People regularly confuse sex and gender and the popularity of body-piercing, tattooing and unisex clothing styles was adding to this confusion, according to a leading British pathologist.
"You mustn't confuse sex and gender," stated Prof David Lowe, who yesterday addressed the Irish Times/RDS Science Today autumn demonstration lecture at the RDS Concert Hall. Almost 900 secondary school students attended the two presentations which included a discussion on six ways to define a person's sex.
The word sex was usually equated with sexuality but it was also used to answer a very simple question, whether you were a male or a female, Prof Lowe said. Gender, he said, was not about male or female but about masculinity and femininity, and these aspects of how a person looked or acted could vary greatly.
Prof Lowe, who is professor of surgical pathology at St Barthole mew's Hospital in London, demonstrated this simply by asking the students to guess the sex of individuals displayed on slides. They could only see portions of the person. They were asked to hold up a blue or pink card to indicate their choice. While they often chose correctly when looking at a person's eyes, the choices became more difficult when subjects wore clothing or jewellery of the opposite sex.
"We are going to define sex in six different ways," Prof Lowe told the students. He did this in terms of what could be seen externally and what might be found by a pathologist studying internal organs or DNA.
The pathologist was frequently confronted a decision about the sex of human remains. This could be after an accident or a murder but also sometimes on remains found many years after death. Prof Lowe explained the various clues used to help accomplish this.
There were obvious things such as clothing or jewellery but these were not always reliable, for example if the person was a crossdresser. Many of the outward physical characteristics such as external sexual organs might also have disappeared if the body was long dead.
Forensic pathology investigations started simply, he said, by listening to the story of what happened, what reports there were of the cause of death.
A decision on the sex of the victim could then be built up by applying the different ways of defining sex. This included checking for external sex organs but a decision based only on this could be wrong, he said. There were a number of medical conditions in which a person could have all the external signs of being a man but carry the internal sex organs or gonads of a woman.
Equally, studying a person's chromosomes could also lead to confusion he said. Certain conditions can cause men to carry the female XX chromosomes and women to carry the male XY chromosomes.
The students broke up into groups and were asked to list clues that might help determine a person's sex.
The Irish Times/RDS Science Today lectures represent an effort by the two organisations to help towards a better public understanding of science by bringing noted international speakers to Dublin. The series includes an autumn demonstration lecture particularly suited to students and a spring lecture at which internationally known scientists speak.
