"King For a Day, Princess by Dawn"

Gender is more than just a polite way of asking someone what sex organs they have. The idea of gender should be separated from biological sex. Although it may have started as a secondary representation of biological sex, it is now its own distinct category. Out of the 38 million people living in Canada, “100,815 [are] transgender or non-binary” (Statistics Canada). These people have experienced first hand the dichotomy between sex and gender and have separated them in their minds. Intersex people also experienced this, and break society’s claim that gender and sex are one and the same. Gender expression is fluid and varies around the world, in comparison to sex, which is consistent throughout cultures everywhere. The two should be separated because there are many physical and cultural reasons as to why they are distinct.

Intersex people exist outside of what society considers the gender binary to be, and are living proof that biological sex is not the same thing as gender. They have always been an anomaly in society’s preconceived notion of what gender is. The definition of an intersex person is someone whose “sexual development follows an atypical trajectory,” and they “disrupt the societal ideas of binary male and female” (Montañez). Peter Chow and Mikayla Jeffery suggest that “the conventional dichotomization of sex and gender into male and female has been found to be far from adequate in representing the amount of variance that exists within each biological sex” (Chow & Jeffrey 1). This article states that there are two genders solely because there are two sexes. This notion is derailed by extensive research around intersex people. There are at least “three sexes, aside from male and female,[…]the three subgroups of intersexed individuals [are] true hermaphrodites, male pseudohermaphrodites, and female pseudohermaphrodites” (Chow & Jeffery 3). Forcing people who are pseudohermaphrodites (those whose chromosomal sex is inconsistent with their genitalia) to conform to the only two genders that are widely recognized in society is hypocritical because for the longest time, gender had to match biological sex. With this logic, intersex people should have a gender for each subgroup. Something that is an issue specifically in more wealthy countries is sex reassignment surgeries on babies. In a medical journal about intersex human rights, it is written that “wherever medicine is accessible, people with intersex variations may be subjected to medical interventions to make their bodies more typically female or male without personal informed consent; typically in infancy, childhood or adolescence” (Carpenter 2). People who believe that providing gender affirming care like chest feminization or masculinization to teens is wrong should also believe that assigning a sex to an intersex baby and performing these surgeries on them is wrong. The difference between whether the individual is consenting or not renders these people hypocritical. This is another reason why gender identity should be separate from biological, because then people who are intersex could grow up as whichever gender they most connect to and proceed accordingly later in life.

Additionally, Gender expression and biological sex are two very separate things. Gender is an ever changing entity, and was created solely as a way to categorise people. The idea of gender originally came from the realisation that for androgynous people, “identification as male or female could not be uniformly associated with or predicted from the biological indicators” (Sonali 3). This explains that gender was created as a secondary label for biological sex because it was not always possible to tell which sex characteristics androgynous people had. Although gender may have originated as a reflection of biological sex, it has become its own form of identification over time. It has changed enough that using it only as a representation of sex does not work anymore. Some people still believe that the idea of gender is always in line with biological sex, and that anyone who believes otherwise is just mentally ill. An anonymous writer on Natural News argues that “manhood and womanhood are inborn psychological constructs” (Natural News). They continue on to say that “men act like men, women act like women, and these behaviours have been established as biological fact from the beginning of recorded history” (Natural News). How is it possible for a societal construct to also be an inborn psychological construct? There have always been people who exist outside the gender binary, whether it be people who crossdressed in the early 1900s, or women who did stereotypical “men’s jobs”. The reason that men act like men and women act like women is because there are so many rules society has created around what defines these genders. For example, it is assumed that women will want children and will be able to have them. Although people with female biology will always be the ones bearing children, that does not mean that all women can bear children. Whether it’s because she is a transgender woman or because she is infertile, a woman may not be able to get pregnant. The key difference between the two is that the word “woman” is a label for someone’s gender, whereas “female'' is the label for biology. It is the same for men. People with male biology are not able to get pregnant or menstruate, but there are men who can do both of these. There are other expectations around gender as well, like how men are supposed to be the providers and how women are always extremely feminine and weak, to name a few. People are physically hurt and ostracised from society when they break these rules, so they choose to conform instead. Just because people follow these societal roles doesn’t mean that they are always comfortable with their biological sex and how they are presenting their gender. Gender has been an influential way to classify people for so long that it has become an aspect of our psyche. A fitting description of the concept of gender is that “gender identity denotes a person's 'internal sense of self'”(Sonali 1). It aligns with the description of transgender people being those who were born in the wrong body. A popular way to describe how it feels to be transgender is that you are a boy born in a girl's body or vice versa. This is because sometimes, people’s gender identity does not line up with what their biological sex is. Gender is a very different thing than biological sex, and sex is not a physical manifestation of gender identity.

