President Barack Obama believes “gender” and “sex” are different things.
In a Monday press release issued to support National Women’s Health Week, Obama declared that affordable health care is a fundamental right — for all sexes and genders.
“The security of quality, affordable health care should not be a privilege — it should be a fundamental right for every person, regardless of their sex or gender,” Obama stated in the proclamation.
The distinction made by the president reflects a growing movement to emphasize that the two words mean different things. According to the World Health Organization, sex “refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women,” while gender “refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.”
As an example, the WHO gives “women earn[ing] significantly less money than men for similar work” in the United States as something that constitutes a “gender characteristic.”
While this statement seems to mark the first time the White House has distinguished between the two terms, it’s not the only instance of the administration wading into gender identity.
According to reports last fall, individuals desiring gender reassignment surgeries can now get them paid for by Obamacare.
President Obama also became the first president to say the word “transgender” in a public speech when he used the term in his 2015 State of the Union.