Sex versus Gender
Biological sex is a physical reality. Gender is a social construct. In the current postmodern realm of thought, the two are intermingled and smashed together. Yet, like water and oil, the two cannot be combined. Advocates of transgender ideology seized the social understandings of language that humans have utilized for millennia, and manipulated them in order to progress sexist agendas and the erasure of women’s sex-based rights and protected spaces. What proponents of gender ideology fail to accept is that emulsification is merely a temporarily stable process. Despite attempts at equivocating the meanings of sex and gender, the forced fusion of sex and gender is inherently unstable, and the two concepts naturally separate when society continues to develop a shared understanding of reality and what it means to be human.
The History of Gender
The word “gender” originates from circa 14th century Old French “gendre,” meaning “kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits.” The term was originally used to describe classes of people. The earliest known recording of the word “gender” being used to distinguish biological sex was in 1474, when the term was written in a letter to describe a man as the “masculine gender.” Up until the early 20th century, “gender” truly was synonymous with “sex.” In the public sphere, as “sex” became commonly known as referring to sexual intercourse, people began increasingly using the word “gender” in conversation when referring to the sex of an individual. Meanwhile in the academic sphere, beginning in the 1950s, “gender” began to refer to something separate from biological sex.
Prior to the 1950s, references to sex as “gender” were exceedingly rare in academia. Beginning in 1955, sexologist John Money introduced the term “gender role” in the paper “Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism: psychologic findings” as a way of signifying all the actions and behaviors a person does to disclose themselves as having the “status” of a boy or man, or girl or woman. Money found this notion of a “gender role” useful in his studies in sexological science in order “to make it possible to write about people who came into one’s office as either male or female, but of whom it could not be said that their sex role in the specific genital sense was either male or female insofar as they had a history of birth defect of sex organs.” Money’s original concept of “gender” was created as a way to understand how intersex people chose to portray themselves to society.
In the early 1960s, the newfound usage of “gender” took off in the academic sphere to include individuals who did not conform to sex-based stereotypes, like transsexuals and transvestites. Starting in the late 1960s, “gender” began to be used to not only describe individuals who went against sex-based stereotypes, but also those who conformed to sex-based stereotypes. Articles began focusing on discerning which sex-based stereotypes were biological versus social, and academics began to distinguish between biological sex and social gender.
Beginning in the 1970s, feminists began working with the differentiations between the biological sex and the societally-derived gender that emerged from the academic sphere. By the 1980s, the usage of “gender” as a societal distinction from biological sex became widely adopted in feminist discourse. The blurring of “sex” and “gender” in feminist debates occurred when there were difficulties in distinguishing whether certain situations occurred either due to biological or social reasons, or from an interaction between biology and human culture. As feminists discussed and debated amongst themselves the distinctions and importance between biological sex and societal gender roles, authors peering in from outside of the feminist circles misinterpreted “gender” as simply a synonym for “sex” and adopted the term as such in their own writings.
As a result of the discovery and usage of “gender” to refer to societal sex-based roles, academic papers from the 1970s and onwards began to use “sex” and “gender” interchangeably. Reasons given for this modern misuse of the word “gender” when referring to biological sex were cited as either an uninformed, surface-level sympathy for the feminist movement; an attempt to use a more “academic-sounding” term; or an attempt to avoid misunderstandings between “biological sex” and “sexual intercourse.”
Gender Misused in Place of Sex
As gender and sex became intermingled and misused with each other throughout the decades, advocates of transgender ideology used this lack of clarity to their advantage. Formerly sex-separated spaces like bathrooms, locker rooms, spas, and domestic shelters now became suggested to be separated by “gender identity.” Furthermore, some governments began to allow transgender-identifying individuals to change the sex on their birth certificates and identification licenses to match their “innate gender identity.” The concept of “self ID” made it even simpler for people to casually change their legal sex to now be based on their “gender identity.”
