Your Friendly Neighbourhood Feminist

Have you ever filled out an application or a medical form? If you have, you'll remember that under the area where you fill in your name, the forms will ask you one of two things.

(1) Sex: _______ (or Male/Female),
or
(2) Gender: _______ (or Male/Female)

Now, it's never both, so by that token we can assume that these terms are interchangeable. But...do they really embody the same concept? Are sex and gender one and the same?

I remember this very clearly, because it was the very first thing I learned when I sat down for my first Women's Studies lecture. The professor asked the class if we knew what the difference was, and aside from a few knowing nods from the savvy individuals who decided to do the readings ahead of time, she largely received blank stares.

"Sex," she said, "is biological. Gender, however, is not."

Simply put, we are all born with a sex, whether it be male, female, or otherwise. The birthing doctor checks between our legs the minute we are born - if we have a tiny vagina we're female, if we have a tiny penis we're male, and if we have both then we're hermaphrodites.

So sex relies on the biological set of genitalia we have. Gender, on the other hand, is a social construction. Based on whether we have a vagina or a penis, society gives us a role to play out. If we have a vagina then the gender ascribed to us is that of a woman, and if we have a penis then the gender ascribed to us is that of a man - and if we have both, then our guardians and the doctor just pick one (either woman or man) and we go along with that one.

From birth we are taught gender, and it affects every single thing we do. It's been with us so long that we've grown to accept (and defend) gender as something 'natural' to us, something we were born with instead of being socialized into. For instance, we've all seen babies before. The toys, the clothes, even the design of the baby room all are determined by what gender we have attributed with that baby. Male children are taught to be boys by society - they play with trucks, they get into fights, and are told not to cry when they scrape their knees. Female children are taught to be girls - they play with dolls, they are prim and proper, and they are fussed over when they fall and bruise their elbows.

It's no surprise that we've grown up to conflate our biological sex with a certain gender. Deviation from your prescribed gender, which is identified when you act out behaviour that conflicts with your sex (for instance, a female who sits on the bus with her legs wide open - a behaviour very, very common with 'men' as any quick trip on public transit will prove), is immediately chastised. You are told to stop being "so unladylike" or to stop being "such a sissy".

Labels: biological vs. social, gender, gender performance, gender studies, sex, transgender, two-spirit