caveat: what follows is purely personal experience, and isn't at all meant to describe anyone else's!

I had a mildly unpleasant experience today. All four of the women's garments I own (3 ankle length skirts, 1 kneelength dress) are obnoxiously sheer. I really like the look and feel of the swishy skirts, but lord forbid I'm backlit right? So I had to buy something called a "slip". Now I bought my skirts from street vendors without having to try them on, and the dress at American Apparel downtown, which seemed like a pretty friednly place for a guy to shop for atypical clothing. But the slip I had to buy at a mainstream bargain department store, and that presented some problems.

For one thing, I had to go to the Ladies floor. Slaes woman there first told me that they didn't have slips, and then reconsidered and sent me down a floor into the lingerie dept. It's bad enough being a guy shopping for himself in the women's section, but it feels much worse in the lingerie section. For one thing I'm surrounded by alien contraptions like push-up bras that I have no interest in, don't really understand, and yet which by my proximity to them, defines me either as shopping for someone female, or else a creepy ne'er do well.

Salesperson there was a lot friendlier though, and when I said I had a blue skirt, she checked the stock for me to see if they had anything in white, and when they didn't she put up a black slip under the blue shirt she was wearing to see if it would be ok. I still felt mildly defensive the whole time, and my voice must have sounded half an octave lower than normal, because I was trying hard *not* to present as anything queer.

Of *course*, after I bought it, the checkout people forgot to demagnetize the tag, so the alarm went off on me as I was leaving. Felt like a gender alarm to me. lol.

Aside: While it fits fine, I really dont like how constraining it is. My skirts are all flowing enough that I can move any way I like in them, but I don't think I could even dance while wearing the slip, let alone do something like run. I'm not impressed. Takes much of the fun out of wearing skirts.

The real point of this anectdote though, is about the anxiety/discomfort I felt while shopping in a women's section. I probably feel a similar anxiety when I publicly wear a skirt (although frankly, this is NYC, and most people don't even notice). Anxiety leads to psychological arousal, and so I wonder if the feelings of gender-euphoria I can sometimes feel from being cross-dressed, might not actually stem from my just having a heightened sense of awareness and anxiety. It's perhaps a milder form of how people do scary things like ride roller coasters or see scary movies in order to feel good.

Maybe the fact that I feel good in a skirt has a lot more to to with that, than it does with my actually enjoying the experience of presenting androgynously.

And it's also really hard for me to separate out my heterosexual attraction to female architecture from actually wanting to present as non-male. Both motivations exist for me, I think. When I focus of my physical apearance, it's more the former, and when I focus on cross-dressing as a means to express my *disatisfaction* of status-quo heterosexual gender roles, it's the latter.

I can think of ways in which cross-dressing -- for me -- is an excersise in falsehood: there is shame involved with being recognized by neighbors, roomates, etc, and shame-seeking may play more of a role in this that I credit. There's also a way that I use cross-dressing as a kind of fatalistic branding of myself as a freak/wierdo/loser, and when I have friends that accept that, I'm basically pre-screening friends who won't challenge me or hold me accountable. Ultimately the biggest mistake is to reify either of these phenomena into a gender variant self-identity. I need to stick more closely to verbs: "I am wearing a skirt, I like how the fabric flows, I like how friends treat me", and stay away from nouns of self-identity: "androgyne, non-masculine, feminine".

To be fair though, I also need to apply this same analysis to the act of not-cross dressing. How does *that* make me feel? In what ways can I manifest my personality as atypically masculine while presenting as a male? To what extent is choosing the safety of a default male presentation every bit an excercise in reification and falsehood as cross-dressing would be?

Last word: it's just fashion. While I could *possibly* be comfortable in a head-to-toe feminine outfit, and while I find masculine clothing practical enough, I *really* dig the demure-skirt and t-shirt look. It just feels like *me*. Much moreso than goth or emo or corporate or hipster or leather/fetish.

What I need now is a skirt that I can inline skate in, which doesn't show an obnoxious amount of leg (so running "skorts" are out).

Of the top 3 scroogle scraped google hits for the search "manscara", were two predictably androsexist ha-ha funny columns in UK newspapers (the worse of which was in the usually high quality Guardian), and a short article that penetrated to the heart of the matter published at the fashion site styledash.com. The styledash article, focuses not the idea of men wearing makeup but rather the ridiculous re-branding of formerly feminine products as somehow testosterone-safe: "If you're man enough to go buy -- never mind wear -- eyeliner, you should have already embraced your inner-make up diva."

