Identifying the roles of both sexes isn't easy these days.

I was into same sex relationships, but then I met you.

When filling out a document such as a job application or school registration form you are often asked to provide your name, address, phone number, birth date, and sex or gender. But have you ever been asked to provide your sex and your gender? Like most people, you may not have realized that sex and gender are not the same any more, maybe they never were.  However, sociologists and most other social scientists view them as conceptually distinct. Sex refers to physical or physiological differences between males and females, including both primary sex characteristics (the reproductive system) and secondary characteristics such as height and muscularity. Gender is a person’s deeply held internal perception of his or her gender.

A person’s sex, as determined by his or her biology, does not always correspond with his or her gender. Therefore, the terms sex and gender are not interchangeable. A baby boy who is born with male genitalia will be identified as male. As he grows, however, he may identify with the feminine aspects of his culture. Since the term sex refers to biological or physical distinctions, characteristics of sex will not vary significantly between different human societies. Generally, persons of the female sex, regardless of culture, will eventually menstruate and develop breasts that can lactate. Characteristics of gender, on the other hand, may vary greatly between different societies. For example, in U.S. culture, it is considered feminine (or a trait of the female gender) to wear a dress or skirt. However, in many Middle Eastern, Asian, and African cultures, dresses or skirts (often referred to as sarongs, robes, or gowns) are considered masculine. The kilt worn by a Scottish male does not make him appear feminine in his culture.

I am sorry to be the one to raise this issue but I am going to put it straight out there so there is no confusion: men and women are not equal. For two things to be perfectly equal they would need to be the same and it should be self-evident that a man and a woman are not the same. Not only are they different on the physical level but they differ in almost every way they relate to the world around them. Men and women have different communication skills, different uses of emotion and even different perceptions of pain. However just because men and women are different does not mean that one is better than the other, in fact the very existence of humanity depends on these differences. These differences are what we might call complementary and they are part of the richness and design of humanity.

We have a major problem in our modern society though, we want everything to be ‘equal’, at least equal in the way we think it should be equal. Marriage has to be suited to whatever combination certain people desire lest it be discriminatory, faith-based employers are forced into employing those not of, or contrary to, faith, and some workplaces have quotas placed upon them in order to employ equal numbers of men and women.

The issue came to the fore recently when Australia voted in a new Liberal Prime Minster and the inner cabinet contained only one woman. The uproar across media agencies lasted the best part of a week with the new cabinet being compared, in an amusing but meaningless way, to the political cabinet of Afghanistan which has three women. The Liberal party has no particular quota on the number of women who must be selected, basing itself on merit, whereas the outgoing Labor party has a self-imposed policy that aims to preselect women as candidates in a minimum of 40% of seats. Imposing quotas though seems to be a rather disingenuous way to respect women. How is a woman selected under a quota regime supposed to know if she is there for her particular talents or simply to meet a politically correct criteria?

This is where society is getting it wrong; a false notion of equality. It begins at a subliminal level where the message is diffused that one’s gender is a social construction, meaning that a woman is a woman because she was dressed in a skirt and given dolls as a child, and a man is a man because he was dressed in trousers and given toy trucks. It is worth remembering that the term ‘gender’ came about in the early 1960’s in an attempt to differentiate between one’s biological sex and imposed sociocultural roles. In Sweden, toy company catalogues must now show images of boys playing with dolls and girls with guns, and vice versa, and in 2012 the Swedes introduced the genderless pronoun “hen” instead of “han” (he) and “hon” (she). One of their state-sponsored preschools has tried to obliterate the male/female distinction among children, so the children are not called boys and girls, but friends

I felt I was a woman until I met you
then my attraction to you made me want to have a gender change!

Final thoughts.

When a society fails to understand the nature of men and women it is true that everything can look unfair but we set rather arbitrary standards of where fairness lies. Men dominate senior positions in the largest global companies, most likely because they have particular natural abilities to do those tasks well. Women dominate the raising of the next generation of humanity and professions which nurture and educate, most likely because they have particular natural abilities to do those tasks well. Of course there will always be men and women who have certain talents which mean they are better in tasks that are not as common for their sex and that is fine also. If we were sincere about the equality issue we would insist that besides a quota of women in leadership positions, a set number of men become carers to the disabled and work at home raising children. However this is not an issue about genuine equality, it is an issue about power, we all want to be out there doing what is seen to be the most important job at the time, but meanwhile we so often forget where the important things lie.

Men and women are not ‘equal’ in their gifts but both sexes have a multitude of specific gifts and we always remain equal in our dignity as human persons. The more we focus on false notions of power and equality the less happy and satisfied we will be. Better that we realise and highlight the complementarity that men and women share and use it to make our world a better and more just place.