "orange" individuals most often won't apply to us. Except for our "orangeness" itself, we don't have much in common with them. When the main body of orange points expresses itself in collective solidarity with the orange direction, we aren't going to feel very included. When the main body of green points does the equivalent, on the other hand, we're likely to say "me too". Except when the subject being discussed is about orangeness or greenness ITSELF, of course.
• In the binary graph, I spoke of a sense of "over-there-ness", a sense for the orange that their relationship to the green involves the green being "over there", in THAT direction. For our isolated orange point in this graph, the green isn't so much "over there" as "right here around me". The other orange points in general, however, THEY are "over there" in a contrasting direction.
• The "green" points will in general have the experience that the color opposite of them (i.e., orange) tends to be in an "over there" (generally leftward) direction. Our isolated orange point is positioned where the color opposite (i.e., green) can also be found to some degree in that same (leftward) direction even though that's mostly contrary to orange-dot experiences.
Now let's translate some of that into how it manifests in the world of gender and identity.
• Even if gender were a pretty accurate generalization about sexual difference (n other words we continue to ignore the "asterisk effects" or we dismiss them as anything more than minor background noise), the distribution model means that there are inevitably feminine malebodied people and masculine femalebodied people. It's not a "deviant behavior", or a "behavior" at all, per se, it's a direct result of distribution with overlap. If you've got distribution with overlap there will BY DEFINITION be such people.
• For masculine malebodied people and feminine femalebodied people, gendered experience tends to be unitary and nonambivalent, and (this is important) THEIR EXPERIENCES are broadcast as the experiences that are expected and anticipated, reinforcing for them the "identification" with other such folks. In other words, not merely "you, male, you're expected to be masculine" but also "you, male, you are expected to find female people to exhibit characteristics in a more feminine direction than your own characteristics" as well as "you, male, are expected to find other male people to exhibit characteristics that are NOT in any particular 'direction' but rather more or less surrounding your own traits". But in contrast...
• For feminine malebodied people and masculine femalebodied people, identity factors are much more convoluted just because of their location in the distribution. Let's consider the masculine femalebodied person. In body she is one of the femalebodied but in a multitude of other characteristics she has more in common with the other masculine people, so that's the first tier of non-unitary identity factors. Then there's the comparison of her experiences with the experiences broadcast as the expected and anticipated: the other femalebodied voices say that malebodied people are more masculine, but that's not generally true of her own experience, although some malebodied people may be more so. The other masculine voices say that the opposite sex (females for the males, males for the females) are more feminine, but for her the opposite sex will have characteristics more clustered around her own traits, although again there will be some for whom that is true.
• It would be an oversimplification (yet again) to say that people in that kind of situation EITHER identify with those of the same biological SEX or ELSE identify with those who have the same constellation of characteristics. Both of those are possibilities, definitely, but the identification experiences are in conflict and hence non-unitary, and that opens up many other possibilities. Continuing with our masculine femalebodied person, she may react to the discrepancy by feeling neither more akin to other femalebodied people nor to other masculine people but instead identifying in a more finely granular way with other masculine femalebodied people. Or she may reject the binary either/or propositions inherent in the identity question and identify mostly with people of any sex and any personality characteristic set who also feel alienated by the whole sex-and-gender thing. If she identifies with the other masculine folk, the fact that she is femalebodied and is perceived as such may be experienced as an obstacle to that identity; it may have more to do with other folks' perceptions (the expectations that are part of the backdrop of broadcasted gendered experiences), or it may mostly focus on her own desire to resemble the people she has identified with and to feel validated in that identity, but either way her SEX as perceived by her becomes intertwined with the process of identification and come to be regarded as wrong and in need of alteration. That alteration in turn may involve modifications at the level of behavioral presentation or may involve body modifications at the physical level. If her reaction to the overall situation takes the form of rejecting the binary categorization, she may similarly seek to modify either presentation or body, but seeking an indeterminable or neutral representation of SEX rather than male or female.
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So it's not unsurprising that in explaining gender issues and gender politics and gender identity and whatnot, we've often tended to present it something like this: GENDER ISN'T THE SAME THING AS SEX. SEX IS BIOLOGY. SEX IS THE BODY. GENDER IS SOCIAL AND MENTAL, IT'S IN YOUR HEAD, IT'S ABOUT BEHAVIOR AND IDENTITY, AND IT ISN'T THE SAME THING AS SEX.
