Are Sex and Gender the Same Thing?
🚁 Gender, gender, gender… “50 genders”, “Shock! People have lost their minds — some random person on Twitter identifies as a BEAVER 🦫!” We keep seeing this online and in the media. But what is gender? Gender identity? Can you really “feel” like a man, a woman or a non-binary person?
Let’s talk about gender, gender identity and trans experience in this context. Read on for the details, as always.
🤓☝🏻 This post continues our earlier educational posts. To be continued!
Contents
Gender
Whenever long conversations about sex, society and biology unfold, it appears… Gender. The right and the church fight it; conservative MPs and even entire states hate it.
Yet most discussions of the nature of gender, sex and gender, gender inequality and so on offer a limited definition:
Gender consists of socially established roles, behaviours, activities and characteristics that a particular society considers appropriate for people on the basis of their sex.
Accordingly:
Gender identity is a person’s inner sense of belonging to a particular gender.
This is exactly where the biggest problems with these definitions begin:
- Are sex and gender the same thing?
- Isn’t this just about stereotypes?
- Can you really… “feel” gender?
- Fine, keep your gender, but leave sex to us!
- And I identify as an attack helicop…
Shall we talk about philosophy’s fundamental question?
Which comes first: mind or matter?
The answer points to one of two approaches to understanding “gender” and “gender identity”.
Mind comes first: idealism
Idealism treats spirit, feelings, consciousness, reason and so on as primary.
Plato, for example, believed in an abstract “ideal world” containing the prototypes of all the things and concepts in the physical world. The physical world, in turn, is secondary: it merely reflects the world of ideas.
In idealist philosophy, these ideas — whether existing in their own right or coming from people or gods — form the basis of the world.
Matter comes first: materialism
Unlike sex characteristics, gender cannot be touched, seen or measured. Organs, hormones and even the structure of the brain are material, while phenomena such as gender and human identity exist in the sphere of relationships between people.
Materialism treats matter, substance and so on as primary.
Democritus, for example, believed that an idea is a consequence, a product of the mind, while the world consists of atoms and empty space.
How does this change our understanding of gender?
Depending on whether we consider matter — substance — or ideas — spirit — to be primary, our approaches to understanding gender and gender identity will differ.
The idealist approach: gender and gender identity are a deep truth that exists independently of the body or actions and cannot be explained scientifically. Someone is a woman, a man or non-binary because that is what they feel, because it has been determined by “higher powers”.
The materialist approach: gender and gender identity reflect sex and/or sex characteristics. They arise from experience, comfort or discomfort, and can take very different forms — including attempts to reduce discomfort and adapt.
Why do familiar definitions cause problems?
The problem with many definitions of gender and gender identity is precisely their proximity to idealism: gender is presented as an abstract idea, and identity as an experience that cannot be explained rationally.
This often produces misunderstanding and interpretations of trans experience such as:
Well, [name] is of course a WOMAN in terms of GENDER, but their SEX is still MA…
Or, conversely, outright denial:
Gender doesn’t exist! It’s all STEREOTYPES and NEO-PATRIARCHY! And trans people are…
And similar remar… remarks.
This approach also leads to the appropriation of some groups’ experiences — for example, those of women or trans people — by other groups, and to gender essentialism: the idea that women and men have certain supposedly inherent natures and qualities.
It also means that:
- Trans people often become targets of political manipulation. Anyone can be presented as a trans person.
- Trans people’s medical needs are ignored because the nature of trans experience is not understood.
- Trans experience is turned into a performance, leading many trans people to spend years unable to accept themselves despite severe dysphoria.
Trans experience is not magic
That is why it is so important to remember: trans experience is very complex. It is not a whim or a fashion, merely a label, a fandom or a subculture.
For many people, accepting themselves as trans takes a great deal of time and emotional effort. Trans identity deserves respect.
Trans experience is not magic. It is bodily. It is social. And it is often the story of a long journey, pain and struggle.
To be continued.