hi so today we are going to start talking about sex and gender um and this is a chapter that of course i think many of you are interested in um without me having to really say anything else about it just because it's a fascinating area um especially for young adults so um the first thing i want to talk about is the difference between sex and gender which seems really simple but it's actually really complicated so um this little this little figure here shows um some differences as far as where we get different terms okay so our gender expression is the way that we choose to express what gender we feel like internally so for example um identify i identify as female and one of the ways i choose to express my gender is by having longish hair right um or wearing makeup or um jewelry okay so those are various ways that i can express the gender that i feel i am to communicate that with the outside world um our gender identity is our internal sense of how we feel okay so identity is how i feel inside expression is how i choose to show that to the outside world okay and that's how those two are different then of course we have sexual orientation who are attracted to and we'll talk about that in a later video and then we have these biological labels okay so for example sex when i say what sex are you or um you when you're pregnant the doctor says you know do you want to know the sex of the baby um the idea there is uh what does your chromosomes say that you are right and and this is you know more biological than anything else let me move this little image here so i can come over here all right so this is more biological than environmental uh but there's a lot of inaccuracies when it comes to how we talk about sex so in our society you really commonly hear male female um if you talk about men then you're talking about females as the opposite sex right and that's just kind of shorthand because it is absolutely true that the vast majority of um the vast majority of people identify as male or female okay so that that is accurate however that's not where it ends okay so chromosomally our um our sex is set by our 23rd pair of chromosomes and mom always contributes an x chromosome because female is xx so mom's only got x's so mom always contributes an x dad always contributes either an x or a y so dad is the one who decides if the baby is going to be male female right um so if the baby has an xx female if the baby has an xy male simple right and we think of it as a dichotomy male or female however biology is not that simple um and so when i'm talking about this i i do not want i'm not trying to get political i'm not trying to say that um you know make a political statement that's not my job my job is to talk about research and science and what the science says is that the idea that there are only two genders male and female is absolutely incorrect it's scientifically inaccurate and one of the reasons for that is because we have a whole bunch of people that are born not male or female and so we call this disorders of or differences of sexual development um and these can come about for a ton of different reasons any any sort of different reasons um but they primarily include genetic influences um that come out with um with with a variety of conditions that can range from very severe to very mild so for example and i know this is a crazy chart and you do not need to know anything on this chart other than what i'm pointing out right now which is that if we look at this um over here at one end we've got our typical biological female and way over here at the other end we've got our typical biological male all this mess of stuff in between is in between okay and again you can see that it ranges from um conditions where you may not even notice that there is a condition until puberty for example all the way to things like um you know right in here where it says you know you have mixed gonads in other words um when the doctor looks at the baby they don't really know if it's a male child or a female child because the external genitalia are mixed they show signs of both now today we can do chromosomal testing we can look at um at all sorts of lab tests to discover if that child actually has internal male female or a mix of organs that does happen um where you have immature testes and ovaries so there's all sorts of conditions that can happen here okay and so the main point is when we talk about sex and gender we are talking about two very different things sex tends to be genetic okay but still modifiable by environment things like chemical exposure things like um if we're talking about oh phones going off um things like if we're talking about um hormones in the womb right those are all modifiable by environment gender on the other hand is much more of a social construction although there are elements of biology to that too and in another video i'm going to talk about the theories of gender development but real quick what i wanted to say about this is that we do have elements of gender that are biological there are absolutely biological differences between males and females however a lot of our gender is socially constructed so for example the idea that um boys wear pants and girls wear skirts or dresses um that's completely made up that's totally arbitrary um the idea that girls like pink and boys like blue again totally made up could have just as easily been the other way we just as easily could have dressed up our baby boys and pink and our baby girls in blue and it would have made no difference whatsoever because that's not biological that is completely environmental um totally just what some cultural norm decided to be um so there are elements of both and as we go through and talk more about this chapter we will talk more about how gender develops