"It's natural and real, but not for you and me my love..."

Can "sex" be separated from "gender"?
Are there bodily differences, which have a "neutral", non-political status?

What does it mean to say: usually when we talk and interact with people, we are not in doubt about the sex of the person with whom we are talking?

This is a tricky question. In many ways. One point here is, of course, that it is not always clear. I am sometimes interrogated about my sex when I am visiting public toilets. It is always hard to come up with something intelligent to say in these situations. I usually say something stupid ("Well, in fact I am a ..."). Once I was so scared that I ran out of the toilet, my errand undone (but I didn't go to the other one.). But there are also more positive experiences. At the local pub, where all sorts of people are hanging out, I was asked, when standing in front of the toilet mirror with another person, "I don't know what you are. What are you, a boy a girl?" This time, I wasn't even attempting to reply. I simply made a gesture of desparation. The person seemed to grasp my predicament, because the response was: "Well, it doesn't really matter after all, does it?" That reply revealed the very artificiality of the question. Nowadays, I am a little bit braver with regard to my toilet habits (well, this is a blog, isn't it, a sanctuary for juicy confessions?). I go to whatever toilet is free. Sometimes.

Why would somebody say that "in most cases, it is obvious that a person is a woman/a man"? Well why, then, is it so obvious? Biology does not seem to have a very straightforward role here, even if that is the idea, that we are discussing sex, not gender. I have another haircut (or lack of it) now, than I did a year ago. I am not refused entrance to toilets that often anymore. We are not exactly talking about biology here, are we?

If some stupid gender hang-ups were to disappear, I guess many things would change. It would not matter so much whether a person "is a man or a woman". As it is now, most people dress quite conservatively. Wearing sex on one's sleeve, as it were. (Kids, for example, are usually dressed up so as to embody a particular gender. If they were not, I guess many things would be different.) Some things are considered "wrong". My mother is fond of telling me how I can and can't dress, and she is very persistent in making her judgement appear as if based on biological facts. The point I want to make is: in the present situation, it is very intelligible that "people in between" who do not fit into the stereotypes, appear to be exceptions to the rule. That said, it is hard to persist in pressing the obviousness of sex/gender differences. Sex, in opposition to gender, is said to be concern genitalia and nothing more. But when people want to defend the thesis, they talk about how we appear as women and men.

If we were to perceive the world differently, different questions and concerns would arise.

We sometimes think that some questions - about sex in opposition to gender - are innocent, non-political. I don't agree with this at all. The question "is it a boy or a girl?" when asked of a newborn child, is not a request for some piece of neutral information. People are killed for being "born as a girl". "I didn't expect a girl, we always thought the foetus was a boy." Well, are those questions appealing to a neutral piece of biology?

Questions, even about bodies, are asked in particular circumstances. All right, we are born with particular bodies, equipped with particular genitalia. I guess we can say that. But what this will come to mean, exactly what "having a particular body" amounts to, well that is an open question. Am I saying that the distinction between sex and gender is illusory? Yes, I do. Do I intend to say that "there is no sex"? My response would be: let's not get involved in fuzzy ontological questions here. They are uninteresting and confusing. Struggles, difficulties, understandings, etc. - this is interesting. Do I say that bodies do not matter? Well of course they do. But let's not drag bodies into some strange metaphysical domain of "biological facts". Please?

Let's assume that I do know that you are a girl. Ok? What does that mean? When would that actually become an interesting piece of information? In what sense are we always "aware" of each others as gendered beings? In my humble opinion, there is no neutral "awareness" here. My being aware of particular things tells you something about who I am, what I find important. I have a hard time understanding the idea that we are sex-ed beings in a totally general sense. "There are these neutral differences of sex, which are expressed in our awareness of each others as men and women, but political questions are different." I don't get it. The situations, in which we find it intelligible, or important, to talk about something as having to do with "women", "men", "female", "male" reveal something about how we see the world. That is, as I am trying to say, not a neutral fact.

I do not have some tacit awareness of you as a man/woman. I don't understand what that would mean. "If somebody would ask me if I was talking to a man or a woman, I would usually be able to reply." Yeah, but isn't the question quite peculiar? It is not asked out of the blue, out of some sort of general interest. Let's say that I am referring to a conversation about progressive music. You ask: "is your friend a guy or a girl?" My immediate reaction would concern the motivation of your question. What do you mean? Do you mean that guys are more prone to like progressive music? The idea that sex is simply some general presupposition in our lives doesn't seem to make much sense.

Reading Judith Butler opened my eyes in some ways. She talks about gender as an activity. I agree with her about that. Some of her points are maybe a little bit misleading but at least she makes illuminating points about the sex/gender distinction.

Names, for example. Why are most Swedish, Finnish and English names considered either male or female? Is it a simple, neutral, expression of our understanding of each others as beings equipped with certain genitalia? No way, man. Something else is at stake. My mother would say: "But why do you always want to change everything? Isn't it good as it is? Don't you realize that we are different?"

Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head.