The media has now reported cases of “transwomen,” men who pretend to be women, intruding into women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and spas, much to the discomfort of actual women. These men have been reported to harass women in their areas of work or places of privacy. In Canada, a transgender-identifying man filed fifteen complaints of “discrimination” at over twelve different spas after female estheticians refused to consent to waxing his male genitalia. In Washington state, a traditional Korean spa, which caters exclusively to female clientele and whose services require full nudity, was sued by a transgender-identifying man with fully in-tact male genitalia for refusing to allow him entry into the women-only spa. In Ohio, a YMCA is facing backlash for allowing a transgender-identifying man in women’s locker rooms; this man was reported to have leered at girls and women in the locker rooms, talked about masturbation to female YMCA employees, and sexually assaulted a female YMCA employee. These are not isolated incidents; women now face increasing harassment and abuse from mentally unstable men, with diminishing legal recourse, as “gender identity” continues to get codified into law at the expense of biological sex.
Gender ideology advocates have been abusing women’s sex-based protected spaces and rights under the guise of “everyone” having a “gender identity,” thus supposedly rendering biological sex irrelevant. Yet their sexist notion of a “gender identity” could not exist without the foundational reality of biological sex. How stereotypically “masculine” or “feminine” someone chooses to convey themselves according to their culture’s societal norms, or what a person chooses to think of themselves as a man or a woman, has nothing to do with their actual sex. A man who is gender nonconforming or identifies as a “transwoman” is still male; a woman who is gender nonconforming or identifies as a “transman” is still female. Sexual dimorphism is the reason humans separated intimate spaces by sex, not because of societal “gender norms.”
Historical Observations of Sex Separation for Intimate Activities
Humans establishing and documenting sex-separation for intimate activities has been noted throughout history, since ancient times. A Greek vase dated circa 430 BCE depicts three nude women bathing while a female servant assists them. The Stabian Baths in Pompeii, constructed circa 125 BCE, were observed to have separate facilities for women and men. The myth of Diana and Actaeon from the Latin poem Metamorphoses, circa 8 CE, details the encounter of the hunter Actaeon stumbling upon the goddess Diana taking a bath with her nymphs. Diana is infuriated that a man came across her while she was bathing, and the enraged goddess turns Actaeon into a stag, whereupon he is found and killed by his own hunting dogs. Circa 1496, German artist Albrecht Dürer created two separate woodcuts titled “The Women’s Bath” and “The Men’s Bath,” each showing sex-separated social bathing in Germany. In the 1780s, Japanese artist Torii Kiyonaga created the woodblock print “Onnna yu,” featuring seven women and one child bathing together socially. Even though it was not until the Meiji Restoration in 1868 that sex-separation was strictly enforced at Japanese bath houses, this woodblock print suggests women chose to gather and bathe together regardless of their ability to participate in mixed-sex bath houses. A letter from 1786 describing the American Healing Springs explained that women made use of the springs “in the morning till nine o’clock,” and “from that time till twelve o’clock,” men had use of the springs. History shows that sex separation for intimate activities has been a commonly occurring theme throughout various human cultures.
The Sensibility of Sex Separation
As transgender ideology seeps into the mainstream and the realities of transgender policy are impacting more and more people, women began to assert their boundaries of not wanting biological men to usurp female people’s hard-fought legal rights and protections. Instead of addressing the impact of men colonizing women’s spaces, advocates of gender ideology decided to claim sex-separated spaces are based on outdated and “regressive” patriarchal notions, in some twisted effort to suggest women don’t really need or want sex-based spaces and protections. People spouting such postmodern claims are quick to ignore the oppression and degradation women have faced throughout human history, by virtue of being the female sex.
Sexual harassment of women during intimate activities has been detailed throughout history. The Book of Daniel, written circa 165 BCE, details the story of Susanna, a woman who desired to bathe in a garden and was then subsequently blackmailed for sex by two men when her female servants briefly left her alone. Susanna refused to have sex with the men, who then accused her of adultery to her community, nearly condemning her to death. The myth of Arethusa and Alpheus from the Latin poem Metamorphoses, circa 8 CE, describes the nymph Arethusa enjoying a bath in a spring when a male god, Alpheus, stumbles upon her and attempts to rape her. Arethusa tries to escape by running away and cries out for help from the goddess Diana, who hears Arethusa’s calls and transforms the nymph’s female form into a fresh water spring in order to prevent her rape. Sexual harassment of women who need to relieve themselves can even be seen in the “humorous” 1772 artwork “A Beau Cacher,” by Louis-Marin Bonnet. The artwork depicts a young woman who lacks access to a public toilet and has to relieve herself on a public street. An older woman is shown standing in front of the young woman, protecting her from an upcoming man on the street, while another man on a building’s upper balcony inconspicuously leers at the urinating woman’s bare backside. Even in fictional historical accounts, women in vulnerable situations are subjected to degradation or sexual violence from men.
