I.

CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATION OF GENDER EDUCATION

Gender vs. Sex

Biological determinism

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females,
men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender
distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features
(chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men
depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). 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 not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but
also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to
argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and
Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament”
(quoted from Moi 1999, 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. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have
argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance,
Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social
discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by
nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir). Commonly
observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or
chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays
uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological
causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become
airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their
duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said
to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that
connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and
behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological
explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women's thicker corpus callosums could
explain what ‘women's intuition’ is based on and impair women's ability to perform some specialised visual-
spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences
in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly
variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women
and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are
not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to
differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice,
even if women and men's corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences
immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

Gender terminology

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter,
feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ
gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine
words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in
the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological
traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and
large) a person's sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make
theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals' sex and gender
simply don't match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This
enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore,
changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of
arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social
intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus
of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes”
(1975, 179). Rubin's thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the
oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are
oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is
thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to
women's subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which
one's sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin
1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin's, sex and gender were thought to complement one another.
The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack
view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is]
constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-
rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females
should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a
person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female;
their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies
thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the
two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice
versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences
result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying
that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being
nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97).
But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender
amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry
on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

Gender socialisation

One way to interpret Beauvoir's claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a
claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine
traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how
individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a
causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we
are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett
takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential
treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents', the peers', and the culture's notions of
what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and
expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that
gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women's subordination so that women are socialised
into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett
1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’
social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men.
This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often
unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their
24-hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert
and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents' treatment of their infants further reflects these
descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more
overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in
pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to
reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since
the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from
playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play
with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns
(for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126).[1]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world
around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children's books have
portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders,
and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children's books has been to
portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35).
Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-
neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV's Teletubbies). However, parents reading books
with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers' efforts by reading them to their
children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran,
parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters
that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992,
35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and
males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Gender as feminine and masculine personality

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender
differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having
feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting
practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of
small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants,
infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs
from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their
sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself
from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother
unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop
flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these
unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206).
This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow's approach differs in
many ways from Freud's.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take
emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others
around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests
and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat)
confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around
them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are
stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are
virtues. These traits are said to result from men's well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise
their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others' needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine
personalities play a crucial role in women's oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs
of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents
should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children
develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to
eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Is sex classification solely a matter of biology?

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of
biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that
biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex
classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of
this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can
be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of
ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex
characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are
affected by social practices. In some societies, females' lower social status has meant that they have been fed
less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37).
Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological
factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise
opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish
(Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have
social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women's diet and their exercise opportunities
(Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not
affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social
conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social
forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-
chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’
hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as
biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a
relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size,
significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific
view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct
categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the
same sex category. Females' genitals were thought to be the same as males' but simply directed inside the
body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the
former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that
scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex
model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an
alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn't straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b).
She estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various
combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that
intersexed individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one
ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have
ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-
Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersexes suggests that
feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño
has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However,
she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women's sports (Fausto-
Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño's genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to
determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her
chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersexes, like Patiño, illustrate that our
understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts
to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are
influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more
careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically,
intersexed people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and
that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggest to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is
sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a
particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen
supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and
sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp
distinction between the two. Further, intersexes (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex
spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of
sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes),
other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea
that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features

Are sex and gender distinct?

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that
distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For her, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally
constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction
between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)
(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture,
biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.)
Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender.
To unpack her view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler,
boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status
apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie, this implausibly implies
that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so
would physical bodies. This is not Butler's claim; rather, her position is that bodies viewed as the material
foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material
foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production
whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes
how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and
sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are
themselves discursively constructed: they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what
is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99).
Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [6] When the doctor calls a
newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the
doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts). In effect, the doctor's
utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally
come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a
consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler
means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as
socially constructed as gender. She does not deny that physical bodies exist. But, she takes our understanding
of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical
bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a
helpful introduction to Butler's views, see Salih 2002.)

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler's claim that sex
“was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to
question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender.
According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms.
That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry
implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain
facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably
not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about
gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

SEX GENDER
Biological characteristics (including genetics, anatomy Socially constructed set of roles and responsibilities
and physiology) that generally define humans as female associated with being girl and boy or women and men,
or male. Note that these biological characteristics are and in some cultures a third or other gender.
not mutually exclusive; however, there are individuals
who possess both male and female characteristics.
Born with. Not born with.
Natural Not born with
Universal, A-historical No variation from culture to Gender roles vary greatly in different societies, cultures
culture or time to time. and historical periods as well as they depend also on
socio-economic factors, age, education, ethnicity and
religion.
Cannot be changed, except with the medical treatment. Although deeply rooted, gender roles can be changed
over time, since social values and norms are not static.
Example: Only women can give birth. Only women can Example: The expectation of men to be economic
breastfeed. providers of the family and for women to be caregivers
is a gender norm in many cultural contexts. However,
women prove able to do traditionally male jobs as well
as men (e.g. men and women can do housework; men
and women can be leaders and managers).
PRACTICAL POINT: At birth, the difference between
boys and girls is their
PRACTICAL POINT: At birth, the difference between boys and girls is their sex; as they grow up society gives
those different roles, attributes opportunities, privileges and rights that in the end create the social differences
between men and women.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/#SexDis

http://www.ekvilib.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/01_Gender_Concepts.pdf