It is interesting that we need a marketing campaign before we decide that something is "ok" for us to buy. This seems particularly evident when products cross previously defined oppositional-gender lines.

On the one hand, I'm cautiously happy that some stereotypically feminine fashions are crossing over right now. It may help demystify femininity, and perhaps reduce the kinds of sexism that arise from keeping males culturally separated from behaviors and gender-expressions that are deemed feminine. The more men pretty themselves up, the less able they will be to deride femininity (and by associated-guilt, females) as frivolous.

On the other hand, this kind of approach to buffing away at sexism is rather simple-minded. Members of one class (in this case men) ought not to have to walk in another class' ballet flats in order to realize that class boundaries help create, recreate, and enforce hierarchy and oppression.

In practice, I suspect that normative gender roles are far more powerful than changing fashions, and that cross-gender fashion trends, once they become mainstream enough, will simply be swallowed up and made not to matter. While I'm not particularly hip to fashion trends, I think I've seen this happen with skinny jeans (which used to be feminine, and now can be written-off as 'just being emo'), faux-hawks and wide, studded belts (which used to be gay male signifiers, but I think are becoming increasingly gender neutral), and most evidently to me, in those wide leather watch-bands that everyone is wearing today: to me they scream 'fetish', and yet they are just a conformist fashion trend, and at least some portion of their wearers have little clue that their choice to wear their watch right- or left- handed brands them as sub or domme.

Coming back to my own current confusion about the meaning(s) of cross-dressing, I really don't want my "scruffy bloke in a dress" gender presentation fantasy (think Kurt Kobain, I guess), to come off as emo/goth pretense. Although the look is really hot (in the sense that I go for it), I think my body type happily might lend itself to really femme-ing it up as well.

I think I was way harsh on myself in my last post. My thinking is closely tracking what I'm reading in Serano's book, and my previous post was motivated by her chapter on the transexual dissonance between the sex one's brain expects one's body to be, and the actuality of one's body. (Serano theorizes a biological basis for subconscious sex, because it helps her make sense of her own experience, even though she wisely stops short of claiming that this theory actually reflects reality). Reading about her gender dissonance made me cry (and mind you she only gives two or three personal anectdotes, all presented matter-of-factly with a minimum of sentimentality, in a book that is about ideas, and not at all a memoir). She explains that her lived experience of gender dissonance "most of all... felt like sadness... a sort of gender sadness -- a chronic and persistent grief over the fact that I felt so wrong in my body". When she decided to transition, the dissonance had escalated: "it hurt more than any pain, physical or emotional, that I had ever experienced".

So in the face of something that severe, my own seemingly elective gender-playing seemed gauche and rather callous of both transexual and transvestite experience. Strangely, though, I didn't think to ask why the phrase "gender sadness" seems to echo in my own soul, different as my experience is from Serano's, or why exactly I was crying reading about her wrapping a lacy curtain around herself (in the body of a then 11 year old boy with long hair), and staring at herself stunned for over an hour. It's a pretty fucking deep empathy on my part for an experience she relates in a less than one third of a page of straightforward decription. I suspect that my "seemingly elective gender-playing" of today indeed stems from something prickly about gender that's been bothering me since my own childhood.

I should have kept reading, for Serano's very next chapter focuses on what she calls "oppositional sexism": ideas about gender that not only essentialize two binary genders, but that underlie homophobia and transphobia, and that create false heirarchies even within movements of queer activists: gay trumping bisexuality; transexuality being more 'real' than variant non-binary gender expression; or queergendered people being more radical than transexuals.

Ultimately, Serano concludes, lived experience trumps any theory: "an impenetrable wall.. exists between our own *experiential gender*, which we live,... and the genders of others, which we merely percieve or make presumptions about.... It is time... to move beyond the insolent rhetiric of gender entitlement and one-size-fits-all gender theories".

In other words, Serano gives my felt experience of gender far more leeway than I was giving it myself. Binary gender prescriptions have hurt me plenty. It doesn't matter if it's due to my reacting against social prescriptions or due to something innate to my gender identity. What matters is that I don't assume that what makes sense for me gives me any right to invalidate, project upon, or prescribe for someone else's gender identity.

