I bring this up because it seems like there’s a lot of confusion as to what the difference between gender and sex is, how many there are of each, and what it means to be outside a so-called “gender binary.”
Gender and sex are not archetypal models that people “fit” or fail to fit into, rather they’re types of categorical labels that people apply; genders are social categories, sexes are biological or physical categories.
In this regard, the relation between sex and gender is parallel to the relation between skin colour and other hereditary indicators of geographic ancestry, and race. Skin colour is a physical, biological trait, race is a social construct that people recognize in people based on their physical appearance. Likewise, sex is a physical, biological trait, and gender is the social
Its often repeated that race isn’t biological, and this is sometimes interpreted to mean that race isn’t real. But equating discreet biological categories with something being real or not has no basis in science or sociology or leftist political theory. Race is very real, on a social level, and its also essentially fixed within any given society, because the social recognition of race in individuals is determined by their physical appearance, specifically the social interpretation of traits such as skin colour which relate to geographic ancestry. There is absolutely no biological basis for, .
Nor could there be; the reaction that’s sometimes taken, that there are some species with real races or subspecies but that humans just don’t happen to be one of them, completely misses the point and makes a category error; the reality of social categories is not found in biology its found in social interaction, they exist because of how people behave collectively not because of how people are biologically.
Someone once argued passionately here that there is a “Mediterranean race”, an argument made on the basis of appearance and self-identification, and this race simply wasn’t recognized because the “white race” wrote a version of history where it didn’t exist. In making this argument, she completely misunderstood the concept of race; races aren’t organic things that exist outside of human conception, where failing to fit racial stereotypes evidences the existence another race, rather they are categories created by social recognition. In other words, if the dominate version of history and social recognition, regards people living in the Mediterranean as being ‘white’ rather than non-white as it regards people living in sub-Saharan Africa, that simply means that Mediterranean’s are white because race exists and only exists as a socially agreed upon category.
The same is true of sex and gender.
The existence of intersexed infants who have physically ambiguous sexual characteristics is not evidence of a ‘third gender’ or many different genders; to suggest as much is to mistakenly believe that gender is a physical or biological or mental category rather than a social one. Being physically unusual doesn’t need to be met with abnormal treatment or necessitate any sort of social abnormality; contemporary western society is perfectly capable of recognizing people with unusual sexual characteristics as being one or the other gender and treating them normally.
The ambiguity that might exist in infants is in part attributable to the fact that gender has very little social consequence in interactions with infants and only determines pronoun choice, and because infants have no secondary sexual characteristics which is the way people determine what gender someone is when they’re older. Different types of birth defects that affect primary sexual characteristics lead to different presentation of secondary sexual characteristics and people in normal social interaction have no trouble determining which gender they belong to at that point. For instance, people with two x chromosomes and one y chromosome might not be ‘male’ or ‘female’ on a cellular biological level, but to anyone looking at them and interacting with them on a social level rather than a medical one, they appeal male, so their gender is the same as any other boy or man even though their primary sexual traits are different. It isn’t a case of “not fitting into a gender binary”, they fit into a gender binary perfectly well they just don’t fit into the two common biological sexes.
Getting back to race and skin colour; in addition to the essentially fixed racial categories that society imposes on people, some (but not all) people will additionally posit stereotypical views of people belonging to those categories. These stereotypes are however, just that, and they do not constitute requirements for recognition in a racial category or ‘fitting in.’
For instance, if you accept the premise that certain people believe that, in general, white people can’t dance, and you accept the premise that, say Justin Timberlake, can dance, does it follow that Justin Timberlake is in fact not-white? Does this mean that Justin Timberlake somehow transcends race and doesn’t fit into the racial white/non-white binary? Does it give Justin Timberlake reason to identify himself as non-white, or can Justin Timberlake legitimately say he doesn’t feel white? No of course not, because whether or not someone is white is something that’s agreed upon based on their appearance and presumed ancestry, not whether or not they can dance; the fact that some people who hold this particular stereotypical view assume that if someone is white than they can’t dance or probably can’t dance is irrelevant.
When you see people who don’t fit the stereotype of a race, that doesn’t mean that they don’t ‘fit in’ that race; rather it means that the stereotype is wrong or inadequate to describe the range of human diversity.
Likewise, the same is true about sex and gender.
Someone who prefers to dress a particular way, or acts a particular way, or thinks they feel a particular way, which are not in line with the stereotypical expectations for their gender, isn’t an example of someone who doesn’t “fit into the gender binary” but simply someone who doesn’t fit a particular gender stereotype.
So why is it that, after so many years of feminism demonstrating that the stereotypes about men and women are wrong, of the feminist movement reducing the recognized criteria for gender to sex rather than any set of stereotypical behavior or attitudes, we all of a sudden have people who seem to think that failing to adhere to gender stereotypes means failing to be part of that gender. It seems like a step back in time where there was prescribed behavior for ‘real men’ and ‘real women’.
When people confuse gender with gender sterotypes it actually has a very reactionary affect of presuming a stereotypical role for people on the basis of gender. If for instance, a black kid said “I don’t feel black, I don’t identify with being black, I don’t like rap music, hip hop, reggae, I think OJ was guilty, I straighten and dye my hair and speak with a waspy accent, therefore I feel I’m white and identify as being white”, I don’t think leftists would come to the conclusion that this was in fact a white person trapped in a black persons body, or alternatively, a member of a different previously unidentified race that we need to rush to socially recognize. I think, we’d just think that he or she had bought into stereotypes about black people and white people and mistakenly thought that being a black person meant wanting to adhere to those stereotypes rather than simply being recognized as such in society whether or not one fit the stereotypes.
Similarly, I don’t think that just because some kid is embarrassed that girls or boys do stupidly stereotypical things means that we need to introduce a set of new ‘gender neutral’ pronouns for them, thereby reinforcing the stereotype as the only normal form of being a girl or a boy. Instead stereotypes should be exposed as just that, stereotypes rather than essentially defining qualities.