That enables us to explain why a person who has, for instance, Xy chromosomes, and the body parts that are conventionally described as penis and testicles, or which would be identified as such by the overwhelming majority of disinterested average people asked to identity them, at any rate, isn't necessarily "a man". Why some of us consider ourselves to be "women" instead. Or genderfluid (perhaps sometimes men, sometimes women, depending on how we feel). Or nonbinary (perhaps not relating to that whole "are you a man or a woman" thing at all). Or some other variation entirely. So we say to our audience of mainstreamish ordinary people, ACCEPT THIS. LET PEOPLE DEFINE THEMSELVES, GENDER-WISE, DON'T ASSIGN THEM BASED ON YOUR ASSESSMENT OF THEIR BODY BITS. BECAUSE GENDER ISN'T THE SAME THING AS SEX. And those of them who are tolerant of diversities and respectful of other folks' experiences often nod and add this to their list of socially appropriate attitudes and, at least in socially liberal diversity-tolerant circles, that becomes The Truth and they themselves begin to correct other folks who conflate sex with gender.
Except, well, it IS a simplification and like all simplifications it is on some occasions an OVERsimplification, one that can make some explanations and elaborations even more complicated. Like when someone asks why, if gender isn't sex, someone with a male body who identifies as a woman wants sex reassignment surgery: isn't that the body? Or when you're trying to explain that yonder person, who identifies as a woman, considers herself to have a clitoris, considers her body to be a female body, even though she was assigned male at birth (AMAB for short) and has Xy chromosomes and body parts that would be identified by the overwhelming majority of other people (who had not been informed otherwise) as penis and testicles and whatnot. We begin retreating from our original distinction, saying things like "Well, actually SEX is also a matter of perception, the interpretation and categorization of the physical is a social process, maleness and femaleness are themselves social constructs". And the people who were on board with the notion that SEX IS BIOLOGY AND GENDER IS SOCIAL look back with glazed eyes and perhaps ask, "So sex and gender are sort of the same thing after all?" and perhaps add, unnecessarily, "... I'm confused!"
Well, what I'm about to do here is probably ALSO an oversimplification on some level, but I think it may be a useful second level that's worth a mental climb that I don't think will be too bad.
First off, yeah, GENDER is social and mental. But is isn't unaffiliated with SEX which is biological and of the body. Gender is basically a set of generalizations (a more loaded term is "stereotypes") based on observed sexual differences. Gender is also affected by other social stuff, factors that aren't strictly biological. For example, social systems tend to try to control individual people's reproductive behaviors, because either too much or too little reproduction can play havoc with resources, and for that matter so can too random versus more narrowly channelled into specific situations. The more that the social system is defensively poised on the edge of a threat to its survival, the more tight this control tends to be. Well, one form that this control takes is the promotion of ideas about what the sexes like and want and what their "nature" disposes them to do, whether in fact those ideas are close reflections of the real actual generalized behavior of those sexes or not. Sexual propaganda, you could call it. You can see how that makes gender MORE than just generalizations about SEX, yes? But for the rest of this discussion, that's just a side issue. For now let's just put an asterisk next to where I said GENDER is a generalization about SEX and the asterisk means there's some distortion involved for various social reasons and now let's go back to the simple bit about generalization.
Here's how generalization renders gender out of sex:
First, it's BINARY. Because in general there are two sexes and since we're generalizing we ignore the exceptions and we say we have MALE and we have FEMALE. Two dots.
Then we focus on differences. Men are "this way" and women are "that way". We compile a list of characteristics and separate them into male and female. Orange and green. Him over here and her over there. And because he's over here, from his perspective she is in THAT direction, whereas because she's over there, from her perspective he is in THIS direction, and thus the directions THEMSELVES, the over-there-ness versus the over-here-ness, that becomes gendered. In yon direction lies the female characteristics, the feminine stuff. Over thereabouts, that direction means masculine, the male characteristics.
Now let's toss up a less generalized diagram that reflects the same reality but doesn't oversimplify it as much:
Here we see two populations, the male population in one color and the female population in another, and we still see an overall tendency, a sense that in general the females are "more over this way" and the males are "more over that way", but we also see that there is overlap. And that makes immediate sense, we all know that some individual women are more this way than others and that any characteristic is manifested some of the time by all of either sex and quite often by some of either sex and so on.
