How Sex Became Gender

We are presently experiencing a genuine crisis of meaning about what we mean by ‘sex’ and what we mean by ‘gender’. In popular and scholarly texts alike, one can find numerous examples of the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ being used interchangeably to refer to men and women and male and female. In journalistic practice, ‘gender’ is often favoured in headlines, and ‘sex’ is buried in the small print. When China announced it was going to re-impose (discontinued in 1999) ‘sex-testing’ on female Olympic athletes in July 2008, initial press reports used the official translation ‘sex-testing’ provided by the Chinese translators, but later articles in the Anglophone world substituted ‘gender-testing’ (Anon., 2008).

The ambivalent use of these terms extends even to the technical science literature. In an issue of Science devoted to ‘Women's Health’, several articles freely inter-mix ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. One article, entitled ‘Gender in the pharmacy: Does it matter?’ uses them in consecutive sentences: ‘Clinicians still don't always analyse data on women separately, and more research — and better research tools — may yet reveal more serious gender differences, they say. Even subtle sex differences may be important in an era of personalized medicines’ (Kaiser, 2005, p. 1572). This is not an isolated example.

Perhaps it takes a historian to permit a clearer focus on this terminological conundrum. Alice Dreger, who has written historical studies of hermaphroditism and intersex phenomena, refers to both ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in an article on the current controversy about the proper way to test the eligibility of female athletes (Dreger, 1998, 1999); but Dreger also quotes experts who study the variability in human sex development as an interdisciplinary task comprising genetics, endocrinology, anatomy and psychology, and distinguishes ‘transsexualism’ from ‘transgender’ and ‘gender-identity questions’ in this complicated field (Dreger, 2009).