AIBU to think sex and gender need different terms if distinct?

While this would be ideal, you must live in a different society to me, where I have been told I have to wear makeup up at work because I'm a woman, where I had to wear a skirt to school and was made fun of as a teen for having 'boy' hair.

@JSMill They are simply reproducing the societal norm of a woman in Western society in the 21st century. Yet again, gender is a social construct and sex is biology. If you don’t get that, that reflects on your intelligence and education. I honestly don’t give a fuck about the people who disagree with me on this.

Transgender people are mostly focused on replicating secondary sexual characteristics.

Transgender women may remove hair from their body and use hormones to grow breasts. Transgender men try to build muscle and use hormones to grow body hair.

Transgender people may also opt for surgery to modify their faces, again replicating secondary sexual characteristics.

Sorry to break the news to you, but body hair, breasts, shoulder size, jawline, facial hair, waist-to-hip ratio, and brow bone size are not a "social construct." They are biologically-determined characteristics.

When transgender people try to modify these parts of their body, they're not adopting a "social construct." They are masking biology.

Ok. I had planned to ignore this thread as it is clearly full of thick people but a lot of men are trying to pretend they are women on the basis of the fact they have long hair, wear lipstick etc. This does not make them biologically women. They are simply reproducing the societal norm of a woman in Western society in the 21st century. Yet again, gender is a social construct and sex is biology. If you don’t get that, that reflects on your intelligence and education. I honestly don’t give a fuck about the people who disagree with me on this.

I imagine most women do understand gender as a social construct. It's all the expectations like women should look after children, men should go to work. Women should have long hair on their heads, but no hair anywhere else. Men should have short hair all over. Women should wear makeup and men should not.

According to sex - women have vaginas and men have penises. All of the extra things are "gender norms".

What confuses me, is that there is a narrative that transgender people are not re-enforcing these arbitrary gender norms that feminists have been fighting against.

@WallaceinAnderland if there isn't any consciously expressed display of stereotypically gendered clothing or attitude in public or private then it could be said that that individual is opting out of doing so, and i believe there's already a word for that: agender.

As for 'They don't have to mimic being female in order to be considered transwomen. And the same goes the other way' - maybe they do but you just don't see it if you're a colleague rather than a lover.

That's quite long for a dictionary definition.

But also it's problematic simply because men don't have to have fake breasts or implants, or long hair, or wear makeup, or wear dresses, etc. They don't have to mimic being female in order to be considered transwomen.

And the same goes the other way. Women do not have to grow beards, flatten their breasts, cut their hair short or wear shirts and trousers to be considered transmen.

Expecting any of that is transphobic so it can't possibly be a definition of gender.

I'll give it a crack - to me it means a public 'display' of one's sex in line with the cultural trends of the time and place, for procreation purposes.
That and displaying characteristics which would make a potential mate want to breed with you to give the best odds on the child surviving childhood, such as protectiveness and caring qualities.

From there we get women actually looking after children because breastfeeding, so, the caring stereotype, while the dads are more physically and consistently able to take on the harder labour ('men should be strong'). Obviously not everyone wants to take part in the breeding nowadays and that's fair enough, the planet is pretty full, plus times have changed so there's less need to display adherence to these survival based roles and people are in the UK at least, free to opt out of taking part.

Gendered clothing I imagine comes from biological functions such as periods (try stuffing a load of rags in your pants then wearing trousers and not being completely self conscious about what you're displaying to everyone, never mind the implications of alerting men as to whether you are able to potentially breed or not in certain times/societies), and it's more economical and practical to wear a dress/skirt to accommodate hormonal fluctuations in eg belly size rather than getting trousers in different sizes (in the days before lycra!). However, it's worth trying to differentiate between the practical and the unequal eg using make up to conceal one's suboptimal health in order to still attract a mate, which only women tend to do (cos, patriarchy?).

It looks like many miss the biological and historical connections. They see 'gender' as a thing all by itself that you can opt into or out of (or even as something that can determine your sex it seems!), which is only a problem practically if it's conflated with sex, which should be the most important thing seeing as sex is what our species relies on.

Fwiw op I completely agree that there should be new words for sex imitators (which I see as a completely natural phenomenon by the way, even if it can be offensive). Mimics? Sims? You wouldn't even have to specify which sex they were imitating. There would just need to be a culture of general acceptance that this is what/who they are, alongside zero requirement for any public delusion about them being the opposite sex.

I don't know what gender means either OP. No one has been able to explain it I don't think.

@JSMill However, for example, the idea that being feminine is having long hair, wearing makeup and high heels is a societal expectation and can change over time.

There is literally no one who expects you to wear long hair, makeup, or high heels.

There is nothing that is inherently female about long hair, makeup, and high heels. A woman can decide not to have long hair, not to wear makeup, and not to wear high heels. If a man has long hair, makeup, and high heels, he is still unquestionably a man.

If you have long hair, makeup, and high heels, that's solely because of a personal choice you made. It has absolutely nothing to do with "society."

Superb post, I totally agree

This.

Biological sex is real and it never changes.

Gender can be any of over 150 different genders and is a belief system, can change, change again, is in the head.

You (editorial you) are quite thick if you don't understand the difference between sex and gender. They are two different words, with two different meanings. How is this difficult?

Until we’re at a point in civilisation where boys/girls men/women are treated completely equally then there will be gender, there maybe a biological reason when this will never happen.

I completely agree. It should be sex = man/woman male/female, this can't be changed. Lesbians used butch or femme to describe a lesbian woman's presentation. People who think their gender identity is important can invent a word for it and give a definition of that. The thing they shouldn't do is pretend the word woman means women and men who like to pretend to be women.

All the posters saying female/male is sex and women/man is gender, what sex based word do use to describe an adult human female?

Google, or watch the documentary on her. The Rachel Divide.

Tell that to Rachel Dolezal!

It's a very regressive movement OP, relying heavily on stereotypes which are harmful to both sexes but particularly to women.

It's hugely related to that which we are not allowed to talk about on mn at the moment.