sex is the phenotypic expression of your body. society interprets this expression - which includes a multitude of often contradictory features - as a binary but the biological reality is that it exists on a spectrum with two modes (for humans, anyway). gender identity is complicated but the best explanation is that it's the sex of our brains - this frequently aligns with the body's sex but not always. when it doesn't, the brain spends a lot of time setting off alarms until you go totally numb to them and stop even noticing that it's happening. we call this phenomenon dysphoria. not everyone experiences a concrete sense of dysphoria and not everyone who experiences dysphoria is trans. cis people experience dysphoria too -- look at the body builders or instagram models pushing their bodies to almost ludicrous extremes, chasing an image of who they think they ought to be.
while we might one day be able to look at a brain scan and determine who's likely to be trans - people for whom their brain's sex and their body's sex diverges - it's important that we resist the urge to make such classification final. the only person who can determine what their sex & gender ought to be is the person themselves.
why am I framing it in this way? because the sex/gender dichotomy is originally a TERF thing. they were trying to explain why trans people were biologically their birth sex. they're obviously wrong and in contradiction with all of biology (there are very few categorical distinctions in biology; virtually everything is a spectrum) but for whatever reason, it's stuck -- I think because we're not used to thinking of the brain as an organ that can display sexual dimorphism. but the reality is that it is and it can have anything ranging from a subtle to a significant effect on how someone sees themselves.
gender expression is just how you present yourself to society - man, woman, NB, agendered, whatever. it's your clothes, your mannerisms, and everything else.
in colloquial speech, when people talk about sex & gender, they're almost always referring to the notions that society has constructed about these underlying factors. "biological sex" is a misnomer. we mean "how society buckets any particular combination of sexually dimorphic features" and society only has two buckets at present - man and woman. this is what people mean when they say sex is socially constructed.
lastly, because sex is entirely about phenotypic expression (consider: someone can have XY chromosomes yet will never be able to androgenize hormonally if they have a gene that makes them totally and completely insensitive to androgens), it's possible to change one's sex. and because sex mostly refers to society's concepts surrounding sex, this doesn't really even require medical procedures or hormones -- for some people they don't really need to do much but change their appearance, and society will read them as they wish to be read. but even the biology can be changed. hormones gave me a menstrual cycle (minus ovulation), I have a vagina, I have breasts, and my hips are as wide as my shoulders. whose definition of female do I, someone who was assigned male at birth, not meet?
sex is the phenotypic expression of your body. society interprets this expression - which includes a multitude of often contradictory features - as a binary but the biological reality is that it exists on a spectrum with two modes (for humans, anyway). gender identity is complicated but the best explanation is that it's the sex of our brains - this frequently aligns with the body's sex but not always. when it doesn't, the brain spends a lot of time setting off alarms until you go totally numb to them and stop even noticing that it's happening. we call this phenomenon dysphoria. not everyone experiences a concrete sense of dysphoria and not everyone who experiences dysphoria is trans. cis people experience dysphoria too -- look at the body builders or instagram models pushing their bodies to almost ludicrous extremes, chasing an image of who they think they ought to be.
while we might one day be able to look at a brain scan and determine who's likely to be trans - people for whom their brain's sex and their body's sex diverges - it's important that we resist the urge to make such classification final. the only person who can determine what their sex & gender ought to be is the person themselves.
why am I framing it in this way? because the sex/gender dichotomy is originally a TERF thing. they were trying to explain why trans people were biologically their birth sex. they're obviously wrong and in contradiction with all of biology (there are very few categorical distinctions in biology; virtually everything is a spectrum) but for whatever reason, it's stuck -- I think because we're not used to thinking of the brain as an organ that can display sexual dimorphism. but the reality is that it is and it can have anything ranging from a subtle to a significant effect on how someone sees themselves.
gender expression is just how you present yourself to society - man, woman, NB, agendered, whatever. it's your clothes, your mannerisms, and everything else.
in colloquial speech, when people talk about sex & gender, they're almost always referring to the notions that society has constructed about these underlying factors. "biological sex" is a misnomer. we mean "how society buckets any particular combination of sexually dimorphic features" and society only has two buckets at present - man and woman. this is what people mean when they say sex is socially constructed.
lastly, because sex is entirely about phenotypic expression (consider: someone can have XY chromosomes yet will never be able to androgenize hormonally if they have a gene that makes them totally and completely insensitive to androgens), it's possible to change one's sex. and because sex mostly refers to society's concepts surrounding sex, this doesn't really even require medical procedures or hormones -- for some people they don't really need to do much but change their appearance, and society will read them as they wish to be read. but even the biology can be changed. hormones gave me a menstrual cycle (minus ovulation), I have a vagina, I have breasts, and my hips are as wide as my shoulders. whose definition of female do I, someone who was assigned male at birth, not meet?
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sex is when unga bunga