While this may not seem like a feminism issue, it is an important distinction I feel I should include on this website. Sex categorizes someone only by their biological reproductive traits. The words to describe sex are “female” and “male.” More recently, these words have been looked at negatively for being used as nouns since simplifying a person down to their reproductive organ is dehumanizing. It can also be controversial because there are only two sexes and many people who are transgender or non-binary do not identify with their biological sex. You cannot assume someone’s sex by looking at them, but you also cannot assume that all transgender people have a different sex than how they identify, because many transgender people get sex reassignment surgery (as adults).

Gender refers to a person’s feeling of their own identity and how it fits with the “norms” of females and males. Although society traces out many expectations of boys and girls, gender is not a social construct, because there are patterns in the behaviors and thinking of females and males that have proven to be different from each other, while similar within each gender. This is how people know they are transgender. However it is also how people know they do not fit into the box of just male or female. Many genders have been discovered, and you can click here to learn more about them.

Feminism mainly battles the challenges faced by individuals who identify as female, although transgender men and non-binary people are often targeted by abortion, sanitary product, and pregnancy issues as well. The word for the prejudice of all non-cisgender people is transphobia (cisgender: identifying with your biological sex from birth). Sexism and transphobia have a lot of issues in common, however there are also many challenges specific to non-cisgender people, and a portion of non-cisgender people do not face the same problems as women.