What Is A Woman? What Is A Man?
Before our generation of writers, teachers and therapists, the differences between boys and girls, men and women were all subsumed under the term “sex.”
They were considered immutable gifts of Mother Nature to all humans that would further differentiate females and males as they matured. Any deviance from the prescribed path was proscribed and considered a problem in development.
We did not just name gender for idle or academic reasons. We needed a paradigm that was more amenable to important questions. We wanted to investigate whether gender was different from sex; we wanted to find out if certain aspects of one or the other were learned rather than given; we wanted to know if gender and sex were written in stone or in the shifting sands of culture.
We were richly rewarded, as the psychology of the past 50 years has been enormously deepened and extended by this research. At present, theorists and researchers have been able to view and treat gender as a social construct and sex as biologically based.
Sex is coded into the DNA of every cell of every human and a discussion of the anomalies, such as intersex, is beyond the scope of this article, so I leave it to others. Unlike sex, gender is largely learned, while its specifics have been shown to differ in different cultures and at different times.
What used to be called trans-sexual has morphed into transgender and, in my mind, this again obscures the differences, as well as effects on each other, from further questions and research. This linguistic conflation is not accidental, but part of a cultural change that has no basis in scientific research, but instead in personal and political values. In fact, this cultural shift is largely refuted by today’s scientific research.
