Sex vs Gender

I remember an interesting comment thread on my Facebook wall some 2 years ago. I was just conceiving mi bebe then when a HS friend (A) asked me what my baby’s sex is. Fellow HS classmate (M) commented and said “sex talaga, pwede naman gender ah”. Of course everybody in the thread knows there was pun intended, A is openly gay and M, as I assume, intends to make a good laugh out of it. A could have been the laughing stock among us teaser friends, but he immediately responded before anyone could even hit the comment button, with intellect he said something like this: “Sex is the appropriate term, you know why? Because sex states the biological difference and gender is the social orientation”. I was stunned, I automatically consulted Wikipedia to verify and yes, "Sex is annotated as different from gender in the Oxford English Dictionary where it says sex "tends now to refer to biological differences, while . . . [gender] often refers to cultural or social ones" (underline supplied). In other words, sex is to male or female while gender is to masculine or feminine.

To be honest, I didn’t know there was such a distinction, I thought gender is just a civil way to say it (I guess M thought the same too), apparently, sex is politically and grammatically proper. Ooops, I forgot to tell that A was our batch salutatorian and a BS Bio graduate, he should have known better.

Oh well, all I wanted to say is... our bebe dos is a boy!