Sexes: Difference between revisions

'''Sexes''' are a scientific system of categories, a way of putting kinds of bodies into categories. Living things of many species evolved to be specialized into their own male, female, and [[intersex]] kinds, each known as a sex. A sex is generally determined by reproductive body parts. In humans, these imply-- but do not prove-- a correlation with chromosomes. In gender studies, the sex and [[gender]] of a person are thought of as two distinct things: sex is about the body, whereas gender is about the self. What most people mean when they talk about someone's sex is their assigned gender at birth.

 

Men have penises and women have vaginas. Non-binary activists often advance arguments using anomalous data, i.e. intersex individuals, to contest this.  

The form of sexism called biological essentialism is the belief that your body is the main thing that makes you who you are. It is supposed to define you forever, no matter what you change about yourself, think about yourself, or anything. It says the gender you were assigned at birth must be your only real gender. Biological essentialism is used to justify most forms of sexism. It is harmful to virtually everyone, of any sex or gender.<ref name="Weiss">{{Cite web |title=How Gender Essentialism Hurts Us All |last=Weiss |first=Suzannah |work=Bustle |date=13 March 2017 |access-date=16 February 2021 |url= https://www.bustle.com/p/7-ways-gender-essentialism-hurts-everyone-43897|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230330090711/https://www.bustle.com/p/7-ways-gender-essentialism-hurts-everyone-43897 |archive-date=17 July 2023 }}</ref> Some [[transgender exclusionists]] use biological essentialism to discriminate against transgender and nonbinary people.

One common misconception is that all animals have only male and female sexes. However, nature is much more complex and varied. Many animal species are known to have a variety of intersex conditions, or very different kinds of sexes than occur among humans. For example: male seahorses that get pregnant, fish that change sex if there aren't enough of a particular sex in their group, female deer with antlers, lionesses with manes, lizards that lay fertile eggs after two females mate together (''parthenogenesis''), hyenas that give birth through an organ that is nearly indistinguishable from a penis, and so on. Most animals don't have sex chromosomes that are the same as the XX or XY set that are most common in humans. Learning about the diversity of animal sexes can help one recognize how much the sexes are an idea constructed by humans to describe and simplify reality, but our understanding of that reality tends to be limited by our own sexual stereotypes widespread in our culture.