Sex and Gender

Sex

As part of the tsunami of nonsense hitting the West at the moment is the committed inability of media to handle this simple issue. To misquote Confucius "if you get the name wrong, then nothing follows." Critics would say the spreading of nonsense is a way to castrate the population and stop it being an effective political force. Anyway on topic the difference is thus:

Sex is biological. It is something that can be determined on the mortuary slab. In an intact relatively freshly dead organism (and this applies to all organisms including plants) you can determine its sex by a variety of methods. An examination of genitals can supply information.

Here for example is the female genital on the Hazel tree (Corylus avellana). The tree is not itself male or female as it also has male genitals in the form of more famous catkins. 

However it is a simple matter to identify the two types of genitals the male and the female. In some trees like the Holly, trees have one or the other genital and can be referred to as male or female trees.

All animals are like this with genitals developing into either female or male genitals. There are only 2 types of genitals and only two types of sex.

This is not the only way to define sex. Chromosome differences also correlate with sex.

Now there are aberrations. Sometimes genetic sex differs from genital expression. But there are only two sexes to play with here, and even aberrations are just versions of this.

Now to be really specific the fundamental difference between the male and the female is to do with how the sex cells produced by the gonads behave.

In the male the sex cells are mobile and the female they are not. So in plants males produce pollen which is small and mobile and travels by wind or other means to the female ovary. In mosses the males produce sperm and in most other organisms males also produce sperm.

In long dead organisms where DNA is no longer extractable analysis of bones can determine sex where there is sexual dimorphism. Female humans for example undergo skeletal changes to the pelvis at adolescence to make room for childbirth. But in pre-adolescent individuals this cannot be done and it is impossible to determine sex. I assume but don't know the extent to which similar dimorphism can be used to determine sex in dinosaurs which are just rock imprints of organisms. But some sex information is most likely still available.

So this is biological sex and it is a really obvious an demonstrable feature of all organisms.

Gender

Now gender is not so easy to determine after death. Gender covers things like differences in social roles, clothing, identity. It is poorly defined and is a learned social feature. You learn for instance to wear makeup, wear high heels or never cry (as Cure reminds us in the song "Boys don't cry" (which is ironic as he obviously wants to cry)).

Commentary

Now when people talk about fluidity they are clearly talking about Gender. Yes you can do whatever you want, and yes people who have learned to do things one way will complain if you do it another way. Really nothing unusual about any of this. Yes a man can wear makeup if he wants, but a lot of people will ask why he would do this when it is reserved in this society for women. Challenging the social norms is obviously going to cause friction and there is nothing noble or prejudice about this. This is what norms are. To deny people the change to have norms is its own type of fascism so no one is better or worse here. Political movements that take sides are profoundly ill conceived.

And yes its seems some people develop problems with their sex. But they need to remember when they die and are no longer around to argue they will be judged by the physical shape of their bodies and structure of their DNA. If dying makes a difference then we are talking about Gender. So it is really odd that some people with gender issues should take this further and try to disguise their physical sex. You can pay money and mask this but you are not changing it. One would need to ask why they would wish to fake a different sex and why they cannot accept what they were born with. But these are psychological issues that end the moment they die.

Hardliners may continue that the physical and genetic structure of their bodies means nothing and their identity is something they can chose. If I want to be female then I am female. However the problem with this is, if the physical form does not matter then why are they so opposed to people making judgements about the physical? It seems what is really going on here is some people are in denial and they absolutely refuse to hear anyone remind them of this. Now why anyone would get so neurotic about something that doesn't really matter that much is the main mystery here. Who cares if you are male or female? People have to be one of the other so why should anyone be so personally upset by what they get?

I imagine this is no more than parents getting a girl when they wanted a boy. So parents go for a sex change of their child or do they learn to live with it? That gives a good guide to people with sex identity issues how to deal with it.