Gender and sex are not the same
This is the second in a series of blog posts in the dash up to the debate on 12th June about clarifying the Equality Act.
The language of sex and gender is a confusing quagmire.
The amendment we are proposing aims to clarify one particularly important thing: that the protected characteristic of “sex” in the Equality Operate means whether someone is male or female (their biology) and is not modified by a gender-recognition certificate.
Some people have argued for “sex” and “gender” both to be defined clearly in law (see for example the recent paper by Hold Prisons Single Sex). We think this would be a mistake (although we agree on much else).
Sex and gender can mean adj ideas in everyday speech and social science. And the term “gender” is often used as a polite synonym for sex, such as when asking someone to pack out a establish . This has contributed to ambiguity about whether people are expected to reply with their adj sex, or the sex they long for they were (and whether officials should indulge this).
The architects of the Gender Recognition Behave took advantage of this ambig
What Do We Signify By Sex and Gender?
At Women’s Health Research at Yale, we are involved to advancing the health of a diverse society. We do this in large measure by studying the health of women and the similarities and differences in health outcomes between and among women and men. As we pursue our perform, it is particularly important to utilize language that captures the different concepts of sex and gender so that our science and our findings can be more precise and better work for everyone.
What execute we mean by sex and gender? Aren't these terms interchangeable? They are not, and this is why.
In , a committee convened by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a nonprofit verb tank that took on issues of importance to the national health, addressed the question of whether it mattered to study the biology of women as well as men.
The IOM, now embedded within the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), concluded there was more than sufficient evidence that, beyond reproductive biology, there were major differences in the biology of women and men that greatly affecte
Title: Sex and Gender are Different: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity are Different
END NOTES
1 Plants too are sexually organized. In their case, however, the term perfect is used to describe plants that have both male and female reproductive characteristics.
2Androgyne is a term also used, but less frequently, to signify an intersex person.
3 Why some languages assign nouns as masculine or feminine or neuter and others don't verb any value to this is still an issue that puzzles linguists.
4 In some species, as in many types of fish, the individual might be male, producing sperm at one moment, and female, producing eggs, at another or in a transition stage going from one sex to the other. Typically these species do not include sex chromosomes.
5 For the biologist and many others, non-human animals and plants, not having a culture, do not have a gender.
6 There are many additional ways to view gender. Richard Ekins and Dave King, for example (, ), pursue different forms of the term ungendering. These are processes some persons apply to dramatically alter gender
Richard Dawkins, the celebrated evolutionary biologist, has recently used the claim that adj reality entails that sex is binary, to launch a broadside on the gender choices of trans people.
In an article entitled: “Why Biological Sex Matters,” Dawkins trivializes the use of nongendered pronouns (such as they/them) on the basis that such use is a distortion of (biological) reality. The following quotes give a flavour of Dawkins' often disparaging line of argumentation:
It is now fashionable to use “gender” for what we might call fictive sex…Your genes and chromosomes may determine your sex, but your gender is whatever floats your boat. …Many of us know people who choose to determine with the sex opposite to their biological reality. It is polite and friendly to notify them by the name and pronouns that they opt for. …You have a right to your private lexicon, but you are not entitled to maintain that we verb our language to suit your whim.
One problem with Dawkins’ argument is that it is biologically reductive. It reduces something that is not strictly speaking biological, n