While cross-dressing in certain safe contexts may give me some kind of unearned privilege, and that's one motivation for me to do it, it's not the important thing. What's important is to not self-invalidate my own hate for singular, binary prescriptions of gender expression. Yeah, I'm not transsexual, but that doesn't mean that US mainstream society's definition of 'male' doesn't fuck with me and wear me down every day of my life.

It's about time I started fighting back.

Cross dressing by a man who is not genderqueer (that is, someone who does not feel a dissonance between his subconcious sex and his physical body) has two possible political meanings:
1) to disrupt the normativity of binary gender, in solidarity with genderqueer folk; or
2) to take pleasure in appropriating a few carefully chosen feminine signifiers, without having to be female, and without having to give up male privilege.

I'm a little wary of the latter. I certainly enjoy wearing skirts, and if I ever get around to buying a few dresses and makeup, I'd enjoy wearing that as well. But what if it turns out that I *enjoy* wearing feathers on my head and war paint in a mockery of Native American garb? Should I go out and do that too just 'cuz it feels good?

While I think cross dressing is far more acceptable in progressive queer-friendly circles than appropriating the garb of a completely different culture just to look cool or feel good, I'm not sure there's a difference between the two.

Clearly if someone is sincerely genderqueer, I encourage them to behave however it is that they feel that the negotiation of their subconscious sex and their external sex moves them to behave. But when it comes to guys who are not gender dissonant dressing feminine, I get a bit suspicious.

Perhaps I'm saying that unless I'm willing to live 24/7 as a woman, subject to all that entails, for at least some period of time, I have no right to play at dress up. But really, by *playing* at dress up, I demean trans-people, for whom there is no choice in the matter, and I falsely steal a moment or two of fun from the feminine spectrum without paying the necessary social dues.

Perhaps I'm setting too high a bar for myself. But perhaps not. Every see frat boys dress up in their girlfriends' clothing for a Halloween party? Far from disrupting gender roles, they actually manage to reinforce them.

Reading Julia Serano's book Whipping Girl has helped me a lot. There are three levels at which one is gendered: one's brain-sex (or subconcious sex, as she puts it) -- the sex that one's brain expects one to be; one's physical body; and the gender roles projected onto one by other people. Gender dissonance occurs at a private level, when one's brain expects one's body to be of a certain sex, but bewilderingly (to one's brain), one happens to inhabit a body of a different sex.

My brain sex and my physical sex are both male, and there's no dissonance there.

As for the gender roles that are projected onto me, well, they don't always accord with how I'd like to behave. I'm suspicious as to why though. Seriously suspicious that cross-dressing is analogous somehow to the 'hot-bi-babe' phenomenon wherein homophobic males fool themselves that they enjoy watching 'lesbian' eroticism. Cross dressing feels too straight to me, too heterosexual, too male. But the alternative, to be a man dressing as a man, isn't any alternative at all. The only authentic, honest, alternative for me, I think, is to dress with gay signifiers.

(but gay boys can cross dress, so why can't I), complains my mind. Answer: because I'm not gay. I'm bi, but I live the majority of my life passing for straight.

I *really* don't want to self-censor my gender expression, but the sad truth is that I'm trying to pick up street cred by claiming to be queer, or a sex-worker, when in reality I'm just a dabbler, who gets out as soon as the going gets mildly uncomfortable. That's not called being queer. It's called being scared.

shesanightowlWrote a provocative response to my post about gaybars and subway exhibitionists. So here's an attempt to figure out what I really think:

Hmmm. Ok. I don't think that in all cases individuals ought to publicly and explicitly confront those who bother them, since safety, expediency and efficacy are clearly most important. In any case, I'm not sure I *really* meant (and I surely don't mean it anymore) that there was an onus on the two women to speak up against the exhibitionist in an uncomfortable (and potentially unsafe) situation that was imposed on them.

I just wish we lived in a culture where we are better versed in the varieties of sexual consent (and the necessity of being frank and open about asking for, giving, and whithdholding consent) than we are about sports teams and shoe-styles. My own confusion about the issue (I wrote and re-wrote tis response several time over already) is testament to how confused our culture (and I) am about consent.

Also since I don't know what was going on in the women's own minds, it's rather dumb for me to accuse them of being subject to patriarchy just because they said nothing; their utterly ignoring the guy and going on with their conversation may have been a potent enough assertion of their own identities.

