Hello, my name is Nitin Deckha, and I teach a lot of Social Science courses here at Humber,
and, one of the things that a lot of students have a lot of trouble with, is, differentiating
between sex and gender. So today, I’m going to show you how. I’m going to show you have
to distinguish between sex and gender. So, let’s start off with sex.
So, we’re starting off with sex. So, what is that? That includes our biology, but there
are a lot of different components. We’ve got our hormones; we’ve got our reproductive
organs, and processes. But it’s also includes in our genetics, and the evolutionary trait
that we have developed over time. And, largely sex is binary meaning that we definitely divided
into two things: male and female. But there is a lot of biological variability and we
call that kind of grouping now, intersex, as sort of straddling this binary.
So we’ve talked about sex. Now, what is gender? Okay, so we’re going to talk now
about gender. So, basically gender is asking this simple question. Well, it’s actually
not that simple. But, how does a society or culture take an infant, and transform them
into a “boy” or a “girl”, or something else?
So, here’s this little infant, and the society has to create roles for it to become what
is recognizes as a boy and a girl. Or, it could be something else. So next we’re going to talk about how the society
does that.
Okay, so, we’ve talked a bit about sex, and now we’ve talked about, we’re starting
to talk about gender. And, what we, if sex is a binary, gender is better understood as
a spectrum. And, from this, we have our different aspects of our society, for example, our parents,
our peers, maybe cultural heritage, religion, and of course, really important today is our
media, and these shape the spectrum of behaviours of positions of roles. So, we perform these
gender roles in accordance to these, to societies’ media roles, and these can vary depending
on society, and we may agree with them, or we may perform behaviour that rejects them.
So, we just talked about how we perform gender roles by following, or according to society’s
expectations, or rejecting them. And from that, we get a spectrum of behaviours. So,
we get, what we describe as “femininity” or what is, being “female”, or “womanhood”,
on one side of the spectrum. And, “masculinity”, and being “male”, and “manhood” on the
other. At different parts of our lives and for different situations, we may perform behaviours
in different aspects on this spectrum.
So, what did we learn today? We learned that there is a difference between sex and gender,
and we learned how to distinguish them. We learned that sex is about biology, its about
evolution, genetics, it’s largely binary. But gender, on the otherhand, is shaped by
society, and culture, it’s performance, of behaviour, and these performances occur
across a spectrum. So, in a way, today, we learned a little bit about gender, we, hopefully,
I’ve enhance your gender intelligence. This is just he beginning on this journey about
gender, and I hope you will join me for another segment.