What Is Gender?

There are people who want to say that studying sex is “trendy,” but the fact is, studying sex is necessary and always has been.

Short answer: biological sex is a spectrum, even in lab rats. Male and female are rough buckets into which most people and other animals fit, but there are more intersex people in the world than there are redheads. We perceive sex as a binary, but the better scientists get at studying it, the less that seems to be true.

What Is Gender?

For decades, it’s been common to say that “sex” is what your body is and “gender” is how you identify yourself. By these definitions, a transgender person is someone whose self-perception of gender doesn’t match their body; that is, a trans woman is someone who was born in some version of a male body (given the complexity we just described, let’s say a visibly male body, or a body with a penis) but identifies or perceives herself as a woman.

However, we can also talk about sex as having multiple definitions. To quote one scientist of human sexuality, “chromosomal sex; gonadal sex; morphological sex and related secondary sex traits; and psychosocial sex or gender identity.”18 In other words, gender identity is one aspect of sex. Scientists don’t really want to separate gender into its own thing because that, itself, is a binary, “sex-equals-biology, gender-equals-society.”19

But to get out of the weeds, gender can be understood as the perceived social aspect of sex. A person can identify as a man, a woman, as genderqueer, as nonbinary (enby is a term comfortable for many, but not all, nonbinary people), or as some other term. We’re just now inventing terms, so they’re all kind of in flux, and some of them could easily disappear from usage, while new ones could arise.

My gender is what I know myself to be. It is part of my authentic self. It may or may not be the same as what you’ll find in my panties.

18. Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender, 30–31. 19. Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender, 52.