In actual happenings, humanity remains as vivid in its sexual harassment of women as it does in fiction. In 1886, it was noted that young women and girls working in a Brooklyn worsted goods mill were the victims of sexual harassment at the hands of the mill foremen and other men. These women sought the support of the newly formed Central Labor Union, who prosecuted the men involved in the sexual harassment of the female mill workers. In 1908, the India Factory Commission reported that women working in the rice mills claimed they were “often molested by men laborers whenever they went to the latrines in the dark.” The Commission sympathized with the exploited female Indian workers, acknowledging the difficult dilemma of a marginalized woman of color admitting such harassment to the mill authorities and risking losing her “moral reputation” and livelihood, while her male assailants avoided any punishment. In the present day, countries like Japan and India have had to create women-only passenger cars in order to address the sexual harassment that women in these regions endure in public at the hands of men. Women’s desire to stay safe by avoiding interactions with unfamiliar men is not unfounded nor unreasonable.
When one is so far gone in the realm of postmodernism that they detach themselves from reality and live in a fantasy world made purely of social constructs, it is quite easy and convenient to dismiss what it means to physically live in a female body. Assault of women includes rape. Rape of women can result in pregnancy. Pregnancy as a result of rape forces a woman to face the painful choice of deciding whether to carry a rapist’s child, or go through the emotional and physical stress of an abortion. Pregnancy, whether carried through by choice of the woman or forced via misogynistic laws, can result in grievous bodily injury to a woman, and possibly even her death. These are realistic reasons that justify sex-separated spaces as for the health and safety of women as a sex-based class.
The notion that sex-separated intimate spaces “oppress” women is so far detached from the substantial risks female people face as a sex-based class that it borders on absurdity. Taking into account the anatomical differences and statistical strength disparity between men and women is not sexist; it is realistic. Providing women private spaces where they can complete intimate activities while in public is not regressive; it is equitable. Women deserve safe public spaces where they can use the bathroom, cleanse themselves, and seek shelter from domestic abuse, without risk of assault, rape, or pregnancy due to the actions of abusive men.
The Desire to Separate Sex and Gender
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This notion can be witnessed now, with women clashing against the realities of what gender identity laws and “self ID” mean for female people. Women and girls now face discomfort that male people can legally intrude into formerly protected and intimate women’s spaces, where men previously would have been societally barred from. Organizations like Women's Liberation Front (WoLF) have now been formed; women are once again fighting for the human rights and protections of the female class.
Even women who support transgender ideology have been attempting “polite” ways to differentiate between the female-bodied and the male-bodied, much to the protests and anger of men who continuously demand the “right” to invade women’s spaces. When advocates of transgender ideology began dictating that the word “women” also include delusional men, conflicted women — who desired separation from men while still hoping to remain politically correct — attempted to meekly request “assigned female at birth,” or “AFAB,” roommates, companions, and communities. Even as proponents of gender ideology attempt to twist language to coerce women to put up with men in their intimate spaces, women are continuing to seek out ways to connect with and be around actual women, for their personal safety and comfort.
Even if all the historical reasons for sex-separation being argued as for the protection, instead of the oppression, of women are wrong, and all these examples really were for misogynistic or patriarchal reasons, how does that negate women’s desires and demands for sex-based rights and protections now in the present day? Boundaries are to be respected, that includes women’s sex-based boundaries. Until men as a sex-based class learn to behave and not rape, assault, and abuse women, women as a sex-based class have every right to speak up and demand protections in order to have a safe and equitable life in modern society.
Achieving a Mutual Understanding
What is a woman? A person wearing a dress, heels, and makeup? Or is it an adult female human? What is a man? A person who ignores emotions and lets their body hair grow freely? Or is it an adult male human? What does it mean to be a man or a woman? Does it mean conforming to sexist stereotypes? Or is it simply acknowledging the immutably sexed body one is born with? In a world rife with transgender ideology and postmodern thinking, these questions must now be addressed and clarified.
When people talk about sex and gender, it is imperative that the words used have a common meaning. Using the proper terminology when it comes to discussing sex and gender helps ensure discussions are mutually understood. If one person spends their entire discussion considering “gender” to be the same as biological sex, while the other person views “gender” as collections of sexist stereotypes, then their entire conversation is based upon an unstable foundation. How can meaningful communication occur without a mutual understanding of language?
