15 May 2012

What is the difference between sex and gender?


As the saying goes, “sex is between your legs while gender is between your ears”.

Sex is what a person is assigned at birth based on what’s between their legs- male or female and occasionally intersex, where a person is born with either both or neither genitals for the sexes. Gender is what a person feels that they are. It’s their “brain sex”. According to the American Psychological Association, “gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women.” [Source]

Gender has an impact on everything that people do, how they act, what their interests are, and how they feel about themselves. While some of these match up with the sex of a person whether they are transgender or not, sometimes they don’t. If enough of these do not match up with the birth sex, the person may be transgender. However, like it was mentioned earlier, they may not necessarily identify as such.


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