Gender as Sex:


First up, some example viewpoints that consider gender to be the same (or approximately the same) as sex!


Another Facet of Evolution

This school of thought considers gender to be just another piece of biological sex that came into being for the purpose of survival. Some variations (and outliers) exist, but usually the idea goes that women evolved to be caretakers along with childbearers, and men evolved to be protectors, hunters, and fighters. It feels almost mythic, right? The Mothers feed infants with their bodies and continue to provide for their children, partners, and communities. The Fathers protect their wives and children, stoicly facing all danger, including the perils of the hunt. Their roles echo their bodies, or so the theory goes.

In this sense then, gender is little more than how primary and secondary sex charecteristics impact socialization. Women are women and men are men because both evolved to be that way.*

Yet humans are never just humans.

I can understand the comfort of the mythos. Things are the way they are because it's the best way. Because it's simply nature. Because any other way would have wiped us out. But it's rooted a bit too deeply in 1950s American propaganda and earlier/cotemporary eugenics movements for me to take seriously, not to mention the convenient blindness to anything in history that contradicts, let alone expands.

And why does having a dick or a uterus dictate so much of the course of your life while anything else from height to how many teeth you still have doesn't? Estrogen, Proestrogen, and Testosterone levels matter; why don't any other hormones? Wouldn't it make sense to take stock of someone's cortisol levels? "We're very sorry Mr. Blake, but according to your blood test results you simply get too stressed out to keep working at our company as a manager. You're being reassigned to an assembly line job. Your next paycheck will be refelctive of this change." Yeesh. Freedom who?

Myth isn't always all its cracked up to be. It's interesting, no doubt, but propaganda made to stir something in us doing just that shouldn't be much of a surprise.


* The Myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron has a chapter dedicated to pointing out the recursive logic that tends to comes up with "gender as an evolved characteristic of sex" thoeries for anyone interested. It, like most works, is imperfect, but a good fuckin read all the same. If my memory is right, barely a week before reading it for the first time I had been watching PBS with an ex when an archeologist on one of the programs posited that a woman likely figured out the basics of metalsmithing while "washing" stone dishes in the fire. No time was spared to explain how exactly we knew that the womenfolk of the prehistoric culture were the ones cleaning up after mealtime, let alone how we knew that said womenfolk would even conceptualize of themselves as womenfolk...


Child Talk

Probably (hopefully) endemic to rural/conservative USA, this viewpoint holds that gender doesn't exist, let alone as anything separate from sex.

"That's odd," you might say, "given that we created two whole words there, and that we're lazy fuckers that only tend to do that when there's at least some difference between them--even if it is a very small difference and we're being pretentious about things."

And those of this mindset would probably say, "Ah, that's where you're mistaken: they can refer to the exact same thing. Because see, talking about sex in front of children would be bad. So we talk about gender instead."

In a certain way then, gender is differnt from sex: it's any piece of human sexuality that is appropriate to bring up in the presence of children. A part of the whole, as it were. A very, very, very tiny part, and at the mercy of whatever moral crusade it is this decade. Gender then is to sex what cooties are to venereal disease or the ruined reputation of a lady in the 1930s. Gender is girls and boys lining up in their two separate queues at recess at the behest of teachers, or what bathroom you use. It's a square in the wide word of rectangles, and the even wider world of polygons. Human sexuality, meanwhile, is a lot bigger, a lot more raw, and to this mindset, absolutely not to be brought up around anyone under the age of 35.

Funnily enough though, Child Talk forces our focus onto Sex As In The Act(s) instead of Sex As In Biology in a way that few other views do, including the ones on this page. Something to think about, right?

While this does sound like a bit of a caricature, it's shocking how easy it can be to slip into this mindset. Human sexuality, in both the biological and active senses, is something you think about at the bar, and gender is something that harkens back to kindergarten or conversations had in a college dorm at midnight thirty. Unless you're queer, of course, in which case gender is going on at the bar too.



