Gender Versus Sex

[Page 769]Psychologists use the term sex to refer to the biological aspects (e.g., hormones, chromosomes, gonads, genitals) of being male, female, or another configuration of sex and the term gender to refer to the psychological, social, and cultural aspects (e.g., gender identity, gender expression, gender roles) of being a man, a woman, or some other gender. The distinction between sex and gender is not particular to psychology and is used widely across the humanities and social sciences. However, the terms sex and gender are often conflated and used interchangeably both in popular culture and in some academic work. This conceptual error has important consequences for popular understandings as well as for research and clinical practice in psychology. The distinction between these terms was created to ...