Ep. 02: Kisha Schools Doug on Gender and Sexuality

Digging Doug Podcast

Doug seeks the help of Kisha in attempt to understand gender, sexuality, patriarchy, feminism, complementarianism, egalitarianism, LGBTQA+ and more!

Growing up, the terms sex (as in male or female) and gender were synonymous. However, these terms have been separated to distinguish the nuance between a couple of concepts. Add to this the term "orientation", and we get three major categories related to a person's gender and sexuality.

1. First is a person's biological sex. Most people are born with either male anatomy or female anatomy. However, there are times when a person isn't entirely one or the other, but rather may have parts of both female and male anatomy. This is known as intersex. For some time, when a baby was born this way, medical personal would consult with the parents to choose the baby's sex and then surgically make the baby that sex. This has become known as a person's assigned sex.
2. The second dimension is a person's gender. This has to do with how a person see themselves. In other words, it is more conceptual rather than physical. Typically, people with male anatomy see themselves as boys/men while people with female anatomy see themselves as girls/women. However, not all people feel this way. There are some people who have male anatomy but who feel more female and vice versa. As someone who does not have this experience, I have a difficult time imagining this. However, based on the experiences of those who do, it is clear that this is a real thing and not just something which people are making up. The term transgender or often trans for short is used as a general term for all of those people who don't fit into the typical male-man, female-woman construct. Conversely, cisgender or cis for short (which uses the Latin prefix "cis" meaning "on this side") is used to refer to those who do identify as the gender matching their sex.
3. A third aspect is a person's sexual orientation. Most people feel sexual attraction to other people; orientation is a way of talking about the type of attraction a person feels. Once again, the most common orientation is men attracted to women and women attracted to men. This is known as heterosexual and is also often referred to as "straight". Once again, not everyone aligns with this norm.

As few as 0.018% of people may be born intersex, though the number could be as high as 1.7%. The range is due to the challenge of defining what intersex is from a technical, medical perspective. A good estimation may be 0.05%.1,2,3

Things get more complex when it comes to gender since this has to do with less concrete conceptions of oneself. First off, there are people who are anatomically male but feel female and those who are anatomically female but feel male. This is what I typically think of when I think of transgender, though as mentioned this term can be used more broadly.

In addition to those who consider themselves men or women, there are those who consider themselves neither (agender, non-gendered, ungendered, or genderless), both (bigender, dual gender), fluctuating (gender fluid), or another gender (third gender). These are all considered non-binary. This often falls under the umbrella of trans, however non-binary people may not identify as trans. It can be difficult to clearly categorize non-binary people in part because often these people resist classification. They believe people should be free to express and present themselves however they wish and feel that categorization is a way of putting limits on this freedom. This is probably part of the reason there are many different terms used by non-binary people.

We already defined heterosexual in relation to sexual orientation. Those people who are attracted to only those of their same gender are homosexual or colloquially "gay". Homosexual women are also specifically known as lesbians though this is more of a slang term. Beyond this, other people are bisexual meaning they are attracted to people of both genders. Other people don't experience sexual attraction and known as asexual.

As you might expect, definitions become complicated when it comes to non-binary and/or trans people. We've covered the major terms and I won't try to enumerate all of the possible other possibilities.

All this allows us to discuss the acronyms LGBT, LGBTQ, and/or LGBTQ+. This stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer. Essentially it is intended to be an umbrella term for all of those which are not cisgender, heterosexual.

Crash Course has a good video on this topic as well.

1. https://isna.org/faq/frequency/
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5866176/