The short answer is this: sex is about your body, gender is about who you feel yourself to be, and sexual orientation is about to whom you’re attracted sexually.
Now here’s the longer answer:
“Sex” is the term we use to refer to a person’s sexual anatomy (his or her sexual body parts). So if a doctor were to say that a girl is female in terms of her sex chromosomes, her sex organs, and hormonal make-up, the doctor is referring to the girl’s sex (her body).
People with disorders of sex development (DSD) are born with a sex type that is different from most men’s and most women’s. Rather than being male typical or female typical, people with DSD have one or more sex atypical traits. That means a woman with DSD has some sex traits that are relatively unusual for females, and that a man with DSD has some sex traits that are relatively unusual for males.
Recall that disorders of sex development are defined by the medical community as “congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal or anatomic sex is atypical.” So DSD is an umbrella term covering a wide variety of conditions in which sex develops differently from typical male or typical female development.
“Gender” is the term we use to refer to how a person feels about himself as a boy/man or feels about herself as a girl/woman. Gender identity is the term for how a person self-identifies in terms of being a boy/man or girl/woman. When you say, “I’m a man,” you are stating your gender identity.
Gender role refers to social roles that are assigned by a society according to gender. (In the U.S., gender roles have been changing a lot in the last hundred years, as society has become less restrictive about what roles men and women may take on.) Gender assignment is the social process by which children are labeled girls or boys at birth. So when someone announces at a birth, “It’s a girl!”, that’s a part of that girl’s gender assignment.
“Sexual orientation” is the term we use to refer to a person’s sexual (erotic) feelings. So when we talk about a person being homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, or gay, straight, or bi, we are talking about that person’s sexual orientation.
Statistically speaking, most females are anatomically sex-typical, they gender-identify as women, and they are sexually oriented towards men. Statistically speaking, most males are anatomically sex-typical, they gender-identify as men, and they are sexually oriented towards women. But there are many alternatives to these combinations of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation in the human population, because human development is very complex.
Posted in: Social Implications