Terminology

It's long overdue but time to talk about what I mean when I use different terms.

Sex

Sex is about your biological status and can be male, female or intersex. It depends on your primary sexual characteristics. If you have a penis, you are male and if you have a vagina, you are female. Any ambiguous physical status, i.e. a person who cannot be clearly identified as male or female, is called "intersex".

Gender

Gender is about identity. When you are born, you are normally assigned a gender depending on your sex. This is known as your gender assigned at birth. This can lead to all sorts of problems. As soon as someone checks between your legs when you're a baby and finds whatever sexual organs you have, you become pigeon-holed and your externally ordained genderization starts. This reaches right into adulthood where a woman with short hair who plays football is quickly judged to be too butch or assumed to be a lesbian or a man wearing high heels is laughed at and called a "homo" - a term still all too often used as a form of abuse.

But a newborn child has no idea they are male or female let alone about the gender roles society imposes upon boys and girls! Instead of being free to discover and express their own (gender) identity during the transition from baby to child to adult, they first have to accept that forced upon them by society which can lead to painful rejection of their assumed identity later in life and the discovery of , "but that's not who I am!"

Masculinity and Femininity

Where do I start on this one?!? I reject the idea that masculinity is about being big and strong, tough, reliable, aggressive, competitive, non-emotional, calm under duress etc. All these are attributes that anyone can have, independent of gender! We have been socialised to believe that men behave and dress in one way, masculine, and women in another, feminine. This is clearly horse-shit. An competitive woman is often insulted as being too masculine. An emotional man as too feminine....although these adjectives when applied to the opposite gender are considered positive! It's double-standards and about time we rejected masculinity and femininity as catch-all terms for sets of behaviour and style exclusively tagged to one gender or the other. Masculinity and Femininity are outdated claptrap!