Sex–gender distinction
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
While in ordinary speech, the terms sex and gender are often used interchangeably,[1][2] in contemporary academic literature, the terms often have distinct meanings, especially when referring to people. Sex generally refers to an organism's biological sex, while gender usually refers to either social roles typically associated with the sex of a person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity).[3][4][5][6] Most contemporary social scientists,[7][8][9] behavioral scientists and biologists,[10][11] many legal systems and government bodies,[12] and intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO[13] make a distinction between gender and sex.
In most individuals, the various biological determinants of sex are congruent, and sex is consistent with the individual's gender identity,[14] but in some circumstances, an individual's assigned sex and gender do not align, and the person may be transgender.[3] Also, in some cases, an individual may have sex characteristics that complicate sex assignment, and the person may be intersex.
Though sex and gender have been used interchangeably at least as early as the fourteenth century, this usage was not common by the late 1900s.[15] Sexologist John Money pioneered the concept of a distinction between biological sex and gender identity in 1955.[16][17] Madison Bentley had already defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex" a decade earlier, in 1945.[18][19] As originally conceived by Money, gender and sex are analysed together as a single category including both biological and social elements, but later work by Robert Stoller separated the two, designating sex and gender as biological and cultural categories, respectively.[improper synthesis?] Before the work of Bentley, Money and Stoller, the word gender was only regularly used to refer to grammatical categories.[20][21][22][23]