Q&A published on the definition of sex and gender

I remember their really badly-designed survey.

Gender was also a more hopeful term since, as a social process, it suggested that gender could be abolished or radically changed (in ways that sex could not be).

Other activists and policy-makers focus on gender, arguing that it is one’s lived gender status (or identity) which should prevail as a legal category, and that sex has become redundant or misleading in this context.

The feminist hope of abolishing sex role stereotypes has been replaced with the reification of them. It's really depressing.

Others may identify as female or male but do so far more ambivalently, recognising their gender as an externally imposed category towards which they have minimal or no positive attachment.

Case in point. Female and male are not genders. I do not identify as female, ambivalently or otherwise. I just am female. My degree of femininity or masculinity has got nothing to do with it.

Sorry not v. exciting. It's only the demographics of the respondents.

Oooh, survey findings: futureoflegalgender.kcl.ac.uk/findings/

it all comes down to the practical consequences

^^This. Much of the time sex does not matter and nor should it but there are circumstances where the differences in male and female bodies really, really does matter (whether you call the differences 'sex' or something else).

I'm struggling to think if there is a more unnecessary word in the English language than gender.

"One controversy raised by this question is whether a pre-existing sex is merely recorded, or whether sex is assigned, or something in between. This project explores the different ways people understand these issues. For some, sex is a scientific fact of bodily difference on which gender is imposed. For others, gender provides the framework within which bodies are given meaning as being either one sex or another, and sometimes not comfortably either."

In the context of a "three-year critical law reform project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council", I would expect the questions to be based on facts, not individuals' perceptions.
I remember the survey now, it was incredibly badly designed.

"We should start by emphasising that FLaG is not an advocacy project. Its aim is to explore the complex issues surrounding how legal personhood is gendered, including through the terms of sex."

What benefits are there to gendering legal personhood in any other way than sex? If you don't 'gender' by sex then why bother at all?

"Views differ on the meaning of sex...."

Views differ on the creation of the universe, but the fact is it happened around 13.8 billion years ago, and not on 22 October 4004 BC at six in the evening.

Spot on, Millytant. And it doesn't really matter most of the time what people believe "on their own time" - if your conceptual framework helps you to make sense of a chaotic universe and live your day-to-day life, crack on. I may not share it, but I respect your right to hold to it.

Where it does matter is if the rest of us are coerced into it or somehow forced to abide by its implications - for instance by having creationism taught to our children in school, or when a company in the US makes use of its (Gorsutch-sanctioned) right to refuse to provide its employees with birth control on the company healthcare scheme because the CE is Catholic.

And that ultimately is the problem with transgenderism - it all comes down to the practical consequences. Do we force women to share prisons with male-bodied sex offenders? Do we remove women's rights to ask for a female HCP, or get changed in open plan changing rooms that are free of penises? Or compete in sports with other female athletes rather than being placed at a massive systematic disadvantage?

"For some, sex is a scientific fact of bodily difference on which gender is imposed. For others, gender provides the framework within which bodies are given meaning as being either one sex or another, and sometimes not comfortably either."

Can anyone explain the second sentence to me please?

And we want to avoid reducing the terms of sex or gender to a single understanding

Erm...why would that be then?

Well the beginning is waffly but it actually does lay out: we have two general groups here. One sees sex as a fixed, unchanging biological fact, and gender as sex stereotypes which are problematic for women, and the other group (insert ideology here).

It is acknowledging: group one are not going to be convinced, or go away, or shut up, they have valid reasons for those views, and these are two incompatible sets of beliefs. That to me is a step in the right direction.

Is this the bunch of people who produced that ridiculous consultation a few months back?

"Views differ on the meaning of sex...."

Views differ on the creation of the universe, but the fact is it happened around 13.8 billion years ago, and not on 22 October 4004 BC at six in the evening.