#MotsPourMaux: Is gender the same as sex?

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20 minutes

Today in #MotsPourMaux we are talking about a word that is both simple and complicated: the word gender.

When you fill out an administrative form, if you are asked your "gender", you will answer "female" or "male" (or another box, if this box exists, but it is still quite rare).

But for scientists, gender is a social construct.

This means that men and women do not have fixed characteristics.

This is the famous phrase of Simone de Beauvoir: "We are not born a woman, we become it".

Gender is a power relationship

And how do you "become" a woman or a man?

For example by associating the feminine and the masculine with adjectives which are often opposed: strength VS weakness, emotion VS reason, active VS passive ...

It is by sticking labels to women and men that we will also be able to ensure a form of domination.

Gender is therefore also a power relationship.

Gender in the plural

And that is why gender studies provoke sometimes epidermal reactions.

In 2011, right-wing MPs wrote a column to criticize what they call “gender theory”.

We will see that there is not “one” theory of gender, but “some” conceptions of gender.

Sex is also of the kind

In the 1970s, feminists used the word gender as opposed to the word sex.

On the one hand, the “social” gender, on the other, the “biological” sex.

In other words, having a vagina between your legs does not necessarily lead to wanting to be a mother, for example.

And you can be a woman and love to DIY.

Except that this distinction has its limits.

For the philosopher Judith Butler, this idea of ​​two well-separated sexual blocks is itself a construction.

Sex is also gender.

Later, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling argues that sex is a continuum, that there is a multitude of sexes.

An example: some people have so-called masculine attributes, but rather feminine hormones.

Others have XY chromosomes, and female attributes.

In short, studying gender is like putting on somewhat special glasses, which make us see reality differently.

I promise, it's even more stripping than wearing 3D glasses!

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