Conflating sex and gender

[NameChangeAgainandOncemore]

I have known for as long as I can remember that sex and gender are different, and I have been guilty of going around thinking that most people know that, but they simply think that one must be kind to those who feel they were born in the wrong body.

Turns out they do not. A lot of people think sex and gender are the same, and that you can change sex if you try hard enough.

This came up because I was trying to find out if you can determine sex from blood, and looking at academic articles, many of which use the terms sex and gender interchangeably (declaring that you can determine a baby's gender from maternal blood, etc). Then I was talking to someone who hadn't really thought about it and explained to her the basics of why the terms are different. She was visibly shocked to discover that 'even if you take hormones???' you don't change your biological sex.

There's a huge mountain to climb still isn't there?

I am not well read but that is quite beautiful.

The word “sex” is used by Austen commonly as a descriptor of biological sex in relation to society, so yes, there was definitely a period in history where it was used like that.

I don’t think you really can change your gender, your gender and the stereotypes associated with it exist because of your sex. Society is not going to suddenly expect a man to start cleaning and take on the role of main carer for elderly parents because he’s changed some aspects of his superficial appearance to those more commonly associated with women, we still know he’s a man and these men still benefit for everyone knowing that and treating them accordingly, no matter how dangly their earrings.

, your gender and the stereotypes associated with it exist because of your sex.
True, but gender stereotypes are only associated with your biological sex by society. They aren't innate.
Lots of people, like me, never accepted gender stereotypes, and never conformed to them, and grew up gender non-conforming, but still identifying fully with our biological sex.
I've also known women who started out stereotypically 'feminine', but later rejected gender stereotypes in dress, behaviour, employment, sexual orientation, etc. - but not their femaleness.

Is that 'changing gender'?

Back in the 90s I was aware of Gender as a term for the constructed beliefs and expectations laid by culture on top of sex. So absolutely the terms had distinct and different meanings in academia by then, but the idea of gender as an innate or superior identity wasn't part of it, gender was understood as something repressive, a sexist and artificial construct that limited women (and indeed men)'s innate potential.

I would argue that they were interchangeable from about the 70s or 80s up into the 2000s. The exception would be certain academic uses but that's not the general public or even the law.

And it's still very much that way in North America, so conversations can be even more confusing.

I agree with the PP who said that many people really have, not a language issue, but a science issue. They think that "being trans" is a kind of biological state, a kind of intersex (as they think of it) condition.

It's easy to make fun of people about this, but it's important to remember that most of us are being told all kinds of new and surprising science things all the time. Many seem counterintuitive, we can't "see" them, we just need to accept what we are told by scientists, doctors, and various bodies. And lots of medical bodies and doctors and public scientists seemed to be on board with this.

Maybe, although tbh I think this is often exaggerated and also "gender" is not always the most useful way to formulate this idea.

For one thing, I would really question the boundaries around many supposedly imposed sex stereotypes. On the one hand, because we know that actually a lot of stereotypes are, at a population level, fairly accurate. Women tend to be less aggressive than men, for example. The error is statistical - assuming individuals will follow the stereotype. But on the other hand, to what degree have we ever really insisted that women should follow such stereotypes? Look at Jane Austen, writing at a time where ideas about women were more enforced than today - she has many women characters with very strong personalities, in some cases domineering, powerful women within the sphere that was available, educated women, women who accomplished a lot, intrepid women. These characteristics weren't seen as bad other than when they were in some way anti-social.

With many of these things we really have no idea to what degree they are socially created tendencies or based in some way in our biological make-up. If they are socially created it is worth asking how and why that occured.

Then there are things like clothing styles and such. Some of these have a real arbitrary quality, on the other hand, there is usually a historical reason or set of circumstances that they have come to be associated in a particular culture with male or female dress. In some cases it is practical reasons related to body differences. Ultimately, they usually reflect the fact that men and women consider their sex, and the sex of other people, to be significant and interesting. They are a reflection in our material culture of the fact that we are a sexually dimorphic species.

And actually, in our culture there is a pretty wide variety of expression there too. Vogue models may need to do a lot of feminizing to get a certain look, but the vast majority of women don't do all that stuff.

@IwantToRetire "ie sex is a biological reality, gender is a social construct"
The first time I came across this idea laid out succinctly like this would have been in the third or fourth year of my English degree, when I was introduced to reading theory (aka pomo wank but I did enjoy some of the rabbit holes).
This idea, of sex=real gender=cultural construct, was presented as the (humanities) academic consensus up until the great Judith Butler performed her amazing circus trick of deconstructing sex!!! Thus proving that both our gender categories (masculine, feminine) and our sex categories (male, female) are socially constructed.
Apart from the unscientific (or possibly anti-realist) suggestion that there's no real thing called sex, I think the cute sex=biology gender=culture dichotomy actually misrepresents what second wave feminists were arguing. And reduces all their different ideas to a consensus, which is absurd, there are so many strands of feminist thougth, much patient working through of uncertanties. All thrown out the with the bathwater and this "sex is socially constructed" embraced as 21st century dogma.

This is all so interesting, and I swing wildly one way then the other on this.
I used to feel convinced that sex stereotypes are all arbitrary signifiers and playing with gender will set us all free.
I travelled to Fiji for the first time about a decade ago now. One gender norm Melanesian Fijians have that is directly opposite to western norms is that men hang little crocheted purses around their necks. Bright pinks and greens and blues, lovely items but when I first saw them it looked hilarious to see something so girly being worn by such manly men.

Then, after I'd been there about a fortnight, I had a strange experience watching a particularly handsome man walk up the stairs onto the bus. The purse was tapping against his chest as he walked and it looked hot. I realise I'm objectifying him here and I'm wary because of the way hypersexualisation and racialisation are linked, but I want to communicate that I was responding to his maleness as a straight woman, and the gender signifier was emphasising his maleness to me. After only two weeks - something that I had all my life associated with little girls now meant man.

I don't actually know what the moral of that story is. I guess that maybe sex is just so important to us humans that, while it doesn't matter what our gender signifiers are, they're always going to be there.

I trained as a nurse in the 90s and definitely remember mentioning 'sex change surgery' and being corrected to 'gender reassignment surgery' and being told that was the correct term because you can't change sex.

I worked as Burials Clerk at our local cemetery until 2013 and transferred all the records onto a computer database. I've just checked and in 1962 "Sex" was used as a heading in the Burials Register. I'm ashamed to say that my database used "Gender" as I think it was perceived that "Sex" was a bit rude then. In the really old Register book dating from the 1890s no heading at all was deemed necessary - presumably the person's name alone was considered enough.

Gender meaning social stereotypes associated with your sex has been a widely understood use of the word since at least the eighties, in addition to the use as a synonym for sex. Of the top of my head, there’s the contemporary description of Boy George as “gender bending” and the lyrics to James song “Laid” including “dress me up in women’s clothes, mess around with gender roles, line my eyes and call me pretty” (sorry for any ear worms).

I also posted a direct quote from Hansard of an MP during the debate on the Sex Discrimination Act using gender in place of sex