There's a difference between sex and gender, according to a new poll from the British Telegraph newspaper and Censuswide. The poll found that 58% of respondents think sex is binary, except in rare cases such as intersex individuals, who are born with both male and female sex organs.
Just 29% agreed with the statement “sex is not binary," while 13% had no opinion. However, 64% of respondents believe that gender is "fluid." What gives?
"Sex" is a biological classification while "gender" generally refers to society's expectations for the two sexes as far as roles and relationships between males and females.
The "relativist" view of gender posits a sliding scale of male/female attributes where most people are completely or almost completely male or female with the rest being varying degrees of male or female. It's still a controversial view of gender that some scientists believe where facts are shoehorned into a theory to explain a poorly understood phenomenon.
“To me, this just means that at least 29 percent of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22 percent of them do not know what gender means,” Dr. Wolfgang Goymann, professor for behavioral biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, told The Telegraph.
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, a human rights organisation that campaigns for clarity on sex in law and everyday life, told The Telegraph: “This survey has two remarkable findings. The first is that 29 per cent of academics are apparently unaware of the obvious fact that sex is binary.
“The second is that nearly two-thirds of academics say that ‘gender is fluid’. That is a strikingly confident statement about a nebulous concept.
“Most ordinary people think “gender” is just a polite alternative to “sex”, so are these academics talking about personal style – masculinity or femininity; or assertions about “identity” – that is, states of mind?
“This muddle feeds through into academic research and public policy. It’s concerning that people supposedly among our best and brightest are seemingly blind to this confusion," said Joyce.
Yes, sex and gender are two different concepts. But the question needing to be answered is what basis is there to believe one's gender is "fluid" and can somehow be different from the sex they were born to? If gender is a "preference," that is, a conscious decision made that does not match one's sex at birth, why aren't we all running around in hysterical confusion about who we are? Or what we are?
Society doesn't "impose" gender as much as it recognizes sex roles already present. If one wants to reject those roles, they're free to do so.
Just don't expect most of the rest of us to agree with you.
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