Lastly, many cultures around the world already have more genders than there are biological sexes, and are proving the possibility of biological sex being separated from gender. The western view of gender is not one that exists throughout the world. According to Funk and Wagnalls World Encyclopedia, there are “some Native American cultures [that] have formally acknowledged genders that combine male and female elements” (Funk and Wagnalls World Encyclopedia). Allowing people to express who they are through their gender is something that has been a part of these cultures for hundreds of years. It derails the idea that a third gender is a new concept and also that gender has to be a direct reflection of physical characteristics. There are many different ways that gender identities are presented. In western societies, “women can be distinguished from men on the basis of make-up and hairstyle, in addition to differences in facial structure. In contrast, women in Asian cultures may cover their hair and wear minimal makeup” (Gul & Humphreys 2). Gender is a performance, and there are many different styles of performing. People have different bone structure, skin tone, height, and body type and yet are categorised into two boxes; man and woman. The only consistent similarity between women of all different cultures is their biology, likewise with men. How can “girl” and “boy” or “man” and “woman” mean the same thing in all of these different cultures? Gender is displayed in such a wide variety of ways that having only two is restricting. People argue that these genders that “break the binary” are actually just men and women exhibiting symptoms of mental illness, and that they are not actually their own genders. They have been described as “males who partially or completely assume culturally defined female roles” (Funk and Wagnalls World Encyclopedia). The argument that these are just men pretending to be women (or vice versa) is harmful to these cultures because they are considered to be a completely separate gender. Regardless of their biology, these are people who are in their own category and have their own role in society. Sex and gender are not the same thing and if western society ever wishes to reconcile with other cultures, they will have to separate the two to allow for people of different genders and societies to relate better.

To conclude, biological sex and gender are not only very different things, but it has also been proven that it is possible to separate the two. Gender and sex should be separated from each other because people who are intersex should not be forced to choose a gender to become, gender has warped into a completely different construct and can no longer be used to represent biological sex, and because there are already cultures with a third gender that breaks the unity of sex and gender. People will be able to feel confident in themselves and more people of diverse cultures will be able to interact if biological sex and gender are separated.

Citations

Carpenter, Morgan. “Intersex Human Rights, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Sex Characteristics and the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10.” Culture, Health & Sexuality, vol. 23, no. 4, Apr. 2021, pp. 516–32. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2020.1781262.

Chow, Peter, and Jeffery, Mikayla. “The Reliability and Validity of the Anima-Animus Continuum Scale.” Education, vol. 138, no. 3, Spring 2018, pp. 264–70. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=128637050&site=ehost-live.

“Gender.” Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, Jan. 2018, p. 1; EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=funk&AN=ge024450&site=ehost-live.

Green Day. “King for a Day.” Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/track/3b2Tnh3Dd9ahRoNm28RfNM?si=0f6db17ac01c43bd

Gul, Amara, and Glyn W. Humphreys. “Cultural Effects in Emotion and Gender Recognition.” Asian Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 17, no. 1, Mar. 2014, pp. 70–80. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12039.

Montañez, Amanda. “Beyond Xx and Xy.” Scientific American, vol. 317, no. 3, Sept. 2017, pp. 50–51. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rch&AN=124854094&site=ehost-live

Morland, I. “Management of Intersex.” Lancet, vol. 358, no. 9298, Dec. 2001, pp. 2085–86. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(01)07121-5.

Natural News. “Trans women are men and pretending otherwise is cultural insanity.” Natural News, 28 March 2022, https://naturalnews.com/2022-03-28-transwomen-are-men-pretending-otherwise-cultural-insanity.html. Accessed 7 November 2022.

Sillars, Les. “The Limits of Gender.” Alberta Report / Newsmagazine, vol. 25, no. 32, July 1998, p. 27. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=893757&site=ehost-live.

Sonali, De. “Transgender: Revisiting the Concepts and Context.” Indian Journal of Positive Psychology, vol. 13, no. 2, June 2022, pp. 190–93. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=158237319&site=ehost-live.

“The Daily — Canada is the first country to provide census data on transgender and non-binary people.” Statistics Canada, 27 April 2022, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm. Accessed 9 November 2022.