17.4: Sex and Gender

Learning Objectives

Upon completing this section, you should be able to:

1. Discuss the relationships between sex, gender, and sexuality.
2. Describe the goals of feminist social movements.
3. Explain the impact of Alfred Kinsey's research into human sexual behavior.

 

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Just as race can be analyzed as a social construct with important real-world consequences, so too can we examine the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. While these terms are sometimes used interchangeably in casual discourse, they represent distinct variables to social scientists: sex refers to biological characteristics (e.g. anatomy, chromosomes, hormones), while gender refers to the behavioral roles (e.g. masculinity, femininity) that a society expects from individuals with certain cultural statuses (e.g. men, women), and sexuality refers to an individual's orientation and capacity for emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction.  American cultural understandings of these categories have undergone several transformations, in some ways paralleling our evolving understandings of race in moving from theological to biological and sociological.

Puritanical Belief

In the pre-modern colonial period of American history into the early 1900s, gender and sexuality were interpreted almost exclusively through a theological lens. For the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England (such as the famous Pilgrims), the structure of society was believed to reflect of a divinely ordained hierarchy. Gender roles were not seen as flexible arrangements to be negotiated by couples or communities, but as sacred duties established by the Creator. Men were viewed as more rational and assertive, making them natural heads of the household and of the state, designed for venturing out into the competitive and sometimes hostile public spheres of politics and the economy.  By contrast, women were seen as subservient and sentimental, well suited to nurturing children and managing a peaceful domestic environment.  

Puritanical beliefs about sex were strictly utilitarian; sexual intercourse was viewed as a duty for procreation only - not recreation!  Sex was only morally permissible within the sacred bonds of a heterosexual marriage.  Any other sexual acts were considered deviant degeneracy, and were often met with severe social and even legal sanctions. During this era, a person did not "have" a sexual orientation in the modern sense; rather, they committed sexual acts that were either in accordance with, or in violation of, divine law. This theological framework established a rigid, cosmic gender binary—the idea that there are, by design, two distinct and opposite gender categories. This binary view remains a foundational element of traditionalist thought in the United States today.

Medicalization of Deviance

As America moved through the nineteenth century with its emphasis on industrialization and scientific progress, the primary cultural foundation for gender roles gradually shifted from the pulpit to the laboratory. This era was defined by a growing conviction that social differences between men and women were rooted in innate biological essences. Early evolutionary psychologists used now de-bunked experiments in phrenology and craniometry to "prove" that women were intellectually inferior to men, with smaller brains that were more suited by nature for the same domestic tasks that earlier Puritans thought they were designed by an intelligent Creator for.  Prominent figures like G. Stanley Hall, often called the father of American psychology, argued in 1905 that there were "profound psychic differences" between the sexes, and claimed that women’s bodies were more primitive and geared towards one purpose - childbearing - while men were more complex and versatile. 

This biological paradigm served a clear social function: it took the existing social hierarchy (previously justified as divinely ordained), and reframed it as a natural division of labor that most efficiently made use of biologically evolved male and female traits.  While feminist suffragettes had been lobbying for the right to vote for decades already, they now had to contend with a mainstream belief that women’s exclusion from politics (as well as higher education and careers) was not a matter of unjust discrimination, but merely a fact of nature. Women’s more delicate feminine brains, the belief held, were simply not cut out to handle the complicated, unpleasant, messy and sometimes frightening considerations involved in dirty political conflicts, nor the cut-throat competition and ruthless exploitation that often occur in the free market. It was not “oppression” then, to keep women from voting; it was chivalry. Men were benevolently protecting the fairer sex from a nasty masculine business.  

The Kinsey Pivot

During this time, deviant sexualities and gender non-conforming behaviors were also reinterpreted through a biological lens. Just as "drunkards" became alcoholics with  addictions and "thieves" became kleptomaniacs with compulsions, cultural beliefs that onanism, sodomy, and adultery were inherently immoral and sinful gradually gave way to medicalized beliefs that masturbation, homosexuality, and extramarital affairs were symptoms of underlying pathologies, the unfortunate expressions of psychological disorders.  If these deviant behaviors were not “sin” but sickness, then the appropriate sanctions were not moral condemnation and punishment, but sympathy and clinical intervention.  

