Gender vs. Sex - What's the Difference?

By Eva Hamm on August 25, 2013

The other day, I was waiting for an elevator with my roommate. Posted on the wall near the elevator were some flyers for club meetings and seminars. One such flyer read, “What Is Gender?” Being a psychology major and being up-to-date on the LGBTQ community by way of the outspoken bloggers on Tumblr, I didn’t blink twice at the flyer. My roommate, however, tugged on my arm and pointed at it. She chuckled and said, “What? What does that even mean? Everyone knows what gender is.”

In reality, a lot of people don’t know what gender is. They think they do, but what they’re really doing is confusing it with sex. Sex and gender are similar terms, but are in fact two distinctly different things.

Sex is what you are biologically. There are only two sexes on Earth: male and female. Your sex is determined randomly by whatever combination of genes you are assigned. You either have male sex organs, or female ones. Easy, right?

The hard part is gender. Gender is what you are in your mind. It’s what you identify as, what you feel you are. In response to this, one could contend, “But isn’t that the same thing? Don’t girls feel they are girls and boys feel they are boys?” Not necessarily. Although they probably don’t know it, the majority of the world’s population identify as something called cisgender, which means that your perception of yourself matches up with what sex your body is. A cisgender female is a person with female sex organs who feels that she is female.

But what about when the perception and the biology don’t match up? That’s when you get things like transgender, bigender, genderqueer, and a myriad of other terms that all describe something different. You see, gender isn’t binary—there doesn’t have to be just male and female.

Transgender 

Transgender is a term describing someone whose  gender doesn’t match up to their body’s sex. For example, a transgender man is a person who is biologically female, but mentally male. This person may ask you to refer to them by a male name, and to call them ‘he’ instead of ‘she’. He will still look female on the outside (unless he undergoes a sex change), but he will feel that he is male. If you meet a transgender person, and they ask you to call them a name other than the one their parents gave them, always do so, because it’s extremely rude to do otherwise. You wouldn’t want someone continually calling you by a name you don’t like, would you?

Bigender

Bigender is a term describing someone who feels they are equally two genders, any two genders on the gender spectrum. A bigender person may feel equally male and female, and may not care if you refer to them as both ‘he’ and ‘she’. Also, they may switch genders; one day, they may be more female, and the next, more male. Depending on what gender they are currently on, they may want you to switch pronouns. Again, do as they ask so that you don’t offend them or hurt their feelings—and that way, you don’t look obtuse.

Genderqueer

Genderqueer is just another term that describes someone who doesn’t fall into any particular category. They may feel they are multiple genders, or maybe they don’t identify as having a gender at all. They may identify as a gender that is neither male nor female. They may ask you to use gender-neutral pronouns, like ‘they’ or ‘them’, or other ones that may sound like alien names to a cisgender person who has never encountered someone outside the binary gender system before. As stated before, the best thing to do when you meet someone like this is to be polite, to call them what they ask you to call them, and to treat them like any other person. Because ultimately, that’s what they are!

Having a differing gender identity is no different than having a different hair color, or freckles, or being allergic to peanuts. It’s not something the person chose, it’s simply a part of who they are. It may seem complicated at first to someone unfamiliar with the terms, but in the end it all comes down to treating people like people.

If you would like more information on this subject, feel free to visit the Wikipedia page for Transgender or the GLBTQ encylcopedia.

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