Feminism, sex, and gender

There is a very good reason to distinguish between sex and gender. There are states of being human and states of being a person in a social role that must be named and understood by all humans because of how we have structured our societies, including our legal structures. To not understand the distinction is to acquiesce to the continued discrimination against people of a certain sex.

In general, when people understand that there is a biological reality at work, our frame of reference allows for new understanding overall. Before we understood that there were things like bacteria, humans had all kinds of crazy ideas about what caused diseases and did crazy things as a result (we burned people to death for being witches, for example). Biological fact frees us from our superstitions if we’ll pay attention. When we admit the unique and significant nature of women’s reproductive biology, that clarifies a central reality in girls’ and women’s lives. Then when we see that clearly, we can also see how the concept of “femininity,” and the social ideas about women’s proper roles and behavior, act to obfuscate the important distinction between being female and being male. And it isn’t in how we “present” to other people.

To clarify for the purposes of this discussion, there is a female biology and a male biology, and a gender called “woman” and a gender called “man.” In everyday conversation we mix and match these terms somewhat, although “male” and “female” sound more formal and we tend to use them that way. It’s not possible to speak naturally about females without using the word “woman” or males without using the word “man,” but we should be able to see the specific areas where the distinction  in those terms matters. Here we’re specifically talking about the difference between sex and gender. And further, that being female is not about being feminine and being male is not about being masculine.

The concept of femininity is an element of gender and gender is wholly a social construct. We know this because the ideas about what makes a “man” a “man” and a “woman” a “woman” have changed throughout history and especially in the last 100 years. The concept of masculinity, which is attached to the idea of “man” has also changed throughout history. As has the concept of femininity. What is masculine or feminine has varied across time and cultures. Many people alive today have lived through an era where men were not nurses and women were not astronauts and those ideas were considered completely normal and natural.

Gender is created and understood as a concept because humans need a way to divide each other into categories. We do it all the time and often not for benign purposes. The idea of the two genders is built on group customs, superstitions, historical practices, and learned behavior. There is nothing biologically innate in gender — scientists have been trying to find it for hundreds of years in our physiology and there is less evidence for it as a physical reality with each study.

Even still, scientists continue to study this phenomena because it is so prevalent in human societies. Exactly as our ideas and superstitions about race endure despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. So we have to ask why the idea is so prevalent, even when we can see that it has no basis in fact. Who would benefit if there were two social roles, one that is dominant and one that is submissive? If there are demonstrably two types of human physiology, who would benefit if the people who had one particular physiology were treated differently than the people who had the other physiology? And you’d have to ask, why and how would they benefit?

Humans are fully capable of ordering their world hierarchically using whatever means they have to do so. We want to believe that we are rational beings, but the evidence is clear that we make decisions for reasons other than fact. And we act with violence and discrimination based on the hierarchies we create. By understanding this, we have a way of framing the reasons that no matter what females do in the world, they keep being treated as second-class citizens.

Not very long ago, we came to a social understanding that biological sex had nothing to do with whether females could be astronauts, presidents, or construction workers.  But the discrimination against females taking on those roles remained. So we needed an explanation of why this continued to happen. Gender is the frame we need to understand why a person who is perfectly capable of being whatever their body and mind will allow them to be and do, is still held to very specific standards of “man” and “woman,” “masculine” and “feminine.” Clarified this way, we can easily see that gender is just the facade that we built on the foundation of physiological sex. So we have to look beyond the facade.

It is the female reproductive biology that not only marks them as different from males, but places them at unique risk for most of their lives. We figured out a long time ago that rape is not about sex, it is about power. And we continued to think about that — if it was just about power, why weren’t weaker males raped at the same rate as females? They most definitely are not. The answer is because of female reproductive biology. Rape takes on a completely different meaning when that reality is factored in. Females as a class represent a state of impregnability, whether individuals can get pregnant or not. That’s an abstraction and helpful at that level, but let’s also get down to how life is actually lived.

Pregnancy for women is a completely life-changing event. The decision about getting pregnant (or when the decision is taken away through rape or accident), carrying a child, giving birth to a child, and raising a child falls on a girl or woman far harder because of her direct biological connection to the impregnation, the pregnancy, and the child. Women know all of this, they tell their daughters and young girls about it, and all live their lives with the constant awareness of it. Many societies seem to have tried very hard to downplay the nature of this and again, we have to ask, to whose benefit is it if society pretends that women do not have this unique and significant vulnerability? Conversely, who benefits if that vulnerability is highlighted?

The threat of that state of being is forever in women’s lives and both women and men know that from the time they learn the biological facts of their bodies. A boy is told: you can make a girl or woman be pregnant and the converse isn’t true. It’s a power that we completely take for granted on the surface, but pass on as a deep human superstition and ritual. Even when a female herself is not impregnable, the superstitions and social reactions related to that reality remain attached to any and all females. Rape is based in a social ritual of power-over that wouldn’t exist but for women’s reproductive biology. The current rush by male legislators to deny women the right to abort pregnancies (and even to prevent them from having access to birth control) is directly connected to women’s unique capacity for giving birth.

