1. Key Terms and Their Meanings
a) Biological sex, birth sex or natal sex: These terms all refer to the physical or physiological characteristics that help us differentiate between what is male and what is female: chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genitals, and secondary sex characteristics – e.g., body shape, voice pitch and hair distribution. Biological sex is often simply referred to as “sex.”
b) Gender: Historically, the terms “sex” and “gender” have often been used interchangeably. Even today drawing a distinction between them is not universal. Where a distinction is made, however, “gender” is “often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.”4 As such, the term usually encompasses three aspects: gender identity, gender expression and gender roles.
c) Gender identity: This refers to the way individuals perceive themselves and wish to name themselves. When a person’s subjective gender identity aligns with their objective biological sex, which is the case for most people, they are sometimes referred to as cisgender (cis = on this side of).5 When there is a clash, however, then they are commonly referred to as transgender (trans = on the other side of). See further below.
d) Gender expression: This refers to the psychological and social aspects of how masculinity and femininity are presented in things like dress and demeanour, social roles and conventions and other cultural gender norms. These vary from culture to culture, if not from person to person.
e) Gender roles: This refers to the commonly accepted expectations of maleness or femaleness, including social and behavioral expectations. While some roles (for example, who cooks the meals or irons the clothes) vary from person to person, household to household or culture to culture, and often change over time, others are biologically determined (most obviously, pregnancy and breastfeeding).
f) Gender bending: This refers to the intentional crossing or bending or blending of accepted gender norms in a given culture. This is done either by adopting the dress, mannerisms, roles or behaviors of the opposite gender (sometimes referred to as transvestitism), or through the attempt to obscure one’s gender and to appear as either asexual, agender, pansexual, omnigender or androgynous.
g) Gender dysphoria: This is the latest diagnostic term (c/- DSM-V, 2013)6 for the distress experienced by those whose psychological or emotional gender identity differs from their biological sex. It replaces the previous term, Gender Identity Disorder (c/- DSM IV, 1994), which saw the mismatch itself as a psychiatric disorder. Now, however, it’s only the distress that is (normally) caused by gender incongruence that is regarded as a problem, not the incongruence itself.7 For this reason, I will use the term ‘gender dysphoria’ only occasionally in this essay and, for the most part, prefer the language of ‘gender incongruence’, which I deem to be a more helpful descriptor of the condition.
h) Intersex: This is a term that covers a range of disorders of sex development (DSDs) where there is some biological ambiguity in a person’s genitalia or gonads, or more rarely still, their chromosomes. Except in very rare instances, a person’s biological sex can be known from their DNA. Because intersex conditions are medically identifiable deviations from the binary sexual norm they are not regarded as constituting a third sex.8 Because they are biologically (rather than psychologically) based, some intersex people do not wish to be associated with the LGBTQ+ movement.9
i) Transgender: This is an umbrella term for people who are born either male or female, but whose gender identity differs from their birth sex (to varying degrees), and who want to express the gender with which they identify through cross-dressing, if not also cross-sex hormone therapy (CHT), if not also sex reassignment surgery (SRS). The term transsexual is sometimes used interchangeably with transgender, and sometimes used only of those who seek medical assistance to transition. Because of its breadth, the transgender umbrella also includes those who identify as bigender, pangender, omnigender, gender fluid, gender diverse or agender.
j) Heteronormativity: This is the view that biological sex is either male or female (gender binarism), that sex and gender are meant to match up (cisnormativitiy), and that only sexual orientation toward and sexual relations with a member of the opposite sex is normal and natural. As we will see, the ideas conveyed by the term heteronormativity are central to the biblical view of sex and gender. However, because these ideas are increasingly regarded as bigoted, oppressive, homophobic and transphobic (especially by LGBTQ+ activists and allies), heteronormativity is a somewhat tainted term.
With these terms and definitions understood, we now turn to look more closely at contemporary gender theory and the revolutionary changes it is introducing.