Post
Wed Jun 03, 2015 1:52 pm
#67
by Grumblesaur
Sex is physiological, and is generally limited to male, female, and intersex. Intersex folks may take on hermaphroditic qualities or have ambiguous features, including ambiguous genitalia.
Gender is mental and cultural, and is a lot more varied. What is considered masculine and what is considered feminine varies depending on where you are in the world and whom you ask. Gender is something of a measure of how much people identify with their culture's ideas of masculinity and/or femininity.
Some folks feel aligned very strongly to just one of those things. Some folks feel aligned strongly to both. Some folks aren't really given to either one. For a handful of people, it changes based on their mood or varies over time.
So from there you have male and female, bigender, agender, and genderfluid. There are loads of others. To a lot of people they sound contrived or utterly fictitious, but for the people who use the terms, that's the best they can come up with to express how they feel they fit in the world.
Then between these two classes of human identification, we have categories of cisgender and transgender.
Ultimately, most cultures ideas of sex and gender are intertwined. When an individual's sex "matches" the cultural ideas of gender that "go with" it, they are cisgender. When an individual's sex is "mismatched" with respect to the same ideas, they are transgender.
Notions of cisgender vs. transgender are useful for describing and relating issues of gender dysphoria that stem from an individual identifying strongly with one gender but frequently being mistaken for another, usually due to their physical appearance (which is a phenomenon that stems from notions of sex and gender being conflated by many, since the two words have referred to the same idea, or have been used interchangeably, for a long time).
As for the public restroom question that has popped up, many folks in this situation want to use the restroom corresponding to what they want to be seen as. Grumpy and bigoted social conservatives would have you believe it's a ploy to spy on people in restrooms, which is enormously cissexist and discriminatory.
Many socially progressive institutions (for example, some universities) are installing unisex restrooms which have more than one toilet. Ultimately, the only useful distinction between restrooms is whether or not they contain urinals. I believe some countries like France have no sex or gender distinction for many (if not all) of their restrooms.