Sex, gender, same thing, whatever. But are they? Here’s the difference, and why it’s important to know.
by Mauve Maude
November 17, 2020
A baby is born. It usually emerges head first, and that’s the first thing anybody sees. It takes a huge effort to reveal the rest, the full born body of a brand new child, a shiny new human, loaded with all its potential. The first thing people want to know is that the baby can breathe. Some believe this is when God breathes the soul into the body. Doctors, midwives, new parents, everybody wants to hear the robust cry of a healthy newborn, emerging from the womb into the noise, into the light, into the cold, with air in its lungs for the first time, ready to take on the world.
The next thing people want to know is if it’s a girl or a boy. Behind breathing, and having a body that’s apparently complete and healthy, this is the most important information delivered to all in the room. This is what determines the forward track of a person’s identity, as far as everyone around them is concerned–their name, how they’ll be dressed, how their hair will look, what kind of play will be encouraged when they begin to walk, and how they’ll be expected to behave by the time they go to elementary school. It all hinges on whether the newborn has a penis or a vagina.
This is, at least, how it used to be. “It’s a Boy!” or “It’s a Girl!” was the quintessential announcement of a baby’s birth, the culmination of a pregnancy, the moment new parents waited so many months for. But a couple decades or so ago, rapidly advancing ultrasound imagery and diagnostic tests started making it possible to identify a baby’s genitalia or chromosomal make-up earlier and earlier, eventually even earlier than the halfway point of the pregnancy. So while some parents chose to wait until the baby was born to hear the big announcement, more and more began finding out long before, in a doctor’s office, with pictures to take home.
And in more recent years, America has gravitated toward the trend of gender reveals, where the “It’s a Boy!” or “It’s a Girl!” moment is marked by an extravagant celebration. Cakes are made, presents are received, games are played, and some creative, unique, spectacular (and most importantly, Instagram-worthy) display reveals whether the unborn child has an unborn penis or an unborn vagina. So now, long before a baby is born, its pink or blue path is supposedly determined by what’s between its legs.
And it’s years before any child questions that path. In fact, most kids don’t. So it can be rather disorienting for everyone involved, when a person realizes that who they are doesn’t match the anatomical identity everybody announced at their birth.
To process this, let’s go back, like many might, to where everything started.
Sex and Gender: What’s the Difference?
The penises or vaginas that appear when (most) babies are born are the most visible indicators of a person’s sex. But they’re hardly the only ones. There are also the internal players, the testes and ovaries to consider. But human biological sex, the internal and external make-up of our physical birth features, is actually, at its base, chromosomal. Before any visible or invisible body parts are formed in the womb, a fertilized egg has a chromosomal identity that determines whether a male or female child will try to develop. And it’s not always as simple as the XX or XY we remember from biology class. Though uncommon to rare, there are a few other forms chromosomes can take in a fertilized egg, and they don’t always result in an unambiguous vagina or penis either. Even when they do, however, a biologically female child can physically develop male characteristics, a chromosomally male child can externally develop female genitalia and breasts, and males can have extra X chromosomes. Biological sex–what makes us male or female–isn’t always as simple as it appears.
It’s also not a determinant of gender. While chromosomes, gonads, hormones, and genitalia help us to pull together a male or female package, what makes us men and women, feminine or masculine, is inside, but not entirely contained within that package. What we consider masculine and feminine are roles that we’re taught to step into about as soon as we can step. We’re conditioned to wear certain clothing, style our hair a somewhat certain way, emulate the masculine or feminine people in our lives–our parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, celebrities, peers–play a certain way, like certain colors, like certain activities, follow certain standards of attractiveness, follow certain protocols of emotional expression, follow certain power dynamics . . . There are virtually endless ways in which Americans define masculinity and femininity, and as we mature sexually, a lot of that definition falls around what we’re attracted to, what we favor. But at much younger ages, we tend to steer young children down certain tracks according to their genitalia.
Of course, we ourselves don’t always fit into those roles. We don’t always feel comfortable in the clothing we’re supposed to wear, or cutting our hair, or letting it grow. We’re not always comfortable acting like our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, movie stars, or kids at school. We have our own interests, and they don’t always fit the cut-out we were assigned. As individuals, we often deviate from those social ideas of manhood and womanhood, and as we mature, become our own people. And for those of us whose unique presentations, in view of the society around us, predominantly match the male or female package we came in, hardly anyone bats an eye.
For those of us whose presentations do not, it’s a different story, in which our blue and pink labels don’t apply.
But then, that story depends on the society. Throughout human history, many societies have operated under the assumption that there are more than two sexes and more than two genders. In such a context, the need for any one individual to fit into an idea is virtually nonexistent. It’s only when people don’t meet our assumptions, and expectations, that we glance sideways. What do we do with people who don’t “match” the prescribed ideas we were taught about sex and gender?
When we open the box we find something else entirely. Maybe it is what we wanted. Maybe it’s something even better. But we don’t know until we get into that box.
In the American traditions of Christmastime, we anticipate, much like expectant parents, what gifts we’re going to find under our trees. They sit, often for weeks, wrapped in shiny packages for us to study, imagining what’s inside. We try to guess by the size, or the weight, maybe what kind of noise it makes if we shake it a little, gauging all possibilities against what it is we want to receive. After waiting, seemingly for ages, on Christmas morning we can tear off the wrappings, and maybe find a box underneath that’s misleading. We may think for a moment we’re getting one thing (maybe not what we wanted). Then when we open the box we find something else entirely. Maybe it is what we wanted. Maybe it’s something even better. But we don’t know until we get into that box.
