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Notes -
I think there's a category error underlying a lot of the discussion on this. I don't think it's right to think of sex and gender as being two distinct (though correlated) categories, where everyone has a sex, and everyone also has a gender, and we can place you into a little 2x2 box of what you are (non-binary, or whatever, aside). Rather, sex is some primitive physical category, and gender is the social result of your sex.
Put another way:
Sex is the physical category.
Gender is the set of assumptions, expectations, rules, and roles that society places on you as a result of your sex. It is socially constructed not in the tautological sense that "gender" (like "sex") is a categorization that people made up, but in the meaningful sense of "gender" being a set of material things that society does to you.
Notice, and let me emphasize:
Gender is not a category, it's a bunch of things that happen to you because of your category. Language often elides gender as the category, but everyone is really talking about sex.
Gender is a real thing in the material world. We in 2023 America expect that males (sex) will do man (gender) things like wear pants, get called "he", and pee in the restroom that other males do. It's not some metaphysical voodoo.
Gender being socially constructed doesn't imply that it can be changed from the individual's perspective. This is again a category error. It's not a category, it's a bunch of ways that society treats you.
A lot of components of gender probably make sense given sex differences, e.g., males are bigger and more aggressive, and gender roles need to clamp down on that; females are the sex class that gives birth and nurses children, and gender roles need to make that possible. On the other hand, there are likely many components of gender that make less sense given sex differences, either because they never did, or times have changed.
From this perspective it seems like the way forward is the so-called gender critical view, where we ask whether various components of gender are really appropriate social reactions to your sex category. Like, "girls can be good at math too!" and "boys can wear dresses!"
On the trans activist side, it the sex-gender is different argument is kind of a red herring. You don't get to choose your gender, not because gender and sex are the same thing, but because gender is what society does to you because of your sex. We can slowly change how society treats members differently by sex class, but you, an individual, don't get to control that. Also, by the way, it seems sort of obvious that the overall trajectory of their rhetorical move here is (1) say "fine, you can't change your sex but at least you can change your gender," and soon enough (2) "actually you can change your sex too." This leaves me thinking that they don't really believe sex-gender distinction that they emphasize.
Likewise people on the cultural right seem to think that separating sex and gender is merely a sneaky way to legitimize how trans identified males self-identify. I sort of think that's true, but at least analytically I think the distinction outlined above is useful. A lot of the more basic right wing discussion of this seems to blend together two issues: "can men become women" (no) and "do the gendered expectations we put on people because of their sex make sense?" (maybe, maybe not). Separating them is useful.
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