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.