ent?ent?Interestingly, this is the standard pattern children incorporate even when they know these rules have exceptions. They almost always know families where its Mom whf is thef outside-the-home money earner and Dad who stays home,
and
where boys are nice and quiet while girls are hellions. The basic stereotypes, however, seem somehow branded on their psyche in the every day course of growing up. The input is from family, friends, mc ia, religion and even politics. And most of middle-class society colludes, in turn, to transmit social and cultural normative expectations with essentially the same rules. With a certain degree of schooling and maturity children learn that the sexes to which we are referring are male and female. It further comes to be understood that male and female are terms used to incorporate a whole catalog of physical and behavioral differences.
As a designation of male or female, sex, with the child's increasing sophistication and learning becomes understood as a descriptive set of terms and meanings that encompass the most common biologically accepted attributes --physical differences-- of males and females; the terms imply certain gonads, internal and external genitalia, sex chromosomes and genes, sex hormones and so on. The student learns that a male is an individual that has penis and scrotum, testes, and accessory glands (prostate, seminal vesicles, bulbo-urethral glands); a female is a person with ovaries, a uterus, ovarian tubes, a vagina and clitoris. An intersexed individual is understood to have a mixture of these attributes. And these basic understandings hold for the term sex as they did for the terms Dad and Mom; wide variations and departures from the basic generalities can be known without nullifying the common wisdom.
The term gender first became familiar to most of us in language class when, for those of us with English as a common tongue, we learned that nouns such as table and chair could be either masculine, feminine or neuter. Of what use are such distinctions still remains lost on linguists. Why languages as different as French and German need these artifices while English and most Australoasian languages, for instance, can get along quite well without them is subject for thought. Many languages do not even have sex identifying pronouns. But understanding of gender or sex-typical behaviors (the older expression for gender specific traits) serves quite practical use. And no known language is without gender identifying nouns.
General usage of the term gender began in the late 1960s and 1970s, increasingly appearing in the professional literature of the social sciences. The term came to serve a useful purpose in distinguishing those aspects of life that were more easily attributed or understood to be of social rather than biological origin (see e.g., Unger & Crawford, 1992).
Males and females, as biological entities, were accepted as essentially similar cross-culturally but men and women, by virtue of the multitude of different roles they played in diversified societies, were not so easily catalogued. These anthropological life-style differences came to be accepted as social and cultural constructs. Indeed, the terms sex and gender came, for most investigators, to signify and reify these different areas of consideration; sex would refer to biological traits while gender would refer to social/cultural ones. At least this was generally so among those investigators more sensitive to biological studies. Among those more aligned with sociological and anthropological thinking these differences did not appear so clear cut. For this latter group the terms sex and gender were often used interchangeably.1
In 1978 Kessler and McKenna (Kessler & McKenna, 1978), in their now classic work, challenged how the relationship between sex and gender might be considered. They even challenged if the two concepts were different or interchangeable. In "just-so" story fashion the fact that males and female are sexually --biologically-- different is what leads to the gender differences seen and manifest by men and women in their behavior patterns and roles. It is certainly understood that way by the majority of the lay public as well as many scientists. But, questioned Kessler and McKenna, if this were so clear cut, why do transsexuals in their pursuit of the life-style of the "opposite" sex work so hard in trying to prove to the outside world what they feel they are on the inside? In doing so, Kessler and McKenna point out that transsexuals seek to reconstruct their sex to coincide with their psychological gender. Doesn't this imply that it is their gender which is primary and their sex secondary? Analysis of the thinking of transsexuals is simultaneously used as a foil to bolster the Kessler & McKenna argument that the study of gender benefits from insightful and detailed analysis of the thinking of individuals as they make significant gender related decisions. This is part of the ethnomethodological approach they espouse.
In demonstrating their point, Kessler and McKenna take the rhetorically clever position of accepting that transsexuals are what they say they are (they interviewed fifteen transsexual individuals). A male transsexual has the body of an anatomic male but the conviction (mind-set) of actually being a woman and a female transsexual has the body of an anatomical female but the conviction (mind-set) of actually being a man (Benjamin, 1966). Then, to rectify the dichotomy, the transsexual is seen as not wanting to change gender but change genitals and body. It thus appears that sex is variable and gender invariant; a reversal from the way the two had come to be considered. But the transsexual, according to our authors, then sets about learning or perfecting how to be the man or woman of mind's desire. In so doing, the transsexual proves to Kessler and McKenna that gender is a construction that doesn't necessarily follow from anatomy.2
cChick Innocent From About Sex and Gender: Same or Diffeent?y f f Innocent u Chick b Innocent Innocent
gChick Innocent From About Sex and Gender: Same or Diffeent?y o Sexy