I, however, very much felt I *was* a tool of some sort of social power structures. Probably multiple, conflicting ones, which is why I didn't know how to act. I'm in favor of consensual deviance from hegemonically-correct sexuality, and I think that people ought to be able to get away with public sex on an uncrowded late night subway car without being arrested. By contrast I'm *not* in favor of sexist-oppression (when I'm aware of it) or of non-consensual aggression or sexual acts.

But given the sexism of the culture we live in, the shit I saw on the subway wasn't "just" an act involving three unsexed, ungendered people and a fourth observer:

I don't think people should masturbate *at people* in public like that. It's fucking rude. However, as an act in-itself, stripped of all gender implications, that's all I think it is -- deeply rude. It becomes sexual aggression only because rape-culture frames it as such and makes it so.

Don't make the same mistake I originally did though, and think that makes the act harmless. Given that we are living in a sexist culture, the man's act *is* one of sexual aggression. It's not feminists' pointing out of this that perpetuates rape culture. (They might do better to point it out in ways that don't victimize women though).

I'm still really confused, although surprisingly I'm finding the conventional feminist reading reading of the events to be more and more acceptable.

Maybe there's a reverse asymmetry involved: while the man's act should be seen as one of sexual aggression (against the women directly, but also against the ideal of a harmonious society), the women can choose not to feel aggressed-upon.

Upon further reading (see here, here and ask alice!), I think that I might have the most sympathy with the *psychological* (rather than feminist or criminal justice) reading of exhibitionism, and perhaps my actions were in line with that?

Ask Alice says that NY state has a 3-month prison term for misdemeanor public lewdness, and while I suppose that's ok in this case (it's not like I can get him to seek counseling, but perhaps a judge can), I'm very wary that "public lewdness" could be used to prosecute a whole host of activities in ways that I'd feel are oppressive.

I had an innnnteresting night. At the end of it, I don't know whether to love men or despise them.

Scene 1 (wherein i give a man some luvin)

I spent the first part of the night at a bar called "The Cock", which needless to say is a pretty touchy-feely gay bar. "Touchy-feely" in the sense of "reach out and touch, cop a feel if you want", not "I'm touched by your experience" or "I feel for you"!

For those of you who don't know how refreshingly sexually uncomplicated the gay bar scene is, here's what happened: it was very crowded. Some guys pushed and shoved to get by, others gently laid a hand on my shoulders advising me of their intent to get by, and occationaly someone might very lightly brush his hand on my glutes while *going* by. Once someone gently clutched my hand after he'd walked by, which felt kindof nice, so I randomnly returned the favor to someone else later that night.

Much of that would be rude if not downright harrassing in a straight scene (OK, the *cute* men might get away with touching the cute womens' asses, but usually only after buying them a drink, right?). Not so here. Touching was fine, and if if was unwanted, one simply moved an inch or so away, and if it was wanted, one moved an inch closer.

In that scene, I'm standing at the bar, and the guy next to me incidentally (or not so incidentally) brushes my crotch with the back of his hand. And again. And again. I start to get a hard-on, and very purposefully edge a bit closer. It's mutually evident to both of us that none of this had been incidental, and 3 seconds later we're in each others arms dancing, and about 2 seconds after that we're making out. A minute later we introduce ourselves.

Anyway, he had a partner out of town or something, and "wasn't looking for action", which was fine and dandy, cuz I'm never looking for action unless it *really* wants to come my way. We made out, hugged, groped, fondled, and went our separate ways. Fun time.

I left wishing that the straight scene could someday evolve to that level of normality, where men could grope (or not grope) women, and more importantly, women could grope (or not grope) men, and no one would feel harrassed and no one would feel rejected.

My ideal bar scene is one where there's as many queer people as straight, and as many people engaged in rapt conversation in one room as giving blowjobs or getting flogged in another. Some combination of sex-party, womyn's coffee house, dungeon, nightclub (if you can't dance, what's the point?), and just plain bar. *That's* where I want to go to have fun. That's where I want to go to quietly drink a pint. That's where I want to go to get picked up. That's where I want to go to *not* get picked up. That's where I want to meet the love of my life (whether of this month, of or this lifetime).

All the ghettoizations into gay-bars, lesbian bars, leather-bars, tranny-bars, straight-pickup scenes, coffeehouses, etc, bothers me. Some of us actually like to move around, and be fluid, and like, talk to actual *people* rather than to people stuck in one-dimensional caricatures of themselves.

Ah, utopia.

NOT.