Now comes the fun part. Let's zoom in:
This is a mostly-green region of the "population" diagram, zoomed in with an orange point circled to draw your attention to it. Let's drop our awareness into that location and look around us and make some generalizations FROM THIS PERSPECTIVE:
• Compared to the diagram as a whole, who "we" are is definitely quite strongly off in a "green direction". Most of the dots who are like us (i.e,. in our general location) are "green".
• Generalizations about "orange" individuals most often won't apply to us. Except for our "orangeness" itself, we don't have much in common with them. When the main body of orange points expresses itself in collective solidarity with the orange direction, we aren't going to feel very included. When the main body of green points does the equivalent, on the other hand, we're likely to say "me too". Except when the subject being discussed is about orangeness or greenness ITSELF, of course.
• In the binary graph, I spoke of a sense of "over-there-ness", a sense for the orange that their relationship to the green involves the green being "over there", in THAT direction. For our isolated orange point in this graph, the green isn't so much "over there" as "right here around me". The other orange points in general, however, THEY are "over there" in a contrasting direction.
• The "green" points will in general have the experience that the color opposite of them (i.e., orange) tends to be in an "over there" (generally leftward) direction. Our isolated orange point is positioned where the color opposite (i.e., green) can also be found to some degree in that same (leftward) direction even though that's mostly contrary to orange-dot experiences.
Now let's translate some of that into how it manifests in the world of gender and identity.
• Even if gender were a pretty accurate generalization about sexual difference (n other words we continue to ignore the "asterisk effects" or we dismiss them as anything more than minor background noise), the distribution model means that there are inevitably feminine malebodied people and masculine femalebodied people. It's not a "deviant behavior", or a "behavior" at all, per se, it's a direct result of distribution with overlap. If you've got distribution with overlap there will BY DEFINITION be such people.
• For masculine malebodied people and feminine femalebodied people, gendered experience tends to be unitary and nonambivalent, and (this is important) THEIR EXPERIENCES are broadcast as the experiences that are expected and anticipated, reinforcing for them the "identification" with other such folks. In other words, not merely "you, male, you're expected to be masculine" but also "you, male, you are expected to find female people to exhibit characteristics in a more feminine direction than your own characteristics" as well as "you, male, are expected to find other male people to exhibit characteristics that are NOT in any particular 'direction' but rather more or less surrounding your own traits". But in contrast...
• For feminine malebodied people and masculine femalebodied people, identity factors are much more convoluted just because of their location in the distribution. Let's consider the masculine femalebodied person. In body she is one of the femalebodied but in a multitude of other characteristics she has more in common with the other masculine people, so that's the first tier of non-unitary identity factors. Then there's the comparison of her experiences with the experiences broadcast as the expected and anticipated: the other femalebodied voices say that malebodied people are more masculine, but that's not generally true of her own experience, although some malebodied people may be more so. The other masculine voices say that the opposite sex (females for the males, males for the females) are more feminine, but for her the opposite sex will have characteristics more clustered around her own traits, although again there will be some for whom that is true.
• It would be an oversimplification (yet again) to say that people in that kind of situation EITHER identify with those of the same biological SEX or ELSE identify with those who have the same constellation of characteristics. Both of those are possibilities, definitely, but the identification experiences are in conflict and hence non-unitary, and that opens up many other possibilities. Continuing with our masculine femalebodied person, she may react to the discrepancy by feeling neither more akin to other femalebodied people nor to other masculine people but instead identifying in a more finely granular way with other masculine femalebodied people. Or she may reject the binary either/or propositions inherent in the identity question and identify mostly with people of any sex and any personality characteristic set who also feel alienated by the whole sex-and-gender thing. If she identifies with the other masculine folk, the fact that she is femalebodied and is perceived as such may be experienced as an obstacle to that identity; it may have more to do with other folks' perceptions (the expectations that are part of the backdrop of broadcasted gendered experiences), or it may mostly focus on her own desire to resemble the people she has identified with and to feel validated in that identity, but either way her SEX as perceived by her becomes intertwined with the process of identification and come to be regarded as wrong and in need of alteration. That alteration in turn may involve modifications at the level of behavioral presentation or may involve body modifications at the physical level. If her reaction to the overall situation takes the form of rejecting the binary categorization, she may similarly seek to modify either presentation or body, but seeking an indeterminable or neutral representation of SEX rather than male or female.
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