A person is not a box of treats for us to tear open, but it’s fair to say we commonly treat people as exactly that. If we were to open a Christmas gift and recoil at what we were given, we would be considered rude, arrogant, ungrateful, spoiled. We’d hurt the person who thoughtfully brought us the gift. We’d ruin the air of festivity and celebration, centering the whole occasion on our own selfish wants. This wouldn’t be considered acceptable behavior. Treating a human being in this manner would, in theory, be even less so.
Sexuality and Identity: What We Do With What We’ve Got
By the time most of us reach the age where we begin to feel attractions to, first, vague images, and then certain, special humans around us, most of us aren’t even thinking about whether we’re boys or girls. Once we’re attracted to someone else, all we know is who attracts us. And in our hormonal, adolescent minds, while we are self-centered, we’re often too infatuated to realize it. Somehow it isn’t even about us. It’s all about who we like, with laser focus. Only when we’re faced with the possibility that they don’t like us back, do we start to obsess over ourselves.
And that is just the beginning of sexuality, if we didn’t feel or think about its roots before. Sexuality is composed of our sexual attractions to others and what we do with them. Whether we’re attracted to males, females, men, women, men and women, individuals we have trouble defining with those terms, or nobody at all, reflects our sexual orientation, what direction our sexuality pulls us in. Often it’s not who society says we’re “supposed” to be attracted to, but the attraction is there just the same. And sometimes, our orientation changes. This can all take so many years–maybe a lifetime–to figure out, sexuality reveals itself as existing on a spectrum, much more than two points meeting on a line.
Awareness simply comes from exposure, and human exposure has undergone a revolutionary transformation.
Sexuality has been an essential part of humanity through all of its existence, but it hasn’t always been a major part of human discussion. This is understandable, since sex is a thing that’s more fun to do than to talk about. And since the majority of us act on heterosexual urges, since many others act on the heterosexual roles they’ve observed even without the urge, and since this is our primary method of reproducing, copulation with members of the opposite sex has simply been established as the social norm. We call this heteronormativity. It’s another way we as humans sort ourselves out, without really even thinking about it.
But as long as heterosexuality has existed, so has everything else on the spectrum. Other modes of sexuality, while occurrent, just haven’t been as widely observed. And that’s because we haven’t, until recent centuries, been exposed to as large numbers of people as we are now. Most recently in our history, through rapid expansions in technology, we’ve quickly become exposed to millions and billions of people and cultures in places around the world that most of us will never see. Awareness simply comes from exposure, and human exposure has undergone a revolutionary transformation. As a result, more and more people and cultures are learning about homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality, some within ourselves. These are all natural orientations; that’s almost universally accepted. Where social friction occurs is where non-hetero behaviors rub up against social mores and religious beliefs. Some will declare love for the “sinner, but hate the sin”, viewing non-hetero sex as social and spiritual indulgence, and unnecessary in the revolving plot of reproduction and death. It’s about when and how people should stick to the social script, for what benefit, and at what cost. Of course, this holds implications for any sex that’s not an attempt to produce children.
Deviations in gender identity are generally even less accepted in societies that stick to a sex-based gender binary, a code made only of male man and female woman, in which a heteronormative prescription is easily followed and swallowed. In order for that to work as desired, hard lines have to be drawn, so in some societies cisgender heteronormativity is quite rigid. Humans like categorization to be simple, easy. And for most of us, it is. Most people do have a cisgender identity, one that matches the social roles we were taught according to our external anatomies, and a sexual orientation that, at least outwardly, follows the heteronormative pattern. But if we fail to understand the people who do not fit that pattern, it makes a difficult, sometimes dangerous environment for people with different sexual orientations. And it’s an even more difficult and dangerous environment, indeed, for people whose gender identities–their inner manifestations of personhood–don’t match their anatomies (gender dysphoria), or just don’t fit into a socially constructed sense of man or woman (gender non-conformity), no matter what their anatomy. These people simply find themselves unable to complete the gender assignment they were given, and the less understanding the society, the more difficult their lives might be.
Of course, in these situations, it also depends heavily on how inner gender identity is outwardly expressed, which is as various as people are. People who are transgender or non-binary, or gender fluid, are just as unique as everyone else in how they choose to present themselves to the world. Becoming one’s own person, after all, is important to everybody. Sex, gender, identity, expression and sexuality all line up socially for some of us, but they simply don’t always fit the same pattern, and they don’t have to.
Who We Are
All of our individual factors combine to make who we are, as people, very complex. Even people who fit the so-called “normal” pattern, in whatever society or culture they’re in, came a long way to become who they are–from chromosomes to anatomy, from birth to social inculcation, from self-discovery to self-realization, if they’re fortunate.
What we do is sort ourselves out, then sort ourselves back in again. We emerge from the people who make us, and raise us, we determine how we are different, and then hopefully we merge back into society as our whole selves. If we can do that, we’re successful. And that’s all anybody’s really trying to be.
When we meet new people, we get the chance to witness and explore unique, walking pieces of history. But they are not there for us, and we make terrible mistakes when we pretend they are. They are there for themselves, and a purpose we’re not to assume is ours, just as we are here for ourselves, and a purpose of our own. If we respect that, we’re open to knowing and loving people as they are, not as we need or want them to be.
So we must remember that from year to year, wrappers and boxes can be any changing number of things. What matters are the gifts we find in the people around us, and how well we receive them.