If the meaning of words may potentially be unclear in a conversation, asking others to define how they understand certain words is a helpful way to ensure the communication can progress in a matter beneficial to all, rather than each person feeling misunderstood and confused. Requesting clarification on terminology benefits all involved in the conversation. Asking for someone’s understanding on how they define words like “gender” and “woman” is not an unreasonable request.
Language is built upon mutual social understanding and a desire to define our complex world. Even if society wholly chooses to define woman and man as a collection of sexist stereotypes, there is going to remain a desire to define that which separates female and male. By virtue of humans being a sexually dimorphic species, there are going to be differences between female and male humans and a desire to define that difference. Female and male humans each gather vastly different experiences throughout their lives, by virtue of their sexed bodies. These differing experiences shape female and male humans’ perception of the external world they live in and their internal self.
Humans deserve to be able to speak about how their biological sex has impacted who they are and the society that they are a part of. All human beings deserve respect regardless of whether or not they choose to conform to their culture’s sex-based stereotypes. All human beings deserve the ability to share their life experiences and vulnerable moments exclusively with others of their kind. All human beings deserve sex-based rights and protections. Sex is not gender, because biological sex is not a social construct, it never was, and it never will be.
References
Definition of “gender” from Online Etymology Dictionary (https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender)
“Biological Sex and Gender in the United States” by Risa Aria Schnebly (https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/biological-sex-and-gender-united-states-0)
“Gender” from HandWiki (https://handwiki.org/wiki/Biology:Gender)
“The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex: Social Change in Academic Titles, 1945–2001” by David Haig (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15146141/)
“Estheticians don't have to wax male genitalia against their will, B.C. tribunal rules” by Karin Larsen, October 22 2019 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transgender-woman-human-rights-waxing-1.5330807)
“Olympus Spa attorney speaks on transgender policy complaint” by Kienan Briscoe, June 14 2023 (https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2023/06/14/olympus-spa-230614/)
“Ohio YMCA faces backlash from women over trans-identified men in their locker rooms” by Katie Daviscourt, August 29 2023 (https://thepostmillennial.com/ohio-ymca-faces-backlash-from-women-over-trans-identified-men-in-their-locker-rooms)
“Sexism in the “Bathroom Debates”: How Bathrooms Really Became Separated by Sex” by W. Burlette Carter (https://yalelawandpolicy.org/sexism-bathroom-debates-how-bathrooms-really-became-separated-sex)
“Jar (stamnos) with female athletes bathing,” 440–430 BCE (https://collections.mfa.org/objects/153881)
“Roman Baths and Bathing” by Barbara F. McManus (http://vroma.org/vromans/bmcmanus/baths.html)
“Actaeon” from Metamorphoses Book III (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook%3D3%3Acard%3D138)
“The Women’s Bath” by Albrecht Dürer, 1496 (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-women%E2%80%99s-bath-albrecht-d%C3%BCrer/cgF8yUxp4HQuUg)
“The Men’s Bath” by Albrecht Dürer, 1496 (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/43940/the-men-s-bath)
“Onnna yu” by Torii Kiyonaga, 1780s (https://www.loc.gov/item/2008660821/)
Daniel, Chapter 13 (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/daniel/13)
“Patterns of Rape in Ovid's Metamorphoses” by Nikki Bloch (https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/m039k530v)
“The Story of Arethusa” from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by John Dryden (https://www.u.arizona.edu/~willard/444/arethusa.pdf)
“A Beau Cacher” by Louis-Marin Bonnet, 1772 (https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/es/node/133543)
Report of the Indian Factory Labour Commission, 1908 (https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of_the_Indian_Factory_Labour_Comm/sUUsAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22cooly%20women%20employed%22)
“Persistent gropers force Japan to introduce women-only carriages” by Colin Joyce, May 15 2005 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1490059/Persistent-gropers-force-Japan-to-introduce-women-only-carriages.html)
“On India's Trains, Seeking Safety In The Women's Compartment” by Julie McCarthy, March 28 2013 (https://www.npr.org/2013/03/28/175471907/on-indias-trains-seeking-safety-in-the-women-s-compartment)
Women’s Liberation Front (https://womensliberationfront.org)