Steve Stewart-Williams explains "Why I'm not a Fan of Gender." Excerpt from his upcoming bok, "A Billion Years of Sex Differences":

Many social scientists draw a distinction between sex and gender where, roughly speaking, sex refers to biological aspects of female and male, and gender refers to social aspects. ... I’m not a fan of the concept of gender, which I think confuses more than it enlightens.

There are several reasons for this. The first is that the term has multiple meanings. Sometimes gender refers to female–male differences that are (supposedly) shaped by nurture rather than nature; sometimes it refers to masculinity and femininity; sometimes it refers to psychological profiles that are more common in one sex than the other; sometimes it refers to widely held stereotypes of the sexes; sometimes it refers to the roles that society provides for females and males; sometimes it refers to people’s gender identity (their sense of themselves as a boy or a girl or a man or a woman); and sometimes it’s just a polite synonym for sex: a term that makes it clear that you’re talking about biological sex rather than the fun kind of sex. The profusion of partially overlapping meanings makes it difficult to know what people using the term are actually talking about. It’s like trying to juggle jelly.

A second reason I prefer not to partake of gender is that, even if we could agree on a definition, most of those on offer are profoundly flawed. Take, for example, the idea that gender refers to female–male differences due to nurture rather than nature. An initial problem is that this is invariably assumed rather than demonstrated; indeed, describing a female–male difference as a gender difference often seems to be a way to settle the nature–nurture issue by definitional stipulation rather than arguments and evidence. . . .

Other definitions of gender face similar problems. Consider, for example, the idea that gender refers to psychological profiles loosely linked to sex: Men tend to be stoic and assertive, for instance, whereas women tend to be caring and emotional. This definition is assumed by people who argue that there are multiple distinct genders, rather than just the two vanilla options of man and woman. Again, this doesn’t strike me as a useful way to construe things. The problem is that it involves imposing categories – even if more than just two – on what is actually continuous psychological variation. No two human beings have exactly the same psychological profiles, so the logical endpoint of this approach is that there are as many genders as there are human beings – and we’re really just talking about personality.

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