Let us be clear that, regardless of any philosophical theory or statements by any political or legal body (including the UK Supreme Court), there is no widescale consensus about what sex and gender are and how they relate to each other.[1] In the absence of consensus, I am primarily going to present my own framework. As it makes something of an appeal to common ground, and could perhaps even be seen as a golden mean of different positions, it has plenty of claims on legitimacy. Nevertheless, I am sure that some will see it as contentious.

I contend that sex and its classification is fundamentally about physicality. This means we need a word for things that are correlated (imperfectly) with sex i.e. social roles and so forth and the word gender is used to capture that. However, if the scope of gender is restricted to that, then it is unable to encompass those aspects of physicality that provide indication of the individual’s likely social role. Thus, gender necessarily extends into those aspects of physicality (visible secondary sex characteristics) which are definitely also part of our understanding of sex, as well as into borderline things that are physical and social such as clothing, voice, mannerisms, and deportment.

Recognising the limits of normal social interaction we thus have a conservative estimate of the bounds of gender. However, it is not unreasonable, considering the desire for living as full a human life as possible, to extend the idea of the social into the intimate domain, and thus to include what could be observed by a sexual partner or by a relatively cursory medical examination. This would then include the primary sex characteristics, particularly the visible sex organs.

Thinking along these lines it is clear that it is impossible to define a boundary between sex and gender. Consequently, a typical resolution of other thinkers is either to extend gender ‘all the way in’ so that drills down into the biology or alternatively to extend sex ‘all the way out’ beyond my assumed physical definition to include the social aspects that (imperfectly) correlate with the physical. This leads to a situation where gender and sex can then be superficially viewed as being identical in their coverage though springing from entirely different paradigms! To be clear I do not take this approach as the potential for confusion in terms of communication and understanding is enormous. Yet another approach that has been taken is to use the boundary definition for sex as physical but to then disregard all non-physical aspects and leave them unclaimed, with the word gender either abolished or, perhaps if used at all, as a synonym for sex. However, for as long as we are an embodied and social species, we will always observe the (imperfect) correlations that exist between sex and social behaviour.[2] Consequently the social idea of gender will always re-assert itself if the attempt made to abolish it.

Meanwhile my own conception of sex and gender does not attempt to completely disentangle them and instead leaves them to overlap but with different emphases and imperfect correlation.

I contend it is then possible to change gender by adopting another social role and changing physical gender cues as much as possible. This potentially also changes some aspects of sex (e.g. hormones, secondary and maybe primary sex characteristics) but leaves open the possibility that, for example if you (unlike me) define sex by chromosomes or by gonadal tissue or by genitalia at birth, that you will not view sex as fundamentally changed. From a trans perspective, and for the definitions I will ultimately present, this actually doesn’t matter as long as gender as a bio-social idea is respected as the commonality typically desired by trans people and is viewed as a meaningful idea by society at large. It does however matter from an intersex perspective: as previously posted actually defining biological sex is more complex than simply sex chromosomes or gonads/birth genitalia.

However, the gender critical position is that of bio-essentialism i.e. only biology matters in terms of making a judgment of sex and that gender is either meaningless (in the social sense) or is simply another word for sex. Therefore we see that the gender critical position is to completely deny the very commonality (gender) that trans people identify with and yearn for. When looked at clearly it is an attempt at erasing trans people by removing the foundation of our identity.

Having said that, an expressed concern in much gender critical thinking seems to be that the concept of gender was supposedly being used to erase the concept of biological sex, with the definition of a man/woman becoming ‘whoever identifies as one’. The fact that such self-identification seemingly floats free of biology would be problematic if it were the totality of such definitions. In reality, it is simply an operational definition (given an implicit understanding of what a man/woman is) but this does still mean that explicit definitions that reference biological roots could be very helpful and will be introduced in my next post. Please note then that I continue to use biological sex as part of my own framework despite the other glaring difficulty that we approach, and have already mentioned in the previous post: namely that there is no single characteristic that uniquely and unerringly determines biological sex. There is no characteristic that is both necessary and sufficient. This applies even before we admit trans people into consideration or consider those properties that can be changed by human means. As previously posted it is most obviously demonstrated through various intersex conditions. Given these difficulties it could well seem strange to some readers that I do retain the idea of biological sex. However, it does not need to be precisely defined if deployed in the fashion that I will do in my next post.

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[1] For this reason ‘common sense’ is sometimes a tempting recourse. However, this is not at all satisfactory, as we may most obviously discover now that our society starts to grapple with how we include (or, sadly, exclude) trans people who ‘pass’ extremely well.

[2] Unless of course no one could know anyone else’s sex or, alternatively but frighteningly (as it feels a logical extrapolation of the current anti-trans sentiment), absolute gender conformity was ruthlessly enforced.