Hey all, I've noticed a few times around this sub and elsewhere that there is a little "misuse" in the term gender.

"Gender" is used by most people to simply refer to male or female, but that's not how it's used in an academic sense.

"Gender" is the masculine/feminine behavior that we perform coinciding with male and female gender roles. As in, gender is an act that we perform based on what other men and women do.

"Sex," however, deals with the biological differences between XX and XY human beings. I.E., males or females. It has to do with difference in body morphology and function, irrespective of cultural influences.

So for example: the male sex produces more testosterone than the female sex, which is linked to competitiveness, which then manifests in male participation in sports like football, boxing, etc., which are seen as culturally gendered "male" activities.

Sometimes the differences in sex and gender are distinct, and sometimes the two can morph together like the example above. Whether our behavior is a construct of our biology (sex), or the result of environmental conditioning (gender), or both!, is still up for debate, and skewed one way or the other depending on if you're more genetic determinist or egalitarian. But nevertheless, there is a difference between the two.