A Brief Excurses on Gender

Time for a controversial post.  

In his paper on the gender/sex distinction, Bogardus argues that our traditional English words “man” and “woman” resist analysis as purely gender terms.  They are best taken as partly denoting biological sex.  Still, Bogardus grants - as he must - that a word with a stipulated definition like “gender,” can refer purely to the social features commonly associated with the biological sexes.  Stipulated definitions cannot be argued against.  

I want to go a tad further.  While I grant that one can make a conceptual distinction between sex and gender, I think it’s the case that our biological sex normatively selects for certain behaviors and activities that will result in particular gender roles for the respective sexes.  Here are some examples:  I think that sexual activity between members of the same sex is immoral.  So there should be social ways to signal to others to which sex one belongs.  I think that contraception is morally wrong and that married couples need a grave reason to refrain from procreation.  So pregnancy and child rearing should be common, which will of course select females for particular social roles that differentiate them from males - pregnancy, breast-feeding, early child-mother bonding. This results in men having to fulfill other alternative roles.  Further, and more controversially, I think that Christians have divinely imposed gender norms that we must heed:  No female pastors (though God does inspire female prophets!).  

Notice that I don’t really care about the more frivolous gender norms - leg shaving, make-up, dresses, and whathaveyou.  While our biology may incline us towards certain behaviors in these spheres, I doubt that it’s normatively selecting these behaviors as with the other cases in the above paragraph.