Usually, “sex” refers to biology (“what’s in your pants”) whereas “gender” refers to the social construct (are people expect you to wear pants?).
“Asexual” then usually refers to someone’s preferences about getting what’s in their pants and what’s in someone else’s pants together; asexual typically means “they’re not interested in that”.(“heterosexual” meaning they want what’s in the other person’s pants to be different than what’s in theirs)
There’s a lot of namespace collisions in all this.
> Usually, “sex” refers to biology (“what’s in your pants”)
"Sex" refers more specifically to hormonal expression than anything else.
What's in your pants, what chromosomes you have, etc aren't really great indicators for that. What hormones you have in your body in practice is really the only surefire thing.
This applies especially in the historical context since after social clues, the main thing you have left is osteology/bone analysis and that's driven predominantly by hormones more than anything else.
And even if you subtract the people on hormone replacement therapy, intersex people (people who naturally express "nonstandard" sex characteristics) make up upwards of 2% of the population.
So in the end sex really only refers to what your hormones are and nowadays you can change that with medication.
Sorry for being pedantic but this is one of the things that irks me with sex/gender discourse
While technically yes in the strict biological definition, it's a measurably less useful definition in humans since we generally don't consider a man who can't produce sperm as "not male" and a woman who doesn't have eggs as "not female".
Point being that while sex is certaintly more fundamental than gender, I don't know if the formal biology definition of sex is sufficiently nuanced for the way we perceive sex in humans. Especially since of the primary sex characteristics, having eggs or sperm is arguably the characteristic that humans care the least about when determining sex.
True, a male can develop with malformed testes or a woman with non-functioning ovaries, but can we still understand the difference between the sexes. For gonochoric species like humans it's the whole body plan that develops separately for each reproductive role.
It's not just hormone levels measured at any one point in time, but the result of a long and specialised developmental process. For instance, females and males end up having different skeletal structure which we can observe as accommodating childbirth in the former.
>So in the end sex really only refers to what your hormones are and nowadays you can change that with medication
I think there's a significant point being glossed over here. You are suggesting that it is which hormones our bodies produce that determines sex, without regard to whether our bodies produce them with or without deliberate intervention. I don't particularly care if we settle on one or the other but it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that this has never mattered when we've been running with a definition of sex that assumed a natural expression of hormones.
The significant point in many of these discussions is glossing over the outliers, the 2% whose hardware+wetware doesn't line up with the majority of humans.
Historically, globally, throughout history there has always been such outliers (Gender in Bugis-Makassar society, Sistagirls in Torres Strait groups, etc).
> when we've been running with a definition of
The "we" in a global setting and sans context is an issue, there's a plurality of definitions that are used depending on focus and degree of technical detail.
Richard Dawkins use of "sex" in recent interviews is a classic example, he deftly occludes the 2% of humans that don't neatly fall into M|F buckets by taking a strictly reproductive evolutionary razor to the question and responds (as best I recall) that "there are only two (reproductive) sexes, Males (viable sperm producers), and Females (viable egg producers) .. that's just (reproductive) biology".
That's a bit of a mean spirited one way mapping from two reproductive buckets to those humans that cleanly fall into those buckets.
Dawkins avoids and hopes the audience doesn't press on whether all humans fit into one or the other bucket (they don't) and of course his interviewer at the time doesn't press.
“Asexual” then usually refers to someone’s preferences about getting what’s in their pants and what’s in someone else’s pants together; asexual typically means “they’re not interested in that”.(“heterosexual” meaning they want what’s in the other person’s pants to be different than what’s in theirs)
There’s a lot of namespace collisions in all this.