Overview of Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

The Sex / Gender Distinction

Although the terms sex and gender are sometimes used interchangeably and do in fact complement each other, they nonetheless refer to different aspects of what it means to be a woman or man in any society. Basically, sex refers to physical or physiological differences between males and females, including both primary sex characteristics (the reproductive system) and secondary characteristics such as height and muscularity. From the same basic understanding, gender refers to behaviours, personal traits and social positions that society attributes to being female or male. These terms also mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy nor straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have disagreed with this thinking and have endorsed the sex / gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features; ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors. The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny. A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (Moi, 1999, p. 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights.