Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity

Okay, let’s talk about the difference between sex and gender and what sexual identity means. After spending too much time with certain comment threads and social media, I do have the feeling that we need to talk about all of this for a moment.

First, we get a little scientific with the definition of ‘sex.’ Here, I don’t mean the actual act of intercourse, but the biological or genetic definition of male or female (or intersexual, which means both or none, depending on your point of view).

The biological definition is used to determine the sex of a new-born baby. If the baby has a penis, it’s considered male, if it has a vagina, it’s considered female. If it has both, none, or an indeterminable primary sexual organ, it’s considered intersexual. It has taken very long for official agencies and the medical community to admit intersexuality is a thing and not something which should secretly be erased right after birth. 1/1000 births (the frequency of intersexual babies) is not something rare at all - given our birth rate on earth, that happens on a daily basis and more than once. The biological definition is mostly used today because it’s easy and quick - our primary sexual organs are there for all to see.

The genetic definition of male or female is harder to check, because it needs specific testing, but today, it’s also possible to check whether someone does or doesn’t have a Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is used in genetics to define a male human, so everyone with one, even if they have female sexual organs, is considered male. The fact that I just spoke of people who are biologically female, but genetically male should show you that sex isn’t that easy to define, once you go deeper than ‘I see something specific down there.’ By now, some biologists say we should redefine the sexes and, perhaps, go from ‘two and we accept there’s some mix-up’ to ‘there might be five or so sexes around.’ So far, though, most administrations still balk a little at a third sex (for intersexual people who don’t want a gender-assigning surgery). Imagine the tantrum they’d throw over ‘hey, we have five sexes for you now!’

Now, while people are born with a sex (or not, in some cases), they don’t always identify with that sex. Some of those who didn’t do so in the past were people born intersexual who had surgery as babies and the wrong sex chosen for them, but there’s also people born with a definite sex who identify with the opposite one - or something in-between the sexes.

Some people (often those who call themselves ‘Christians’) will tell you that this is a sign for mental problems and those people will need therapy, not a gender-reassigning surgery. But the step for a transgender person from the sex they were born as to the sex they identify as is much bigger than just ‘let’s pull the scalpel out and go to work.’ It takes psychological assessments (which are meant to make sure the person in question is really transgender), a hormone therapy, and in the end, not for everyone, the surgeries which will change the body from one sex to the other. It’s not something you decide on lightly and most transgender people go through a lot of trouble before they even realize what they need.

Sex is a biological fact - to a certain degree. The people mentioned who have a female body, but a Y chromosome are sterile, for instance. Their penis never developed, but they are left with a ‘proto vagina’ - which is perfectly serviceable, but doesn’t lead to a uterus. Neither do they produce eggs or go through a menstrual cycle. They often do identify as women, though, despite not genetically being one, so they feel comfortable in their body.

The idea that transgender people are mentally ill is just as stupid as the idea that homosexual people (or everyone not really heterosexual) are mentally ill - or sinners who needs to repent. This brings us, as you might have guessed already, to the topic of sexual identity.

Sexual identity is meant to define what kind of people we find sexually attractive. There are quite some different identities around by now, because sexual identity is on a scale where there’s not just a couple of stops but a lot of spaces in-between those spots, too. On the outer ends are heterosexuality and homosexuality - being sexually attracted to either the opposite sex or the own sex. Bisexual people can find members of both sexes attractive. Pansexual people are sexually attracted to basically everyone, they don’t see a difference, unlike the bisexuals. Asexual people, on the other hand, are not sexually attracted to anyone at all. (But be careful - asexual people can very well be emotionally or romantically drawn to someone and they still can have sex, since humans can have sex for sex’s sake with people who they are not sexually attracted to.)

Sexual identities apart from the ‘heterosexual norm’ are a problem mostly for religious people. Christianity and Islam especially have a huge problem with any kind of sexual behaviour which doesn’t lead to children (as a homosexual relationship never will). Sex is only allowed for propagation, even though it’s understood that not every act will lead to a baby. The main problem for society is that there is no logical reason to be weary of non-heterosexual pairings. There’s no reason not to consider homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexual people, or asexual people normal. But we still listen way too much to books written by people who didn’t even know where the sun went at night.

