Open Discussion:
Here at The Good Men Project we’ve had quiet a few articles talking about the differences between the sexes, including an article about common myths about the difference between the sexes. However that article, and my recent “queer dictionary,” all assume that “biological sex” is, well, biologically determined. So what do you think?
Does culture and society influence the way that we define “biological sex?”
Is biological sex purely biological? What do you think is the most accurate way to define biological sex?
Are sex and gender really the same thing? Either both culturally constructed or both biological in origin?
Image of Mars and Venus on Blackboard courtesy of Shutterstock
Except that it wasn’t “solved” exactly. This is an ongoing conversation that people have as we further our understanding of people. Like all areas of knowledge and scientific discussions…things often aren’t “solved,” per se, but just better understood until we gain more knowledge and then re-examine what are often old questions.
The examination of “biological sex” as being culturally influenced isn’t an old question. The strict distinctions between gender and sex are perhaps more fuzzy than we first thought.
Shhhh – I’m referring to Focault and Quiet Riot Girl just up above. She has an excellent novella called “Scribbling on Focault’s walls”
You should read it…
Ah, well I quite like Foucault, so maybe I’ll look into it. 🙂
Understood Heather – the concept can be used more loosely, making it less significant in its ability to predict and locate. I’d usually take a swipe at French constructionist philosophy right about now, but I note my favorite gender theorist has arrived, and I like her too much to take a cheap shot at Focault…she has changed my perspective a tad on that chap
Random Stranger: I don’t think that biology is completely immutable. Race of course is mutable with the advent of airplanes and boats and sexy time!
“I’d usually take a swipe at French constructionist philosophy right about now, but I note my favorite gender theorist has arrived, and I like her too much to take a cheap shot at Focault…she has changed my perspective a tad on that chap.”
Talking about Butler, here, I assume?
Race is not just about skin color, and it’s off base to think it’s a simple social construction. Take a random 10,000 people from across the planet, provide a DNA sample, and with great statistical significance, we can be told their race classification as per geographic origin of lineage. Other species that get divided by geography (Darwin’s Finches is the classic example) develop adapted traits that when they persist, give rise to lineages etc Back to biology versus other variables: one important concept that tells a quick story is termed heritability – the variance in a population due to genetic… Read more »
One important difference though: sex is biologically immutable -race, on the other hand, is not.
I was an archaeologist until wicked recently. I understand how DNA can be used to pretty accurately place a person’s geographic origin. But ‘geographic origin’ and ‘race’ are not always synonymous. “White” is treated as a single race, and yet that covers a huge geographic region and arguably different ‘geographic origins.’ That’s what I’m saying. Where we draw the lines between white, black, Latino, etc (much in the same way we draw the lines between male, intersex, and female) are culturally constructed.
Of course “white” being considered a single race is a fairly recent devlopment. I mean, the parallels between the pearl clutching over Mexican immigrants of today and Eastern European (and Irish, and German, and Italian, and so forth) immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century are pretty apparent.
Which sort of highlights what I’m pointing out…which is that a lot of categories we assume are biological are actually more influenced by culture than we think.
To me, the bits you’re born with have a definite importance so the question “Is biological sex biological?” is a rather silly one. Everyone is born with a body that conforms to a certain sex (medical outliers excepted of course). I think it’s very important to keep these ideas of sex and gender conceptually separated because that’s pretty much how the world works statistically speaking. A minority portion of the population sees their gender as different from the sex they were born with, and that’s fine, but that’s a gender issue (in my mind culturally developed but the jury is… Read more »
As I was writing my article, I came across the Intersex Society of North America, where they discuss the fact that where we draw the lines between male, intersex, and female are socially constructed. There are biological differences between individuals, of course, but how we group them together is really interesting. Hair colour, for example, is a biological difference, and yet we haven’t created social identities surrounding hair colour…or eye colour, etc. And yet we have for skin colour…and again the concept of ‘race’ is still socially constructed. Where we draw the lines between someone who is “white” or “black”… Read more »
An interesting concept there HeatherN.
I suppose I’d counter in saying that the examples you gave are all aesthetic differences with no real bearing on the person. Sure, with gender a lot of the differences between a man and a woman psychologically are socially constructed due to the conditioning we receive in our youth, but there are still a significant number of differences between the sexes that come down to that basic division.
Yeah, but the biological differences derived of sex are more than skin deep, so to speak. Our genitalia comes complete with matching biological reproductive strategies executed acutely through differentiated hormone levels that tend to produce individually noisy but collectively recognizable differences in behavior. We call those generally shared differences in behavior and experiences, “gender”.
(Btw, enjoy your warm beer and 99s)
The sex binary is not purely biological because biology is more complex. As intersex people show.
And the gender binary is complex as trans and gender queer people show.
So. I don’t think ‘sex’ is biological but it is formed from assumptions based on obvious biological differences.
You said it all.
I predict that at some point in the future, if it has not happened already, researchers will come up with clear evidence that “biology” and “culture” are not the only two factors, that it’s not just a combination or one or the other. It’s entirely possible that there will be a paradigm shift and this whole split gets tossed out in favor of a much better set of theories. We are living in an age in which either/or binaries are still intellectually popular. Maybe it’s the whole binary 1’s and 0’s of the computer age. This question may be comparable… Read more »
Possibly, though I think more that our understanding of how culture, biology, environment, and human agency all interact will just become more nuanced and thorough. “Biological sex,” however doesn’t have anything to do with human agency…and to some degree differences in personality between twins does have to do with human agency. There are some things that people can’t control about themselves, and sex gender and sexual orientation are among those uncontrollable things. So then the question becomes, where do those things come from if we can’t control them? I think it’s a bit of biology, a bit of culture, a… Read more »