Unintended Consequences of the Feminist Sex/Gender Distinction (Essay‪)‬

[1] The average person does not distinguish between "sex" and "gender," and uses the two terms interchangeably. The same can be said of a significant number of social scientists. For instance, an unsystematic review of one recent issue of Sociological Forum and several recent issues of American Journal of Sociology produced five examples of this conflation of sex and gender (Bonilla-Silva et al., 562; Huffman and Cohen, 912; Lincoln and Allen, 621; Petersen and Saporta, 855; Rutherford, 593). This treatment of "sex" and "gender" as synonymous dismisses, whether knowingly or unknowingly, the considerable conceptual work of gender scholars over the last thirty years and harks back to essentialist as well as determinist notions of sex, conflating, among other things, social roles, psychological dispositions, power differences, norms of grooming and comportment, sexual object choice and reproductive anatomy. Such an understanding thus collapses important intellectual and experiential distinctions; in so doing, it also fails to provide conceptual categories for the experiences of women and men whose sex, gender, and/or sexuality do not "align" in socially normative ways. The instantiation of the conceptual separation of gender from sex was an effort to give language to some of these distinctions, and the subsequent rigorous critical assessment of the term "gender" over the intervening decades has further refined them. [2] Although it is impossible to make accurate generalizations about the work of all gender scholars, the prevailing trends can be usefully defined and studied. Here I am addressing the vast body of gender scholarship that continues to rely, either implicitly or explicitly, on the conceptual distinction between sex and gender. While my analysis draws predominantly--though not exclusively--on social scientific scholarship, the trends I will outline apply equally to humanistic scholarship that is organized conceptually by the sex/gender distinction.