Title: The Sex/Gender Distinction, Revisited

Abstract: This talk will build on an earlier chapter in my thesis where I sketched out two conceptual resources from psychoanalysis, these being the body-schema and the universal bisexual potential of the human body (the UBP). The body-schema is the means through which we apprehend having a felt-sense of the body (i.e. it is the psychological abstraction of the ego). The UBP is an observation that any given human body displays both male and female sex characteristics, even those bodies that would usually be considered as being clearly legible as male or female. Given this psychoanalytic embodiment theory, I pose the following question: How do particular sex characteristics express themselves in the body-schema? I will argue that there is an assumption hidden in the question, namely that there is a distinction between sex and gender such that it makes sense to speak of one as if separate from the other. This talk will explore the metaphysics of the sex/gender distinction and will start by distinguishing three different kinds of sex/gender distinctions, these being: the distinction of classification, the distinction of features, and the distinction of function. In order to provide a model that can account for all three of the distinctions individually and in unison, I will build on the psychoanalytic embodiment theory and integrate it in conversation with recent proposals in analytic social ontology. This model will then be used to clarify the referents in the initial question (‘how do particular sex characteristics express themselves in the body schema?’) and provide the tools to formulate an answer.