Gender?

[Jesus Saves Gretzky Scores]

I think I understand the differene between sex and gender now. If I'm correct, sex=biologically what's different, and gender=gender roles. So if that's true, and as communists, we would be against gender roles, would you be genderless?

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

I think that's about it. As a transwoman I just want a vagina, I don't feel the need to play with dolls. Though I do admit that I'd like to go shoping if I ever got a surgery, but hey, who doesn't want to look pretty? :P

[Ostrinski]

Gender is generally considered to be a matter of social identity, not necessarily biologically sanctioned. It may or may not have any relation to your biological sex. Those who socially identify with their biological sex are called cisgendered and those who do not are called transgendered.

[Jesus Saves Gretzky Scores]

Ok, I'm pretty sure I get it now, thanks guys.

[islandmilitia]

Well, no. The distinction between sex and gender has historically been instrumental to feminist thinking precisely because it has enabled feminists to argue that social conventions and gender roles do not arise in a straightforward way from apparently given biological realities but instead form a historically and culturally variable level, and one that can be modified through political activism. However, some of the key changes in feminist thinking that have taken place since the 1970s have been concerned with problematizing and re-examining that bifurcation between variable gender and objective sex - in particular, if you look at the work of people like Judith Butler, you find the argument that when we talk about humankind being divided into men and women and when we cite sexual genitalia as what determines whether someone belongs to one sex or the other, we are relying on a very specific conception of the body, in which attention is focused around the genitalia at the expense of other dimensions of the body or even other centers of erogenous experience, which might produce a different way of categorizing human beings or a different ay of understanding sexual pleasure. That is, for certain more recent feminist thinkers, sex is not independent of gender, and so-called biological sex is itself culturally constructed, because it relies on a very specific way of understanding the contours of the human body.

I personally find the arguments of people like Butler very convincing. But regardless of whether you accept her ideas or not, we should be aware that the sex/gender bifurcation is a topic of ongoing debate, there's nothing objective or automatically correct about the idea of inherent biological sex.