My personal take on sexual identities, which I believe is a good one, is like this: as long as all parties included are adult and consenting, there’s nothing which isn’t normal and shouldn’t be accepted. You don’t have to practice it, but you have no right to forbid other people from doing so.

This, finally, brings us to gender. Gender, unlike sex, is a social construct. Gender means two lists with characteristics, abilities, and jobs which are separated into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ for no valid reason (please note I’m not using male and female here on purpose). The lists vary quite some depending on the society they’ve been written in. For instance, modern western society says that ‘real men don’t cry.’ If you told a man from Ancient Greece about that, he would just stare at you in disbelief. A real man then was supposed to cry when the situation was suitable (such as the loss of a loved one).

There is only one aspect of human life where sex in the biological sense really matters: propagation. It needs a man and a woman to propagate, the man to father, the woman to bear and birth the child. Now, a pregnancy takes full nine months, normally (in modern society, with good access to medical aid, babies born at seven or eight months have a good chance to survive, but that wasn’t true for most of mankind’s run so far). Afterwards, women were usually nursing their children in the past, often for a year or longer. That easily adds up to about two years between children. And in a society where medical knowledge and technology were low, the chance of children reaching adulthood wasn’t really good (the average life expectancy of 30 years you might have read about comes together from the many infants and children dying - there have been quite some seniors in the middle ages and earlier, too). So women had to go through pregnancy as often as possible. Men, on the other hand, are needed for a couple of minutes at best. A man can father a lot more children than a woman can give birth to (and that would even be true if every ‘shot’ at pregnancy worked out).

For society, that makes men more easily disposable. As long as there’s a certain number of them to guarantee a certain genetic pool, it doesn’t matter how long they live. As long as enough of them get to ‘sow their seeds at least once,’ the society can survive. And because of that, men are often doing the more dangerous work - as hunters or as fighters.

One thing which is quite interesting is that gender roles generally are less defined in nomadic societies. Where the groups are small (extended families and clans), women are fighting and hunting alongside the men, simply because they are needed. And in small groups, the abilities of the individual are more important than the sex, so if a man is good with children and a woman is good at hunting, they’ll do what they’re good at, not what ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’ should be doing. In societies where war and hunting play a minor role, because of the situation in the world (far from other groups, in areas where agriculture is already in use), women often play a much higher role than in societies focused on war, where the soldier and thus the man is seen as more important.

A big problem with gender roles is that they are brought to our children early in life, when they are easy to impress. Even if the family tries to keep them away and raise the child or the children gender-neutral (which simply means letting them choose their hobbies, clothes, and interests freely without telling them ‘this isn’t for you, because you’re the wrong sex’), as soon as they are around other children, they’ll learn about the differences we teach our young about. Books, movies, and TV series for children are usually based on or built around older tales, tales created at a time when gender roles were considered to be immovable. When the job of the princess was to be beautiful, but passive, while the prince sallied forth actively to save her and prove he was a good and moral man. (Although the original version of Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty has the princess wake when one of her children bites her nipple while drinking - she was raped and gave birth while still asleep.) Now, don’t get me wrong. Being a good person certainly is something to strive for, but should ‘going forth and slaying evil’ really be limited to men? And should every man think that the reward for this will be a beautiful woman who adores him? Nope, not at all.

This is why we need new stories, new fairy tales which do away with the classic princess/prince dynamics. We should, as Nikita Gill put it, write new stories with flawed heroines who do not need a prince to save them:

And we shouldn’t just give our daughters new heroes, but also our sons. We should teach men that feelings aren’t making them weak. That compassion and care are just as good in a man as they are in a woman. That wanting to be a caregiver is just as good and valid as wanting to be a soldier. That it’s okay for a boy to play with dolls, as it’s okay for a girl to play with toy cars. We should very carefully examine all the gender roles we have assigned, all the characteristics, abilities, and jobs we have marked down as ‘for men’ or ‘for women’ and see which of those really, biologically require a specific sex. And then we should do away with the rest of them.

Sex, gender, and sexual identity all aren’t interchangeable or easy to understand, but once you have, you might realize that our world is weirder than you thought and could be much more wonderful, if we finally managed to overcome some ideas.