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Are the terms sex and gender interchangeable?

Listening to much of the dialogue about those two subjects, one would think, well, I guess they are.

They're used interchangeably, but are they interchangeable? And when we confuse sex with gender, in what ways are we actually advocating unwittingly for gender ideology?

Welcome back to Issues, Et cetera. I'm Todd Wilkin, joining us to talk about the confusion of

gender and sex.

Nirja Despande, she's a political analyst and engagement coordinator at the

Independent Women's Forum. She's author of a recent column for the federalist titled Sex

Isn't a Bad Word, but Gender is. Neerja, welcome back.

Thank you so much for having me.

So what has happened to the word sex in our culture?

Yeah, so what's happened is that people think of sex as a dirty word, and it's not a dirty word, because people often act as though sex just has that one meaning, right?

That it means the words and the bees. But then people

ignore the other meaning of the word sex, which has to do with the categories of male and

female. And so instead of using the word sex, people have started to use the word gender instead.

Are the words sex and gender interchangeable, though?

They're not interchangeable, and that's the biggest problem, right?

That sex and gender are completely different ideas and categories, right?

So sex is a fixed category.

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