Sex, gender, and "truth"
Gender is not a niche issue
It’s a scary and exciting time to be a gender researcher. Scary, because the subject I think, write, teach, and generally care a lot about has been suddenly excised from the federal lexicon. “Gender” has been recast as seditious content, placed on the no-fly list for federal grants, and besmirched as a figment of the woke left’s imagination.
But it’s exciting, too, because more people than ever, it seems, are paying attention to gender issues. The combo of high visibility and high polarization sets the stage for interesting and important research. And, at least in the optimistic case, the administration’s extreme measures are likely to galvanize opposition from a wide coalition, including people who previously didn’t care all that much about gender.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about—lucky you!—here’s a bit of backstory. Approximately seven eons and one billion news cycles ago (a.k.a. Trump’s first day back in office) the President signed an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
Among other highlights, the order declares that there are only two sexes, which are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality” and denounces “gender ideology” as a doctrine that “replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.” It instructs all federal agencies to stop using the term “gender” and prohibits federal funds from being used to “promote gender ideology.”
The document is, as they say, a rich text. I could write many thousands of words analyzing and debunking its various claims. I could talk about the extensive harms this order (and other related orders) is causing for trans and nonbinary folks. I could definitely come up with some good zingers about the irony of Trump promising to “defend women.”
But I am very pregnant and very tired. So, I’m keeping my aims modest and getting back to basics. What’s the difference between “sex” and “gender” anyway? And why is trying to get rid of “gender” actually the opposite of “restoring truth”?
(Important caveat: these are incredibly complex topics. I’m giving the 101 version here, because I’m assuming that’s what will be most helpful in this moment. If you want the 201 or 301 iteration, send me a message and I can share some good resources and/or post more in future on this.)
“Sex” is grounded in biology – but that biology is more complicated than the administration suggests
When scientists talk about sex, they’re usually talking about a set of, yes, biological characteristics that cluster together into two groups we’ve collectively labeled “male” and “female.” Characteristics like:
Chromosomes: males generally have XY, females XX
Reproductive anatomy/genitalia: males generally have a penis and testes, females a vagina and uterus
Hormones: males and females have different average levels of testosterone and estrogen
Practically speaking, when a child is born, they are assigned a sex based on their external genitalia. When the doctor holds up the newborn and declares, “It’s a boy!” she usually means, “This baby has a penis,” not “This baby has XY chromosomes” or “This baby has high testosterone levels.” (Advances in prenatal testing do allow us to look at a fetus’s chromosomes, but I think the larger point – that sex designation is driven by what we can see at the moment of birth – still holds.)
In the vast majority—98+%—of cases1, the determination of male or female is pretty straightforward. But there are plenty of exceptions, which are generally grouped together under the label “intersex” or “differences in sex development.” These labels get applied to folks whose various biological sex markers are ambiguous and/or point in different directions. People with XXY chromosomes, or male genitalia combined with high estrogen levels, etc., etc. Sometimes the condition is obvious at birth; sometimes it’s only apparent at puberty; presumably, sometimes it’s never detected.
Historically, if intersex characteristics were recognized at or soon after birth, surgery would be performed to “correct” the issue – i.e., change the body to make the baby fit more clearly into whatever sex category the doctor deemed them closer to. That approach has fallen out of favor for obvious reasons.
Still, pesky human judgment still supplements “biological truth” by assigning intersex babies to one sex category or the other—and by determining whether they count as intersex in the first place. As the Intersex Society of North America puts it:
“Nature doesn’t decide where the category of ‘male’ ends and the category of ‘intersex’ begins, or where the category of ‘intersex’ ends and the category of ‘female’ begins. Humans decide.”
“Gender” is not a niche issue
The Trump administration has been working very hard to frame gender as an issue that is only or primarily applicable to trans and nonbinary folks. The original executive order alludes darkly to “men [who] self-identify as women” and “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women.” Many of the other gender-related actions taken since Inauguration Day have explicitly restricted trans rights.
I hate to break it to you, Mr. Trump, but you, too, experience gender!2 Everyone does, regardless of the level of apparent match or mismatch between their genitalia and the way they dress, or act, or identify.
That’s because gender isn’t an “ideology”; it’s the social meaning we – the collective we – overlay on top of biology. At the individual level, there is no biological reason that people born with XY chromosomes conventionally wear suits on formal occasions, whereas people born with XX chromosomes wear dresses. Nor, for that matter, is there any biological reason for males and females to dress differently at all. Cutting your hair short or keeping it long; shaving your armpits or letting the hair grow; playing with dolls or playing with trucks – none of these behaviors or modes of self-presentation is at all linked to sex. They’re just things that, in the 21st-century U.S., are clearly recognized as markers of masculinity or femininity.3
It feels natural to many of us to act in ways that others will recognize as appropriate for our sex. But “feeling natural” is not the same thing as being “biologically determined.” If it feels natural, it’s probably because we’ve been trained from birth to associate sugar, spice, and everything nice with girls, and snips, snails, and puppy dogs’ tails with boys. (Yes, puppy tails. You can’t make this stuff up.)
Sometimes the arbitrary nature of current gender conventions is easier to see with a wider lens. Take a look at these three boys/men:
Louis XIV, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson. Same sex (as far as I am aware), very different gender presentation. What counts as masculine in one time and place may be read very differently in another. Gender—and the “correct” way to do it—is always in flux, always being renegotiated and challenged.
“Truth” requires careful consideration of both sex and gender
The current leadership alleges that “gender ideology” has come to replace sex. Perhaps some people are indeed aiming for that, but what I see much more often is people striving to pick the right concept for the job.
If you want to understand the human reproductive system or map the effects of a particular sex hormone on some disease, you better be considering sex! On the other hand, if you want to understand why couples divide labor or share power unevenly, sex is likely to be less helpful than gender.
Often, both are relevant in some way. Let’s say you’re studying men’s health: sex, and the way it impacts the physical body, is pretty obviously important. But gender may be, too. Boys are often socialized to be tough and independent, and that messaging can prevent them from seeking help when they need it, which is in turn associated with worse health outcomes.
Neither sex nor gender can substitute for or replace the other; they are simply two different things. Anyone who claims to be interested in “truth” needs to be clear about what kind of truth they’re after, and which concept—or combination of concepts—is most likely to point them to it.
I’ll close with a plug for Ann Friedman’s most recent newsletter, about gender as a “wild romp”:
“Supposedly people like me, who believe trans people have the right to health care and self-determination and full expression, are the only ones with a gender ideology. But the reactionaries in power right now are doing a lot of work to assert their particular way of thinking about men and women. Newsflash: That is a gender ideology.
Their ideology is that men are strong, dominant breadwinners who are born with specific genitalia. And women are the inverse: compliant, nurturing dependents, born with a different set of genitalia…This is not a failure of imagination, but a failure to engage with reality.”
A wild romp, indeed.
There’s a lot of debate over the prevalence of intersex/differences in sex development, driven in part by disagreement over what counts. The figure I see most often is “up to 1.7%.”
“Experience gender” is sort of a clunky phrase, but sociologists of gender tend to argue that gender is not something we have or are, it’s something we do or perform. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic, and I’m trying to keep things simple.
This is not the same as claiming that there’s no relationship between sex and behavior. However, even with sex-linked traits like “aggression” (generally associated with higher testosterone) it can be exceedingly difficult to separate the social from the biological, as Anne Fausto-Sterling’s work shows. Further, within-sex variation is often greater than between-sex variation.