Scene 2 (wherein I hate masculine privilege cuz it diminishes me)

On the subway ride home, some guy who was sitting across from a couple of women decided to whip his cock out and masturbate to the sight of them. They didn't seem to notice or mind so for a while I said nothing. Eventually I asked the guy to calm down, and he very sheepishly did, only to start up again. The women switched cars, and the guy switched seats, planting himself in front of a sleeping woman. I probably should have woken her up, but I didn't, and it was my stop to get off.

It turned out the two women from earlier got off at the same stop, and they somewhat bemusedly shared the experience with me since they were aware that I'd seen it all happen too. I'm pretty jazzed that they took it all in stride and didn't feel all traumatized (but maybe they did... *I* don't feel so good about it 24 hours later, so why should they?), but I'm not particularly happy that they didn't directly confront the onanist, and what's worse, that *I* felt I had to be polite-ish in the situation.

I also didn't want to be the fucking knight in shining armor and sit between them and the guy or publicly confront him, cuz, well, they could have done that themselves if they'd wanted.

I have no idea what to think about the situation. Is it that heterosexual dating games actually encourage such situations? If women and men could be as frank with each other and each other's bodies (when appropriate) as men can be with other men at gay bars, would anyone have to masturbate in public? And if they *did*, would anyone have to be particularly offended?

Anyway, like I said, I don't know whether to love men (for the equality and straightforwardness of gay cruising) or despise them (for the absolute fuckshits they think they can be, without consequence, to unconsenting women).

I'm currently reading a book on self defense as a physical embodiment of feminism, and boy oh boy was last night an eye-opener for me! I had no fucking idea women *really* have to put up with that kind of crap. But I also see how much sexual harrassment could go away if women simply refused to be harrassed by the harassment. If women could react to men the way gay men do: if you like it, step closer, if you don't step away and that's their cue to take it elsewhere. [Editorial note: I'm not advocating a change in women's behaviors in the present culture, but a change in the surrounding culture that would enable more and more women to be sexually dominant themselves. I think it's happening, slowly, as generations see what came before and go through their own trials and errors].

I'm hesitant to call it "patriarchy" anymore. It's a refusal to fully acknowledge both sexes sexualities, and both straight men and women are complicit in it. And as my gay room-mate lamented to me after hearing my story, the gay model which is too often limited to "fuck first, maybe have a relationship afterward" is no panacea either. [Editorial note: WTF?].

Perhaps it's up to us bi/pan/queer/sexuals to rescue *everybody* from the madness.

Time Magazine has a special issue out on romance. The articles are rather silly for the most part, but just as I was getting annoyed at the heterosexual monogamous assumptions in them, bless their hearts they actually has an article looking at the differences among gay, lesbian and straight couples. Nice.

But by far and away the best bit was a couple of pages excerpting real love letters from the book Other People's Love Letters. Jacob was 5 when he wrote "PHoebe I love you And I Might marry you". :-) One of the letters *really* took my breath away though, and I'm quoting it here in full because, if you ever wondered how to write me a morning-after love letter, this is how *grin*:

"You asked me to 'give you a little something?' Well here it is: I'm giving you half my heart. I wanted to give it to you today -- even though I'm spacy, a little bit sore in all the good places and still have absolutely no saliva -- because it's what I feel and I know it's 'real.' I also know that tonight will be hard for you, and that there will be harder times to come for both of us. But right now, I just want you to know that last night was totally off-the-charts incredible for me in the most surprising and profound ways. Even as I write this, I can feel my heart (the other half) twinge and my skin tingle (those frissions again) when I think about how strangely, wonderfully comfortable I felt with you... so close, so calm, just lying there in the pre-dawn delirium, softly touching, bodies entangled. I want to use the word intimacy even though I know the professionals will say it can't be so because it's not a 'real' relationship. All I know is that being with you was amazing. You're amazing. Really.

Oh, and as for the other half of my heart, I'm going to hang on to it and try to keep it in a safe place for a while. Maybe you'll let me know, someday, if you want it. And maybe, someday, I'll give it to you."

[Picture of a half heart attached to the bottom of the note]

Sweet Goddess! I would be falling Soooo incredibly hard in love if I found that note on my pillow after a night like the one it describes! I mean it's not Shakespearean sonnetry, but the way it mixes quiet, hopeful, realism with delicious delirium is exactly what defines romance to me. Anyone with a personality to match that note can have a quarter of my heart right here and now (with the other quarter waiting tremblingly for that night of passion to come).

