Gender and sex are two different words with similar or same meaning making them synonyms of each other. But past certain decades, we have been learning that these two words might be similar but they cannot be used interchangeably because many researchers and organizations have ascertained differences between these two words with clearer definitions.
According to Canadian Institutes of Health Research, ‘sex‘ is usually categorized as female or male but there is variation in the biological attributes that comprise sex and how those attributes are expressed. While, ‘gender‘ refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender diverse people.
This concept of differentiating these two words and highlighting the presence of more than two or three sexes has been in practice since century at least but it took its turn during 1970s when many gay-rights activists spoke for the presence and rights of gay people. Later in 1988 in USA, many activists started using the initialism of ‘LGBT‘ (an umbrella term for different kinds of genders) to spread awareness about lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders in the world. By the early 2000s, ‘LGBT’ was termed as a “minority group” by some famous personalities and companies which give it enough hype and popularity in the entire world and not just United States. In the following decade, LGBT developed various updated versions, latest been ‘LGBTQIA+‘ which stands for lesbians, gays, transgenders, queers, intersexuals, asexuals and + denotes other genders which exist.
Since we gained enough basic information about the concepts like sex, genders and LBGTQIA+. We will now discuss about these sexes or genders and how we differentiate them.
Here is a chart mentioning the different genders/sexes:
From the chart above, we can see that genders/sexes can be broadly classified into two categories, heterosexuals and homosexuals.
- Heterosexuals are the people with straight sexual orientation. There are two genders in it, male and female who both are attracted to each other.
- Homosexuals are the people who are attracted to same gender/sex, can be attracted to opposite same/sex too and/or who have biologically different physical body parts by birth. According to Sexual Diversity Organization, there are about 107 different genders as of 2023. It includes lesbians (females attracted to females and not males), gay (males attracted to males but not females), bisexuals (male or female attracted to both sexes – males and females) and so on. Out of these 107 genders, only transgenders and intersexuals are actually born with different biological physical features (body parts).
