The sociological distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ has been paradigmatic for twenty years and is still taken for granted within the discipline. However it is a distinction that will no longer serve. Doubts about its continued usefulness surfaced as a result of a variety of influences. This paper refers specifically to the history of sex and to recent work in genetics in order to demonstrate that sex, like gender is a discursive construction. I argue that the sex/gender problematic is wrong to assume biological differences are naturally given and that sex cannot operate as a natural base in a theory of difference.
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John Hood‐Williams (1996) studied this question.