This series of posts will be on philosopher Dr. Tomas Bogardus’s exciting published paper “Evaluating Arguments for the Sex/Gender Distinction.”

Don’t we all, nowadays, know that gender isn’t the same thing as sex? This has become a piece of received wisdom in the present-day West.

Yet at the same time, people often use “gender” as a synonym for “sex,” for instance, when they throw a “gender-reveal” party for a baby. They’re really talking about its sex, whether it is male or female, not about its “gender identity.”

But still, in many contexts, it is assumed as obvious that all educated people know that gender is not sex. As a teaser I’ll leave you with a portion of Bogardus’s Abstract:

Many philosophers believe that our ordinary English words man and woman are “gender terms,” and gender is distinct from biological sex. That is, they believe womanhood and manhood are not defined even partly by biological sex. This sex/gender distinction is one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century on the broader culture, both popular and academic. Less well known are the reasons to think it’s true. My interest in this paper is to show that, upon inspection, the arguments for the sex/gender distinction have feet of clay. In fact, they all fail.

What? The nerve! Can he show that? Is there no good reason to insist that there’s this thing called gender which is wholly different than a person’s sex?

We’ll find out.