A musing Beam

Gender and Sex are different While watching all the silliness surrounding people's angst at Caitlyn Jenner's receipt of an award for courage, I've realized that many people simply don't understand that "sex" and "gender" are two different things (though they usually have a high degree of correlation).   "Sex" is an anatomic distinction based on chromosomes and body parts.   Gender is a question of social identity as it relates to ideas of what the spectrum of female and male signifies. This is important because it appears that many who get upset about transgender people imagine that they look down, see one set of parts, and then somehow decide they have another set of parts, evidently in something like a psychotic break. For what it's worth, I'm sure some people actually do that, and I would generally agree that those people have serious mental health problems. But the vast majority of people that are transgendered have no su