A short manifesto on why I think sex & gender ARE the same thing and efforts to distinguish them are misguided & harmful. Sex/gender refers to a set of physiological, expressive, and behavioral conditions & characteristics that we have generally assigned to two binary categories.

When we try to say "sex" is on the body and "gender" is socially constructed, it both minimizes the extent to which our expression is tied to our body and makes overly salient the idea that our physiological characteristics are somehow immune from social construction.

Our bodies take on meaning in social context. We give salience to certain physiological characteristics to serve as proxies for sex/gender just as we do behavioral/expressive ones. Our gender studies classes did not serve us in this sense.

There is neither a biological or social binary of sex/gender that can be extricated from power structures and social context. The impulse to control and maintain the binary categories of sex/gender are always part of a colonial and supremacist projects.