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hey everyone I'm Tracy welcome to test-tube plus this is a podcast style show where we take a big topic and we get really into it this week we're talking about gender identity it's very important topic especially right now what is gender is a big question why does it matter and do we even need it anymore these are questions we're gonna get into we should explain some terms though I think those are all really important sex and gender are both inborn and both fluid both public and yet at the same time kind of intensely personal so let's start with some basic concepts for what sex and gender are sex is a biological concept gender is a human and social cultural concept in fact all of the following things are completely independent identifiers Stender and sex are not the same thing although they're often used interchangeably sex is the classification of being male or female and it's usually assigned at Birth when we're born we look at a baby and we say this Anatomy determines that this is a man or a woman or will be it's a male or a female one in two thousand births though has atypical genitalia you know something's missing maybe or something's extra something's too big something's in the wrong place something too small it really does happen a lot one in 2,000 might not seem like a lot but that's a lot so this is why using the word assignment is important when talking about sex someone decided that this baby is a male or a female at some point not looking at its DNA or anything else just looking at it there are times when a doctor is making this decisions there is a time when this doctor is maybe wrong for example say circumcision was elected to be done by the parents it's happened before where a mangled circumcision results in a change in the sex assignment from boy to girl it's happened look it up gender on the other hand from sex is the state of being male or female culturally or socially so again not the same as sex it's far more fluid and it's also more of a spectrum or a continuum femininity versus masculinity is one way that people talk about gender it's not the anyway male versus female is one way you can talk about sex but again not the only way and reality gender is non-binary there aren't just two genders there are many genders some countries even recognize a third gender group but we'll get there gender identity is your internal feelings about your gender so this is about you not about how the world sees you but how you see yourself so usually it's masculine or feminine a lot of people identify very simply masculine or feminine but sometimes it's a mix of those sometimes it's neither one of those and the thing is when it comes to gender identity this is something that you decide no one can tell you what your gender identity is gender expression is names pronouns appearance like your clothes you wear the hairstyle that you have it's the outward appearance of that gender identity and that's defined by kind of the cultural experience but you're the one who gets to pick what that shows a third term you're gonna hear a lot is sexual orientation and sex and gender are independent of that sexual orientation is physical romantic and/or emotional attraction to another person it's inborn science believes it's likely a result of epigenetics which means it can have some inheritability but more or less there's no gay gene just like there's no straight gene but it's also not a choice and probably not changeable throughout someone's life your sexual orientation is usually pretty permanent another term is transgender this is where people start to get a little tripped up because masculine and feminine describes so many people in our population it's very difficult for a lot of people to understand what this means but this is when the gender identity and or gender expression differs from what the inborn sex assignment is it's an umbrella term for all different gender expressions and gender identities so that would be transgender transsexual is a medical term for someone whose identity or expression doesn't match that as assigned at birth so say somebody who was born a male but felt like they were female their whole life they may become someday transgender or transexual they're not entirely mutually exclusive nor are they both used all the time for every case its individual there's also a gender a gender means you're not masculine or feminine no gender identity some define this as having a gender identity that is neutral as a separate from something standing apart it's a neutral gender identity it's very difficult for this to be studied I have a background in sexual education I'm a certified peer sex educator from Western Michigan University where I went to my undergrad and we talked a lot about a gender because it was very difficult to study people who are a gender because it's not a huge population similar to masculine and feminine people which are very large populations there are also things like cross-dressing this is completely separate again from all these other terms and this is the person whose clothing is their chosen means of gender expression now that you know what that term means and it often differs from their sex assignment but not always terms to avoid in this area that a lot of people still use our transvestite that's someone who dresses for sexual pleasure cross-dressing does not necessarily mean that they're getting sexual pleasure out of it it might just mean that it conforms better to their internally held gender identity someone who is in transition is someone who is converting from living and working as one gender into a different gender it's often done through their outward appearance sometimes it's done through surgery sometimes it goes as far as hormones and other measures that need to be taken in order to make the person's gender identity on the inside match their gender expression on the outside that's when you would say that person is in transition everyone transitions differently and there are different levels of transition not everybody goes 100% masculine to 100% feminine and in fact most science says that there's no such thing as people who are 100% of either of those things everyone is on this spectrum or on this continuum some people will transition partway and find their spot that they are most calm portable and that's where they will stop some people you will read about if you go and looking and into this stuff you'll find some people transition a little bit find their spot but transition a little farther and then come back as in they'll maybe stop taking a hormone or they won't go through with the surgery they had planned because they found the place where they were comfortable even though they planned to go farther this is all complicated and you might be thinking to yourself so if I am a masculine person who was assigned male when they were born what am i there's a term for you too it's cisgender cisgender people are people who identify with the gender that they were assigned at Birth I'm better to be cisgender but it's nice to know who you are and it's part of your identity whether you know it or not or whether you knew it before I told you it was a term or not it's an important part of who you are and that's why this is complicated because this involves human lives and most people are going to commend others for trying so learning some of these terms are going to make you talk to others better and even if you use the wrong term say you're talking about someone's cross-dressing and you use the word transvestite don't but if you do people will commend you for trying often as long as you're not doing it in a negative way because this is about people's individuality it's about affirmation you're seeing people as they want to be seen and that's important so a good place to start was somewhere that I learned to start in college which was instead of saying a member of the opposite sex how many times have you heard people say that the opposite sex implies that there is one sex and then there is the opposite like there is the opposite side of a quarter in reality it's the other sex it's not the opposite you're not two sides of the same coin you're two parts of a greater spectrum or continuum identity is everything to so many people and it's very personal it's very important and being misunderstood or having your deeply held beliefs cast aside it's hurtful and makes everyone feel terrible no matter what they identify with on the inside so obviously I don't know everything about this I have done some training but I haven't done it in a long time so things have changed since I was certified they probably changed since I started doing some of this research two years ago on dnews but that's why we're here to talk about it and having a different opinion or a different understanding of this is really important to us so please let us know you can tell us in the comments or you can tweet at tweet at me if you'd like and just remember be respectful we're discussing actual people here but I think it's important also to find other terms for some of these things there are terms that I didn't get to in this episode so make sure you share those in the comments and you can find out tomorrow what the science says about all of this stuff so subscribe for more test-tube plus last week we talked about aliens super exciting stuff we had our first guest ever dr. Ian O'Neill after physicists really really cool thanks for watching test-tube plus we'll see you tomorrow [Music]