I was five when I grasped the difference between biological sex and gender. My best friend dumped me when we started primary school because he realised I was a girl. I was so hurt and confused: I was the same person, but because our relationship was now embedded in a larger, gender stratified community, I was now seen as something less. Someone less. Someone different. Someone he could no longer be best friends with.
What the experience told me was that my body had socially ascribed meanings that didn’t have anything to do with me, the person inhabiting the body. That I still liked climbing the same trees, riding the same bikes, playing in the same dirt, and with the same trains, was irrelevant. What mattered was that my body was different to his which now meant that there were different expectations on and of me, expectations I did not agree with nonetheless.
Many years later, I did a year of a Women’s Studies degree where we learned basic stuff around the difference between biological sex and gender. Basic facts it seems that most of society has not grasped, so let me have a go because it’s really quite simple. Biological sex is the facts of our bodies (female, male, intersex), and gender is the meanings ascribed to those bodies (women, men, non-binary).
It is abundantly clear that vast swathes of society do not grasp that sex and gender are not the same thing. I believe this lack of understanding is precisely what has led to the transgender wars. I also believe that hardline zealots on both sides are obscuring the debate, and creating more animosity and confusion.