Sex and Gender

First, a note of caution. About a million variations of this post have been written. You can google sex and gender and you'll find ample resources talking about this. I myself have written what I consider to be a less clear version of this post that probably got derailed. But if I'm writing this post (again) is because I believe that this is an important topic and that it is often misunderstood or wrongly interpreted, especially when people try to shield themselves behind 'science'.

So let me start unpacking last sentence first. As some of you may know I am a biological scientist, pursuing a PhD on developmental genetics (that sounds a lot cooler than it is, by the way). I love science, I like understanding things, I enjoy doing experiments. I think in many, many cases, the scientific method is the way to approach things. But I try not to deceive myself into thinking that:

a) Science is objective. Science, the way we understand it, is shaped by the people who perform the experiments and decide the directions of investigations. It is shaped by how those who perform it write about it, and how those who distribute it to the masses portray it. It is shaped by confirmation bias (remember: the first step of the scientific method is to make an observation, but the second is to form a hypothesis that explains it, and this step can easily lead to confirmation bias).

b) (And this derives from a): Science is always in agreement with itself. This is blatantly false. The same observation can lead to wildly different interpretations depending on anything from the person making the observation and interpretation to the background data already available.

Having said that, let's start trying to have a conversation about sex and gender, the differences and why it is so difficult to define these terms in a way that pleases everyone. I am going to concentrate on the 'sex' or 'biological sex' side of things.

Usually, the way that sex or biological sex comes into a conversation is when someone is talking about gender as non-binary and another person tries to bring in biological sex into it so as to be able to actually point out that there are biological differences between two binary categories of organisms from the same species.

The problem is that this binary classification ('male' and 'female') is a simplification. Let me explain. Broadly speaking, it is very often possible to correlate specific physical characters with a hormonal make up with the production of sperm and eggs with genetic sex. And often, these correlations coincide with what we call gender. This is: often, people who have a penis and testicles also produce higher levels of testosterone, produce sperm (or moving germ cells) and have a pair of chromosomes that we call XY. This group of people also often identify as men. And often, people who have breasts and a vagina also produce higher levels of estrogens, produce eggs (or unmoving germ cells) and have a pair of chromosomes that we call XX. This group of people also often identify as women.

However, these correlations don't always occur, and this is why it can become so difficult to talk about biological differences between the sexes. Because while a lot of people do happen to fall into the broad classification of 'male' or 'female', a lot of people don't. And it's ridiculous to try to put these people into one of the two groups based on 'science'. And this is where the simplification comes in: science tries to find general explanations for specific observations. For this reason, science relies heavily on statistics, and that  results on explanations that deal with the 'majority' of cases. In terms of sex and gender this means (or at least used to mean, more and more people are starting to identify as gender fluid or as non-binary) that we simplify to male and female. This doesn't mean that in the real world that binary exists and we all fall on one side or the other. And so, because this is the case, this makes things difficult when we talk. Because it makes it impossible to talk about the real world in scientific terms, since the scientific terms only reflect a simplification of the real world.

Now, because science is a generalisation it is broadly possible to pick people from groups where the correlations above happen to be true and then draw differences between those groups. That in itself isn't strange, and doesn't point to anything other than the fact that your sample is already binary (this is, that you have already separated your sample groups based on a series of characters). What would make this interesting is actually picking a group of people at random, perform a test and then try to trace it back to the correlations above. This would help to eliminate some of the confirmation bias that we tend to see in any sort of gendered testing.

Of course, this doesn't solve a greater problem. Even though we often say that sex is biological (and I explain above why this, while exactly false, is an over simplification and doesn't cover the fact that there aren't necessarily just two sexes, mainly because there are so many factors involved) and gender is social, a lot of the studies performed ignore the fact that because we people based on their most obvious biologically sexual characteristics in different ways socially, which can lead to any study purporting to find a difference between sexes actually just finding a different between the socialisation of people presenting as one or the other sex externally.

This is: we can't (yet) separate between sex and gender because they've become incredibly intertwined in the socialisation of most (if not all, I don't know enough about this) cultural groups. Even trying to perform blind tests (as I say above, perform a test without separating 'male' and 'female' people, then separating based on the results and trying to trace whether the differences correlate with grouping people into two groups that happen to match with 'male' and 'female') might only reflect a difference in socialisation.

All this to say that if you arbitrarily make two groups based on physical characteristics (for example, divide a group of people into people with blonde hair, blue eyes and tolerance to lactose and people with brown hair, brown eyes and intolerance to lactose) you're almost certainly going to find other differences when you test those groups. Sex just happens to be a very obvious way of distinguishing between people, and one that for a lot of people does have a big effect: a lot of people classified as female (but not all) can and do bear children, whilst a lot of people classified as male can't.

This to say the following: even though I think that biological differences between the sexes, interpreted as a binary and especially when the definition of male or female is not considered multifactorial, are difficult to prove, I do think that there is definitely a difference between the genders, likely social but which has probably in certain ways affected our biology through selection. If there weren't a difference it wouldn't be possible to talk about women's rights or women's issues (though of course, if women weren't discriminated, it wouldn't be possible to talk about women's rights or women's issues anyway), because the difference between those discriminated and those doing the oppression would not be easily identified. This applies to any other sort of discrimination based on supposedly biological attributes which are obvious externally such as race (and I would be happy to discuss whether or not race can be considered biological, based on the fact that whilst it is now possible to genetically distinguish race, it is also a social construct).

And I go back to another important point in this discussion: definitions. Definitions play an essential role when discussing anything, because if we are using words that do not mean the same thing, then we cannot understand each other. It is important, therefore, when embarking on any conversation about sex and gender to define each separately and to determine whether we agree on the definitions of each. As a final point, I'll give what I currently use as my definition of sex (biologically):

Sex is a usually binary classification of organisms based on certain external characteristics, the ability to produce male or female germ cells, the production of certain hormones and a difference in chromosomes (the specific correlation of sex chromosomes with sex can change depending on the species). In order to classify an organism as male or female it can have any of the characteristics correlated with a sex, though usually will have several of them. It is also possible for an organism to have characteristics of both types of sexes (if using a binary classification). In this case, it will be ridiculous to decide on a sex in a binary scale. Non-binary classifications should be possible and should consider the multifactorial nature of sex. Another possibility is to stop defining sex at all, and simply consider characteristics individually without making a classification.

I think (but any suggestions to the contrary are welcome) that this covers a fair amount of ground, but of course it being a complicated field and intertwined with gender it's difficult to say.