Sex and gender distinction
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Let us abandon the pretense of sexual sameness and admit the terrible duality of gender."--"Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art" in Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia |
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The distinction between sex and gender differentiates a person's sex (the anatomy of an individual's reproductive system, and secondary sex characteristics) from that person's gender, which can refer to either social roles based on the sex of the person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity). In some circumstances, an individual's assigned sex and gender do not align, and the person may be transgender. In other cases, an individual may have biological sex characteristics that complicate sex assignment, and the person may be intersex.
In ordinary speech, sex and gender are often used interchangeably. Some dictionaries and academic disciplines give them different definitions while others do not. Some languages, such as German or Finnish, have no separate words for sex and gender, and the distinction has to be made through context.
Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, academic use of the word gender was mostly confined to grammatical categories.
Among scientists, the term sex differences (as compared to gender differences) is typically applied to sexually dimorphic traits that are hypothesized to be evolved consequences of sexual selection.
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