Could it be any more obvious why “sex” as a concept matters? And that the rituals and superstitions that attach to “female” also attach to “femininity,” and hence to gender, which in turn only confuses what is really going on? Clear away gender markers such as clothing and hair style, and the reality becomes obvious. It is therefore very easy to see that there are people who are demonstrably harmed in specific ways in human experience, not based on how they present to the world (that’s just trappings), but because of whether they are impregnable and therefore a member of the class of people who are. A female who appears to be masculine is still impregnable and men and women know this. A male who presents as feminine is not impregnable, and men and women know this.

The important place that we finally arrived at in legal terms was to say that certain humans are discriminated against because of their biological sex, not their appearance. This was a major step forward. We cleared away the obfuscation of gender and could clearly see that the harm done to women is because of their biological sex. It is because of the superstitions that attach to that sex that they have been denied all the rights that men have had throughout history. Women were specifically told that they couldn’t be astronauts and presidents and construction workers because of their reproductive organs and the related physiological and psychological effects. Those superstitions did not evaporate, they are just hidden. And that’s why it should be even more clear why it matters whether gender and sex are conflated into one thing.

The way this conflation happens is through the concept of “gender identity” — that is, the person accepts the gender role of man or woman, regardless of that person’s biology. A biological male can “identify” as a woman and a biological female can “identify” as a man. Remember that there is absolutely no scientifically-proven evidence that gender (man and woman, masculinity and femininity) has a biological basis. The only thing that is provable is whether someone is female with XX chromosomes or male with XY chromosomes and has the primary sex characteristics that almost always accompany those genotypes. (Intersex conditions do nothing to refute this. Just as the fact that a very small percentage of people are born without arms does not convince us that having arms is not a standard state for humans.)

What happens when we say that anyone who says they are a woman is a woman, is that sex is erased as a meaningful category for a legal basis for discrimination. If sex is the same as gender and gender is whatever an individual says it is, then there is no way to create laws that protect females as a biological sex. That class of people who are demonstrably at risk specifically because of their biology would have no recourse in such a scenario. The law would only protect those people who claim to have a “gender identity” and that would leave out the vast majority of both women and men. Or it would force anyone who wanted redress of their grievances about the pay they are getting at work, the treatment they are getting at school, or the opportunities they have in the military to claim a “gender identity” — whether they believed that or not.

Well, why is that a big deal? Don’t women want to be women and men want to be men? We’re back to superstitions. Remember that the societies we live in are based on separating classes of people and dividing them hierarchically. We could use many examples of how this turns out for certain people, but one in the news recently is the fact that women — and women alone — are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. This is not because they “identify” as women, it is because their culture identifies the people of their biology as an inferior class of people who shouldn’t have certain rights. But you don’t have to go to extremes to see that women shouldn’t have to identify as anything other than “human.” And if we aren’t specifically working toward that, we are supporting the status quo.

Current forms of discrimination against females and the denial of certain opportunities would not only continue, but would become even more intractable. Because of the conflation with gender and all the markers of it, males are already considered in most human societies to be the smarter, more courageous, more capable of the two sexes. If someone presents as the typical gender associated with male, they have automatic rights all over the world. While it is an extreme example, looking at Saudi Arabia laws is also a way of seeing a problem clearly. If “gender identity” were the sole basis for legal discrimination claims in a scenario like Saudi Arabia’s, females presenting as men would be able to drive, but “women” still would not be able to. In other words, what appears to solve the discrimination problem actually makes it worse.

If “gender identity” is the basis for discrimination claims, females are forced to “identify” as women knowing that the vast majority of human societies have deemed them inferior. They can either do that or identify as “man.” There would be no other choice. Is it acceptable to force every female to make that choice whether she feels like a “woman” or not? What if she just wants to be seen as human, with rights that should accrue to all humans, but which have traditionally only accrued to males? And let’s be clear, in no way will the male gender role be changed by any of this. Men will go right on having the assumed rights and status they have now.

This is because, beyond how a person identifies themselves, society will continue to make decisions about who is ranked higher in the hierarchies we live with at work and socially. But there will be no way of breaking that down through legal means. The only people who would get to have their grievances of unfair treatment addressed would be those who could prove they were discriminated because of their chosen gender. This is the opposite of what sex discrimination laws were intended to address. Instead of supporting the rights of fully half of all humans, only people who perform feminine rituals and appear “feminine” to other people would get their discrimination complaints heard.

Isn’t it obvious that in a society where powerful men are still trying to control women’s reproductive choices, that such a thing would turn out very badly for females? If gender and sex are conflated, and “gender identity” is all that matters for making decisions about what rights certain people have, females who do not want to identify as “women” and all that means (in the proper social forms and with the proper kinds of proof, of course), will have the most to lose and we will have undone many decades of struggle to ensure that that wasn’t the case.

So in the end we have to ask: Should we allow a handful of people to conflate two very distinct concepts and codify that in law, when the consequence for females will be to lose so much ground in our fight for the right to be just humans?