Sex–gender distinction

Though the terms sex and gender have been used interchangeably since at least the fourteenth century, in contemporary academic literature they usually have distinct meanings. Sex generally refers to an organism's biological sex, while gender usually refers to either social roles typically associated with the sex of a person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity). While in ordinary speech, the terms sex and gender are often used interchangeably, most contemporary social scientists, behavioral scientists and biologists, many legal systems and government bodies, and intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO make a distinction between gender and sex. In most individuals, the various biological determinants of sex are congruent, and consistent with the individual's gender identity, but in some circumstances, an individual's assigned sex and gender do not align, and the person may be transgender. Also in some cases, an individual may have sex characteristics that complicate sex assignment, and the person may be intersex. Sexologist John Money is often regarded as the first to introduce a distinction between biological sex and gender identity in 1955. Madison Bentley had already defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex" a decade earlier, in 1945. As originally conceived by Money, gender and sex are analysed together as a single category including both biological and social elements, but later work by Robert Stoller separated the two, designating sex and gender as biological and cultural categories, respectively. Before the work of Bentley, Money and Stoller, the word gender was only regularly used to refer to grammatical categories. Anisogamy, or the size differences of gametes (sex cells), is the defining feature of the two sexes. According to biologist Michael Majerus there is no other universal difference between males and females. By definition, males are organisms that produce small, mobile gametes (sperm); while females are organisms that produce large and generally immobile gametes (ova or eggs).

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Female

An organism's sex is female (symbol: ♀) if it produces the ovum (egg cell), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete (sperm cell) during sexual reproduction. A female has larger gametes than a male. Females and males are results of the anisogamous reproduction system, wherein gametes are of different sizes (unlike isogamy where they are the same size). The exact mechanism of female gamete evolution remains unknown. In species that have males and females, sex-determination may be based on either sex chromosomes, or environmental conditions.

Sex–gender distinction

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