The 5 differences between sex and gender
Psychology applied to the difference in behavior between men and women has always been a field of study that has provoked many controversies. This is due to the social repercussions that can have to defend one or the other vision about what it means to be "macho" or "female".
Next, we will examine which are the distinctive elements of two of the most used concepts in this field: the differences between sex and gender .
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What are sex and gender?
Since the beginning of history there is evidence that society expects different things from men and women , and that in turn men of women behave in a different way (to some extent).
However ... is this distinction between ways of thinking and acting that can be recognized between men and women is the result of their biology, or is it simply their effort to adapt to socially assigned roles? This is one of the fundamental questions that many researchers in biology and in anthropology and psychology have tried to answer.
To begin to understand the most accepted differences about what sex and gender are, let's first look at a relatively simple first definition of these concepts.
Sex is the set of biological characteristics that allows to differentiate the two types of subjects that intervene in sexual reproduction. Thus, this category refers to a categorization that depends on the way in which some forms of life have to perpetuate themselves, create new generations.
On the other hand, sex is composed of characteristics relatively easy to isolate from the rest of the organism, and observable in a laboratory environment with the appropriate instruments. In addition, sex is found in body parts and physical elements that are known in advance.
Gender, on the other hand, is something dynamic , which is expressed through actions, behavior. This means that it can not be known in a faithful way by making objective measurements, since it depends on a perspective provided by the language.
Gender is, to a certain extent, a psychological and symbolic phenomenon. What many experts and scientists are, as we will see, if there is biology behind it, or if sex and gender are totally dissociated and only seem to be united because of a type of social pressure inherited through the generations.
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The main differences between sex and gender
Now that we know what we are talking about, let's look at the differences between sex and gender.
1. Gender is a social construction, sex does not
It is necessary to qualify this, since any concept (be it tree, mountain or river) is a social construction. However, while sex refers to biologically developed elements without our being able to alter them, in the genre yes our ideas and expectations intervene .
For example, certain androgynous features in women, as a uniform thinness throughout the body, may seem unfeminine today, but in the 1920s they were feminine and sexually attractive. However, our assessment of things and our expectations does not change the fact that the vast majority of people are born with penis or vagina, being these attributes that contribute to identify someone's sex.
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2. The genre is unique to animals with abstract thinking
While we can locate sexes even in plants and fish , gender is only present in animals with a relatively high capacity for abstract thinking, the highest representative of which is the human being (in the past, perhaps, other species of the genus homo).
This is so because gender is, at least partially, a social construction, as we have seen, and to develop social constructions it is necessary to build a semantics and symbol systems about what is feminine and masculine.
3. Gender can be on a continuum, sex can not
As gender is mediated by culture, it is possible to see how the feminine and masculine is different among people, depending on their opinions. In turn, a person may feel neither feminine nor masculine, which means that their thinking applied to the self-image does not clearly categorize what is oneself. This, far from being something purely subjective, is evidence of verbal behavior (thought) fleeing from closed categories of the man / woman type.
Sex, however, can sometimes occur in very unusual ways, but in general, there is a very limited group of criteria that allow you to assess it: genitals, type of gonads and chromosomes, mainly.
4. Sex can not be performative
As we have seen, gender is at least partly symbolic. That means that it expresses itself in movement, what we do, while sex is static, depends on rapidly objectifying elements that are found in material elements. This makes the genre can be "negotiated" in conversations and in the way in which we relate with the rest.
For example, if a man goes through a bachelor party and tries to act in a feminine way, it is generally understood that he does comedy. However, in another context, that same action can be directly the expression of the genuine desire to be part of the female gender.
5. Sex has a different reproductive role
This is one of the fundamental differences between sex and gender. A woman, regardless of her perceptions regarding her gender, has a reproductive function different from that of a man : the passage through pregnancy, etc. Gender can lead to experiencing this fact in one way or another, but it does not change it.
