Quote:
Originally Posted by Chibi-Chan
But I think it is important to set sex apart from gender. Today you can fully change your gender, not your sex. That has nothing to do with ignoring the truth. It's just that in this world most people wouldn't accept the change of one's sex and by calling Hide now she instead of he one can show acceptance.  |
I think that's the point people are trying make, yeah, in that sex and gender are two different things. Sex is a word we use to describe a set of biological characteristics, whereas gender is a social construction that is
performed and reaffirmed through action and interaction. According to
Judith Butler, (1988, though essentially the same definition was given by scholars West and Zimmerman in 1987):
Quote:
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Gender is an identity specific to a particular place and time, demonstrated to the outside world through a stylized repetition of acts, the reenactment and re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established.
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So while our society has established the dual structure of male/female as definitive and all-encompassing, this is not necessarily true for all societies across the globe (I'm not necessarily applying this to Japan in particular, where this binary is accepted by most parties in the modern day), and additionally, sex and gender need not necessarily be in accordance with one another.
Does that make sense? >.<