While I welcomed it when I started skating, I'm now irked by the convention that male skaters must wear pants and not tights. It's more than a convention, in fact, since International Skating Union (ISU) rule 500 specifies:

2. At ISU Championships, the Olympic Winter Games and International Competitions, the clothing of the Competitors must be modest, dignified and appropriate for athletic competition – not garish or theatrical in design. Clothing may, however, reflect the character of the music chosen.
a) The clothing must not give the effect of excessive nudity for athletic sport. Men must wear trousers; no tights are permitted. Accessories and props are not permitted;
~ISU 2006 Single and Pair Skating Regulations

Male dancers wear tights, male track athletes wear tights, heck even male wrestlers and powerlifters wear those funny lycra shorts-plus-tanktop things. Moreover, male long-track speedskaters wear tights. Speedskating has the same governing body (the ISU) as figure-skating, so wtf??

So anyway, it's a rainy Friday, and I'm off to the rink in tights, not trousers.

Radio is having a call-in show about women in positions of power, alluding to Hillary Clinton. The usual ideas surfaced, including one woman who said that as a feminist, she won't vote for Clinton because she occupies the narcissistic space that's supposed to be reserved for men. Yeah, OK, whatever.

I briefly wondered why nobody was making reference to real women heads of state. For whatever reason, I forgot completely about Western examples like Thatcher and Brundtland, and thought instead of some Asian ones: Ghandi Gandhi [come-on now! Misspelling Gandhi goes beyond the pale of laziness!], and the Bandaranaikes. In their cases, authority is conferred by their membership in a privileged wealthy upper class. No, South Asians are no more or less "feminist" than people in the US. It's just that class divisions are far more pronounced.

This is blindingly obvious, and yet I don't remember having had this thought till today.

Poor Johnny Weir's the King of Chess again. "King of Chess" is the name and theme of his new short program, which is meant to highlight more masculine choreography for him. There's a subtle irony in the fact that the king, although crucial to the outcome of the game, is severely limited as a gamepiece by the rules: he can only move a single square at a time, and never into a position of danger. The queen on the other hand, has the freedom to roam the whole board, and can sacrifice herself if she so chooses. Role reversal of the cliche of the imprisoned damsel in distress being freed by the gallant warrior (who, OK, is not usually the *king* himself, but you get my drift).

Despite Johnny's new "manly" program, he caught flack recently from some so-called skating experts, for being a loose-cannon, comparing himself to Jesus Christ, "being as out as he can be without actually being out", and basically not being as manly on the ice as his nearest competitor Evan Lysachek.

A video of the TV show, along with commentary is here.

A supposed reply from Mark Lund, one of the "experts" on that show, and self proclaimed "gay man", is here. In short it says, "Johnny is gay, and ought to come out, so that he can support the community that supports him". What a *tired* and ultimately ignorant response that is.

( It makes me mad )

Seriously, as a straight male, I'm wounded by Lund's attempt to queerify anything that is beautiful without conforming to stereotpical male strength and power. And I *do* mean wounded. Why should *only* gays be allowed the freedom to behave in and enjoy both butch and femme ways? Someone please pluck Lund & company out of the 1950s.

The bbc reported on an Indian 800m runner being stripped of her Asian games silver medal after failing a gender test. What really surprised me was that in a radio interview, a doctor pointed out that the test is no longer genetic. Now I understand that a certain genotype can be expressed differently in the body, so genetics *alone* is not sufficient, but mustn't there be a genetic basis to any sex determination in humans? The doctor said that anatomical investigation is the most effective method, while the news articles mention that endocrinologists and psychologists are also consulted.

We're dealing with elite athletes, who by definition, are on the extreme of whatever statistical groups they belong to. I trust there is sound science behind the gender testing.

The test is called a "gender test", which confuses things even further, since the word "gender" has social connotations, while the biological definition of sex does not.

Further discussion on this can be found here in the _scientists_ community.

Athletes do fail gender tests. Biological hermaphrodites exist, as well as clear cut men and women who are physiologically extreme for their gender. Physically, to say little of psychologically, biological reality does not conform to the discrete, binary gender categorization. To put the political consequence bluntly: why did god fuck-up so badly in designing animals if sexual behavior is supposed to be a clear-cut binary thing with dire spiritual consequences for deviance?