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Distinction Between Sex And Gender

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distinction between sex and gender be defined?

In discussing whether the distinction between sex and gender can be defined I am going to use the early distinction between the two and how this has been socially constructed to identify if there is a distinction. Additionally, I am going to use a variety of feminist influences since the 1960’s, to draw upon the main issues when defining sex and gender. I will investigate the implications of defining sex and gender by looking at sexism. I hope this will enable me to define a faultless distinction between sex and gender.

It was in the late 1960s when feminists first began to identify a need for a distinction between sex and gender (fem philos). Before this time the English language used the word gender to refer to masculine or feminine words. Linda Nicholson used the example of a boat being historically thought of as feminine to explain this point (Alison and Jaggar, 1998). Robert Stoller also influenced a beginning to the distinction between sex and gender. He said that sex is reference to the biological connotations and gender is psychological or cultural differences. Stoller broke gender down into two sections. The first section is gender identity, which Stoller outlines as the anatomical, hormonal and chromosomal features of our body, which make one either male or female. The other section Stoller identified is gender role: behaviors surrounding social expectations making us either a man or a woman. The purpose of

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