Biological Essentialism and Gender Abolitionists

Similar to "Gender as a facet of evolution," Biological Essentialism, or bio essentialism for short, holds that anything that gender is, is biological in origin. Or more accurately, gender directly originates from sex. Arguably bio essentialism could be the umbrella term for any belief where gender is essentially (ba dum tss) the same thing as sex, and therefore the name of this page. However, "bio essentialism" currently brings to mind specific groups of bio essentialists, rather than the base theory itself. There are two strains I want to focus on here, both having to do with the idea of gender abolition.

To a gender abolitionist, the answer to "why the fuck do we have both gender and sex as terms if they mean the exact same thing" is "we should only have one," by which most mean to abolish gender and keep sex. While it avoids the question almost entirely, it does make for a strong viewpoint on gender. Gender, to this specific variation on bio essentialism, does not exist, and never should have been concieved of in the first place. Gender is a lie. A platitude. A theory gone wrong, a joke gone too far. Biology, and specifically sex, is what we step around talking about whenever we fuss over gender.

Again, while it doesn't stick around to answer many questions, gender abolition certainly does have a strong sense of itself. While other forms of biological essentialism--like many of the mindsets that lead to Child Talk, for example--are busy arguing that gender doesn't really exist, that really all we're talking about is another facet of sex, gender abolition is putting its foot down. And hard.

Hopefully most recognizeable as gender abolitionists are the groups actually named Gender Abolitionists. Following the trend of "men are men, women are women" that a lot of the viewpoints on this page share, Gender Abolitionists (the groups) are more likely to think that men are men and women are women, with the former said distastefully, and the latter said in celebration. However, this sentiment gets switched when it comes from the mouths of our second flavor of gender abolition: anti-feminism. To an anti-feminist (specifically the sort that peaked in the US around 2014-2018), gender is just as meaningless in the face of the might of biological sex, and the unfortunate reality is that women are women while men are men.

Yet again though, humans are never just humans.

It's easy to assume that anyone involved in gender abolition (or bio essentialism) must be Political with a Capital P. However, I'd warn against carrying that assumption too far. While the political ramifications of either view seem like they ought to be apparent, there are an awful lot of folks with some variation of bio essentialism or gender abolition knocking around their worldview in a much more casual way. Maybe "women rule, men drool/men rule, women drool" takes things too far, but if you bring up dating then Women are Women, and Men are Men, and the rest is history.

Note too that gender abolitionists may have overlapping beliefs with gender as evolution and pull from mythos in the same way: the deification of the mother to Gender Abolitionists (the group), and the similar deification of daddy the father to anti-feminists. Overlapping viewpoints happen. We're human! We contradict ourselves and change and grow and have complicated beliefs! But while gender as evolution is built off some (shaky or not) understanding of evolution, biological essentialism (and gender abolition) can disregard evolution completely. It's tempting to say then that we have spiritual essentialism on our hands, but in reality, biology is still usually the focus.

Speaking of which...



Brief Aside: The 7th Grade Oversimplification of Sex

Whenever gender gets connected or equated to sex, biological sex will, of course....get brought up. No fucking shit. Right? So, a person's understanding of human biology and sex will inevitably inform their views on gender.

And if that person is your average US citizen, then unfortunately, you're probably left working with a half remembered 7th grade (13 year olds) mandatory health class explanation. It usually looks a little something like this:

Like most explanations given to a thirteen year old, this is a vast oversimplification. But when the reality is either, "Actually, while none of that is wrong, hardly any of it is right," or even, "We think we know what's going on here, but we don't actually know, I mean, a lot of this is still relatively recent science when compared to other fields," it's a lot easier (and more satisfying) to rely on those childhood explanations. Everything is static, then, and a nice, clean, simple binary. No explanation is needed for micropenises or bearded ladies or infertility. The human body is a mystery, but we understand: it's just biology. Men are men, women are women. All it ever is, is biology.

Bit creepy, isn't it?



Things to Noodle About



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