‘Gender’ & ‘Sex’: How We Have Got It All Wrong

Written By: Ungender Blog Team

Do you think gender and sex are the same? Do you think gender or sex is limited to male or female? The Collins dictionary defines ‘sex’ of a person or an animal as their characteristic of either being male or female while ‘gender’ is a more profound concept relating to socially constructed roles, behaviours from a range of identities that includes female, male, a combination of both, and neither.

Gender is not something we are born with and not something we have, but something we do – something we perform. Sex is a biological categorization based primarily on reproductive potential, whereas gender is the social elaboration of biological sex.

People tend to think of gender as the result of nurture – as social and hence fluid – while sex is the result of nature, simply given by biology. This implies that your sex is stable since birth, however, your gender may change over time. 

As a classifier for male and female, “gender” replaced “sex” in the 20th century. This was a trend started by feminist writers who wanted to highlight the biological attributes of males and females separate from their social characteristics.

Gender is the very process of creating a dichotomy by effacing similarity and elaborating on difference, and where there are biological differences, these differences are exaggerated and extended in the service of constructing gender. This process of elaborating on differences starts even before a child is born. For instance, we starting buying dolls, pink-themed baby stuff if we know it is a girl or blue-themed baby stuff if we know it is a boy.  

Simone de Beauvoir has said, “Women are not born, they are made.” The same is true of men. The making of a man or a woman is a never-ending process that begins before birth – from the moment someone begins to wonder if the pending child will be a boy or a girl. And the ritual announcement at birth that it is, in fact, one or the other instantly transforms an “it” into a “he” or “she” standardly assigning it to a lifetime as a male or as a female. This attribution is further made lasting through the naming of the child. If biologically it is a girl then a feminine name is assigned to the baby and if biologically it is a male then a masculine name is assigned. Names and clothing are just a small part of the symbolic resources used to support a consistent ongoing gender attribution

Actual differences between gender and sex tend to be scalar rather than dichotomous, with many women and men occupying the same positions on the scale. Consider our voices. On average, men’s vocal tracts are longer than women’s, yielding a lower voice pitch. But individuals’ actual conversational voice pitch across society does not simply conform to the size of the vocal tract. At the age of four to five years, well before puberty differentiates male and female vocal tracts, boys and girls learn to differentiate their voices as boys consciously and unconsciously lower their voice pitch while girls raise theirs. In the end, one can usually tell whether even a very small child is male or female on the basis of their voice pitch and quality alone, regardless of the length of their vocal tract. 

Since schooling is accomplished primarily through talk, gendered verbal practices abound in the classroom. The gender dichotomy is emphasized each time teachers address a group of children as “girls and boys,” and each time gender is used to teach the concept of opposites: black/white, good/bad, boy/girl. 

Life and daily living are about change – about things happening, about creativity and intelligence at work in the space left open by the incomplete hold of ideologies and institutions.

Over time the erosion of these binaries could have profound implications for the many systems that prop up the two-gender reality most people are accustomed to: not just in Facebook statuses, but in competitive sports, courts, the military, toy aisles, relationships. Don’t you think the differences between gender and sex should be proactively taught to students in schools? Gender sensitization sessions should also be conducted at workplaces to defy gender stereotypes. 

With an aim of delving into a better understanding of gender and sex, Ungender is conducting an event in collaboration with the Bohemian House on “Decoding the Gender Alphabet”

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Ungender Insights is the product of our learning from advisory work at Ungender. Our team specializes in advising workplaces on workplace diversity and inclusion. Write to us at contact@ungender.in to understand how we can partner with your organization to build a more inclusive workplace.