Note on the sex and gender debates

The debate on sex and gender

The distinction. Sex is the biological difference between men and women; gender is the set of roles that society assigns them. Feminists use the distinction to show that the pregnancy of women does not oblige only women to rear children, and that much of the inequality between the sexes is produced by society rather than nature. Patriarchy depends on treating the two as the same, so that a supposed natural difference justifies unequal positions. The distinction serves the central question of feminist political theory, why men are powerful and privileged over women in any given society, and it widens the idea of what is political to take in women's concerns.

The positions in the debate.

1. Liberal feminists accept the distinction and want the law to remove sex-based barriers, treating men and women as alike in capacities; critics say this makes women imitate men.
2. Marxist and socialist feminists explain the content of gender roles by class, the division of labour in the family and capitalist reproduction of labour.
3. Radical feminists at first wished to do away with gender as a meaningful category, seeing it as a contrived hierarchy, and called for a society that treats the sexes as equals.
4. Cultural feminists reverse the stance: they preserve gender distinctions and value female qualities (care, nurturance, equality), and some treat male violence as rooted in male biology. Essentialism of this sort risks reinforcing the stereotypes feminists object to.
5. Postmodern feminists go furthest. For Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), even the distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender is open to question: gender is performative, woman is a category formed by class, race, ethnicity and sexuality, and bodies cannot be separated from social norms and language. It follows that no single factor explains the subordination of women, and queer and transgender identities are important to the politics of identity.

Assessment. The distinction has had large political value because it dismantles arguments that biology is destiny. Its weakness is that it can treat sex as fixed and untouched by society, which the postmodern critique exposes. A balanced position holds that most inequalities of status, work and power linked with sex are socially made and so can be changed, while recognising that categories of sex themselves are understood through social meanings.