Sex Isn’t A Bad Word, But ‘Gender’ Is

No one wants to write out S-E-X anymore. In response to online content moderation policies that disincentivize certain words, a growing number of social media users — mostly young people on TikTok — are choosing to use the replacement terms “seggs” or “shmex” when they mean to say “sex.”

For the most part, it’s a funny (if slightly Orwellian) trend, but it also speaks to a different problem, one that has disastrous consequences for women’s rights: Because our culture acts like the word “sex” only has one meaning — namely, well, the birds and the bees (which, naturally, no one wants to bring up in polite society) — far too many people ignore the other meaning of the word “sex,” the categories of male and female, and use the word “gender” instead.

One problem with that: “Sex” and “gender” are not interchangeable.

Whereas sex is a fixed category — mammals, including humans, are born either male or female and cannot switch sexes — “gender” is a vague, sociological concept that refers to the social expression of sex and the social attributes associated with each sex. 

Of course, most people who confuse “sex” and “gender” do so innocently, not knowing that they are conflating an unchangeable category with a constantly shifting and ill-defined concept. Nevertheless, this popular confusion around “sex” and “gender” has laid the groundwork for far-left activists to promote radical gender ideology, a theory that suggests males can become women, females can become men, and members of either sex can assume no sex or some other sex entirely.

Such an ideology may be biologically nonsensical, but activists’ distortion of language, combined with the general public’s casual but inaccurate parlance, is part of what has allowed males who simply state that they identify as women (even though this is biologically impossible) to gain access to women’s sports, bathrooms, and prisons, among other intimate, single-sex spaces designed to protect women.

It seems almost ridiculous that women today must defend their right to female-only spaces. The 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, among other federal and state laws, protect women from discrimination on the basis of sex. 

This is why words matter. “Sex” and “gender” are not synonyms, but because of a false ideology that has pretended they are, it has become necessary to clarify that there are only two sexes, male and female, and that women are biologically distinct from men.

Recently, Justice Alito exposed the danger of erroneously conflating “sex” and “gender” in U.S. v. Skrmetti, a pending landmark case considering the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that protects children from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and other sex-trait modification procedures.

In posing the question of whether being transgender is an “immutable” trait, Justice Alito forced the American Civil Liberties Union attorney, who was arguing that Tennessee’s law was unconstitutional, to concede that “gender identity” isn’t immutable. This is important because an “immutable” characteristic is a legal term that refers to whether an aspect of a person’s identity is fundamental and unchangeable and therefore protected under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. By its very definition, “gender,” unlike sex, cannot be immutable, which, logically, should close the door to the left’s attempt to treat “gender identity” as a protected class.

Now that President Trump has taken a profound step in the right direction and repudiated “gender identity” indoctrination, the focus must shift to 1) Congress to codify these definitions so they cannot be changed via executive order by a future administration and 2) the states, where laws and policies failing to differentiate between “sex” and “gender” have undermined the rights of women.

To that end, we can start to reverse course by acknowledging reality and using language — yes, even the word “sex” — that reflects it.

Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst and engagement coordinator at Independent Women’s Forum (iwf.org). Beth Parlato is a senior legal advisor for Independent Women’s Law Center (iwlc.org).