The mid-twentieth century marked a critical turning point with the work of biologist Alfred Kinsey. His landmark reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), used massive amounts of quantitative data to challenge the distinction between "normal" and "abnormal."  Before these reports, to be considered sexually deviant was so stigmatizing that most people never discussed their sexual behaviors, except perhaps with their doctor if they had a venereal disease, or with their priest or pastor if they wanted to start a family.  Kinsey’s findings revealed an enormous gap between mainstream cultural assumptions of what was normal and common, and people's actual sex behaviors.  His research documented much more widespread occurrences of premarital sex, masturbation, and same-sex activity then anyone had ever guessed.  His scientific reports provided an important catalyst for the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, by revealing that many sexual behaviors and orientations that had been considered extremely deviant (and too taboo even to discuss!) actually fell within the range of biological normality. Many Americans were not perfectly straight or gay, but somewhere in the middle of a spectrum. And some were not perfectly male or female, but biologically intersexed.  This shift in perceptions began to erode the puritanical norms and binary beliefs that still shaped American sexual morality, paving the way for sex to be studied as a legitimate scientific subject.

Doing Gender

By the late twentieth century, academic research moved toward a “post-modern” philosophical understanding of identity. The second wave of feminist social movements in the 1960s and 70s challenged the biological assumption of womanhood requiring domesticity and motherhood, and then a smaller third wave of feminism in the 1990s emphasized the intersectional nature of gender, which is the idea that gender is experienced differently depending on other aspects of one’s identity, such as race, class, and sexuality.  Sociologists Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987) introduced the concept of gender performativity, arguing that gender is not some essence an individual "has," but a set of scripted behaviors they learn to "do" through socialization.  Everyday interactions with others involve (often subconscious) performances that aim to live up to others’ social expectations, and which, through repetition, create the impression of a stable gender identity.  

Social scientists in this era began to observe people making a distinction between gender identity on the one hand (meaning our internal psychological sense of our self as a man or woman, for example) and gender roles on the other (referring to the sociological performance of pre-scripted behaviors meant for an external audience to see as masculine or feminine).  These academic distinctions began to trickle out into mainstream culture just as the Information Revolution began to ramp up with the rise of social media, leading to a proliferation of new terms people began using to describe their particular combinations of sex, gender, and sexuality, such as: transgender, pansexual, queer, nonbinary, cisgender, demisexual, etc… often grouped together under the umbrella term LGBTQ+.  This diverse array of identity labels is now a visible part of the media landscape that socializes new generations of Americans with cultural norms and values.  This is quite a dramatic change from the puritanical culture of earlier eras in which sex, gender, and sexuality were all seen as binary, and were considered taboo to discuss in public.

Memetic images like this "Genderbread Person" circulate on social media, illustrating onceptual distinctions between different aspects of a person's identity.

The Contemporary Landscape

Dramatic cultural changes in short time spans often produce social tension and political conflict. Following the Sexual Revolution, the feminist and gay rights movements, and the Information Revolution’s increased visibility of LGBTQ+ identities, a significant “sexual counter-revolution” has emerged to defend traditional sexual morality and gender roles. In his 2025 inauguration speech, President Donald Trump explicitly dismissed the existence of transgender and non-binary people, stating "there are only two genders: male and female."  His administration has taken steps to define the discussion of alternative notions of identity as “gender ideology,” implying that it is simply a fact that sex and gender are the same thing, and are in fact binary.  This definition has also recently been codified into law in several states, with new legislation prohibiting education that promotes gender ideology. Critics of these new policies argue that sex and gender are distinct concepts that shouldn’t be conflated, and that the existence of biologically intersexed people, and the existence of other global cultures with different systems of gender, both demonstrate that binary sex/gender is itself also a “gender ideology” that simply wants a regression to nineteenth-century biological essentialism.

Social media has acted as a primary accelerator of this culture war issue. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram serve as "echo chambers" where algorithms prioritize inflammatory content, reinforcing existing stereotypes for those with a binary gender ideology, while simultaneously providing a space for people with an expansive gender ideology to express themselves and find community.  While digital spaces allow for the expansion of positive portrayals of diverse identities, they also expose youth to inaccurate information and digital "gender warfare," making media literacy a vital skill for navigating modern demographic realities. Ultimately, the current era is defined by a struggle between a post-modern view of identity as socially constructed and therefore changeable, and a resurgent view of identity as a matter of unchangeable internal essence that calls for a return to traditional gender roles.

 

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References

• Acree, B. (2010). Begotten and Beguiled: Puritan Women's Communities and Gender Policing in 17th Century Colonial New England. Minds@UW.

• American Journal of Public Health. (2003). Alfred C. Kinsey: A Pioneer Of Sex Research. AJPH, 93(6).

• Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

• Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. (2026). Handbook of Children and Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Digital Media.

• Hall, G. S. (1904). Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (Vol. 2, p. 194). New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company.

• Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., & Martin, C. E. (1948). Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders.

• SMU Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. (2024). Feminist “Waves” and the Question of “Post-Feminism”.

• University of Manchester. (2026). Religion: Fuel to the Flame of the Right Wing Anti-Gender Agenda. Global Social Challenges.

• West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing Gender. Gender & Society, 1(2), 125–151.

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