Sex–gender distinction
[21][22][23] The Oxford English Dictionary defines sex as "Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions".
"[24] Merriam-Webster defines sex as "either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures."
[43] The American Psychiatric Association states that "Sex is often described as a biological construct defined on an anatomical, hormonal, or genetic basis.
[53] The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gender as “a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms”.
[55] The American Heritage Dictionary (5th edition) states that gender may be defined by identity as "neither entirely female nor entirely male"; its Usage Note adds: Some people maintain that the word sex should be reserved for reference to the biological aspects of being male or female or to sexual activity, and that the word gender should be used only to refer to sociocultural roles.
[22][23][20][65] This changed in the early 1970s when the work of John Money, particularly the popular college textbook Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, was embraced by feminist theory.
[66] Other studies have noted that, while there is some tentative evidence for a potential genetic, neuroanatomical, and hormonal basis for gender identity, the specific biological mechanisms involved have not yet been demonstrated.
[67] There is little general agreement among archaeologists about what can be accurately stated about gender identities, roles, and processes in the earliest human societies between 40,000 and 4,000 years before the present.
[68] There is a consensus that cultures at this time differentiated categories of people by 'gender', if this is defined as rules of behavior and roles based on sex.
Similar grave goods found in male and female high-status burials of this period, however, indicate that status was not simply based on gender.
[75] The remains, believed to be anatomically male, were orientated in the same way as women's burials and were not accompanied by any gender-specific grave goods.
Based on this the archaeologist Kamila Věšínová suggests that it was likely that this was an individual "with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual",[76] while media reports heralded the discovery of the world's first "gay caveman".
[77] Archaeologists and biological anthropologists criticised media coverage as sensationalist, as well as criticising Věšínová's original statement, in which she conflates sex, gender, and sexuality,[76] arguing that, although the burial might well represent a transgender individual, it does not necessarily mean that they had a different sexual orientation, or that their culture would have considered them 'homosexual'.
However the words for inanimate objects are commonly masculine (e.g. der Tisch, the table) or feminine (die Armbanduhr, the watch), and grammatical gender can diverge from biological sex; for instance the feminine noun [die] Person refers to a person of either sex, and the neuter noun [das] Mädchen means "the girl".
[90] The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) gathers data about the population broken down in various ways, including by sex and gender.
[92] ABS recognizes the popular confusion among the two terms, and provide descriptions of how to phrase surveys so as to elicit accurate responses for the purposes of the data they collect.
[94] The United Kingdom Office for National Statistics (ONS) describes definitions provided by the UK government that make clear distinctions between the "biological aspects" of sex, "generally male or female", and "assigned at birth", while describing gender as a "social construction relating to behaviours and attributes based on labels of masculinity and femininity".
[101] The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used to use gender instead of sex when referring to physiological differences between male and female organisms.
In their Media Reference Guide for transgender issues, they describe sex as "the classification of people as male or female" at birth, based on "external anatomy" and other bodily characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, and genitalia.
[107][108] Gayle Rubin, for example, defines her influential concept of the sex/gender system as "the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity”.
[112]Mari Mikkola has put forward the "Trait/Norm Covariance Model", divided into descriptive traits and evaluative norms, as a suggested replacement.
The use of different terms to label these two types of contributions to human existence seemed inappropriate in light of the biopsychosocial position I have taken.She quotes Steven Pinker's summary of the problems with the terms sex and gender: "Part of it is a new prissiness—many people today are as squeamish about sexual dimorphism as the Victorians were about sex.
[124] Mary Hawkesworth and Lisa Disch note that some feminist theorists have criticised the biological basis of sexual dimorphism.
In the field of feminist metaphysics, sexual difference is discussed by Elizabeth Grosz, Gayatri Spivak, Hélène Cixous, Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Moira Gatens, Monique Wittig, Naomi Schor, and Vicki Kirby, among others.
[129] Suzanne Kessler, in a 1990 survey of medical specialists in pediatric intersexuality, found out that when a child was born with XY chromosomes but ambiguous genitalia, their sex was often determined according to the size of their penis.
In addition, the gender, behavior, actions, and appearance of males/females is also seen as socially constructed because codes of femininity and masculinity are chosen and deemed fit by society for societal usage.
[131] Historian Thomas W. Laqueur suggests that from the Renaissance to the 18th century, there was a prevailing inclination among doctors towards the existence of only one biological sex (the one-sex theory, that women and men had the same fundamental reproductive structure).
[133][134] Laqueur asserts that even at its peak, the one-sex model was supported among highly educated Europeans but is not known to have been a popular view nor one entirely agreed upon by doctors who treated the general population.
Stolberg provides evidence to suggest that significant two-sex understandings of anatomy existed before Laqueur claims, arguing that sexual dimorphism was accepted as early as the sixteenth century.
[136]: 276 Joan Cadden has stated that 'one-sex' models of the body were already treated with scepticism in the ancient and medieval periods, and that Laqueur's periodisation of the shift from one-sex to two-sex was not as clear-cut as he made it out to be.
