Chapter 12. Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
12.1 The Difference between Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
When filling out a document such as a job application or school registration form people are often asked to provide their name, address, phone number, birth date, and sex or gender. But what if they were asked to provide their sex and their gender? It does not occur to many people that sex and gender are not the same. Sociologists view sex and gender as conceptually distinct for a number of reasons. Sex refers to physical or physiological differences between males and females, including both primary sex characteristics (the reproductive system) and secondary characteristics such as height and muscularity. Gender is a term that refers to social or cultural distinctions and roles associated with being male or female. Gender identity is the extent to which one identifies as being either masculine or feminine (Diamond, 2002). As gender is such a primary dimension of identity, socialization, institutional structures and life chances, sociologists refer to it as a core status.
The distinction between sex and gender is key to being able to examine gender as a social variable rather than biological variable. Contrary to the common way of thinking about it, gender is not determined by biology in any simple way. For example, the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s cross-cultural research in New Guinea in the 1930s was groundbreaking in its demonstration that cultures differ markedly in the ways that they perceive the gender “temperaments” of men and women; i.e., their masculinity and femininity (Mead, 1963). Unlike the qualities that defined masculinity and femininity in North America at the time, she saw both genders among the Arapesh as sensitive, gentle, cooperative, and passive, whereas among the Mundugumor both genders were assertive, violent, jealous, and aggressive. Among the Tchambuli, she described male and female temperaments as the opposite of those observed in North America. The women appeared assertive, domineering, emotionally inexpressive and managerial, while the men appeared emotionally dependent, fragile, and less responsible.
The experience of transgender people — people whose sense of gender does not correspond to their assigned sex at birth — also demonstrates that a person’s sex, as determined by their biology, does not always correspond with their gender. Therefore, the terms sex and gender are not interchangeable. A baby boy who is born with male genitalia will be identified as male. As he grows, however, he may identify with the feminine aspects of his culture. For example, it is physiologically normal for persons of the female sex, regardless of culture, to eventually menstruate and develop breasts that can lactate. The signs and characteristics of gender, on the other hand, may vary greatly between different societies as Margaret Mead’s research noted. For example, in American culture, it is considered feminine (or a trait of the female gend