One of my colleagues’ students is going to take the MCAT, the test required to get into med school. (As far as I know, it’s still required.) The student found this question in a practice exam they were taking on a laptop.
I’ll print out what’s above:
Which of the following statements is NOT an accurate description of gender?
A. Gender is a biological distinction.
B. Gender ideals and expectations vary by culture.
C. Some societies recognize more than two genders.
D. Gender is a performative aspect of individual identity.
I know the right answer, but perhaps you can vote to see which one was deemed correct by those who made the test. It’s unclear to me why this is on a test designed to assess students’ ability to succeed in medical school. Well, you get a chance to answer it below, as here’s a poll. Pick one,and remember, you’re looking for an INACCURATE description of gender.
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Is this a trick question? B and C don’t constitute “a description” at all.
No, it’s an actual screenshot of an MCAT prep test. Not a trick question, not as far as I know.
Why don’t they say “false” instead of “not true”?
I pick A.
I think “false” is too absolute and negative, frankly. Also a wee bit judgmental.
I think I might agree with ‘A’ as the answer if I knew that in the context they also recognized that “sex” is a biological distinction and they are using “gender” to represent humanity’s need to distinguish between “sex” and “what some people feel themselves to be”. That would also imply that no animals but humans have “gender” because for other animals the term “sex” suffices.
That’s an easy one — sex is biological, gender is linguistic! If all the tests are this easy maybe I should have gone to medical school.
I agree. But this definition is mainly circulated in academia. Out there in the real world the term gender is used pretty much interchangeably with sex.
I voted for A as the one the test makers would not think true. Oddly, I agree with them: gender is a recent and invented concept, and is used instead of sex when someone has an agenda. Gender should only be applied to nouns in gendered languages.
Kathleen Stock, in her book “Material Girls,” provides this helpful breakdown of the various ways that the word “gender” is used. If the MCAT prep people had read and absorbed this, they would have seen that their question is not answerable in any unambiguous way. Here’s the excerpt:
I will disambiguate four senses of ‘gender’ now. Readers should return to this section if they later come across a use that confuses them. Just as the English word ‘bank’ can refer to the land beside the river, or the institution that looks after your money, the following are four different meanings of the English word ‘gender’ – etymologically related, no doubt, and overlapping in terms of people they apply to, but standing for different things. Here they are.
GENDER1: A polite-sounding word for the division between men and women, understood as a traditional alternative word for biological sex/the division between biological males and females. This word is thought to have the benefit of an absence of embarrassing connotations of sexiness in the copulatory sense. When a passport application, say, asks for ‘gender’, it’s intended in this sense. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, a character refers to the ‘masculine gender’, meaning males/men.
GENDER2: A word for social stereotypes, expectations and norms of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, originally directed towards biological males and females respectively. These can and do differ from culture to culture, though there are many overlaps too.
GENDER3: A word for the division between men and women, understood, by definition, as a division between two sets of people: those who have the social role of masculinity projected on to them, and those who have the social role of femininity projected on to them. This is the view of womanhood and manhood, as such, discussed in Moment 1 above. As mentioned, in the late twentieth century it was enthusiastically endorsed by some feminists as a putative shield against accusations of ‘biological determinism’: the idea that female anatomy is domestic destiny. It will be examined critically in Chapter 5.
GENDER4: A shortened version of the term ‘gender identity’. What exactly a gender identity is will be investigated in Chapter 4, but a common idea is that it is the ‘private experience of gender role’ – roughly, whether you relate to yourself psychologically as a boy or man, girl or woman, or neither, in a way that has nothing directly to do with your sex.
Keeping these different senses in mind is crucial when trying to decipher various claims made by feminists and trans activists.
Stock, Kathleen. Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (pp. 40-41). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.
“connotations of sexiness in the copulatory sense” is an amazing phrase.
Isn’t “sexy” already a euphemism? You can describe someone in a bikini as sexy in a context where it would be rude to explicitly mention thoughts of having sex with her. (I presume this was once slightly scandalous… around the same time that wearing a bikini was slightly scandalous?)
Or him?
The answer is A I hope. Sex is a better word to describe biological facts. The word gender now means whatever the user wants it to mean.
Yep, I picked A as well.
I do hope that the options in the actual test are more carefully chosen, to be actual descriptions for one.
I think the answer that would count as correct is A.
Well, of course, the only thing it canNOT be is A.
It MAY be any of the others under various circumstances; but I would argue that—except through a particular lens of the meaning of gender—it is less likely that people would agree with D, even if certain academic disciplines argue that because we behave according to the gender roles and expectations of our cultures, D is true. Our actions and behaviors tend to be shaped by cultural expectations, but there are also numerous examples of those who “violate” those norms. Think of sex-mark occupational categories. When we once said “male teacher” in pre-K–6, we don’t any more. And other “gendered” occupations—priests/ministers/rabbis, airline pilots, physicians, nurses, and the list goes on—show how these can change with time and culture. Only POTUS seems still gendered.
Of course he is. AFAIK there isn’t a female-specific near-synonym for “dickhead”. There are of course many female-specific insults, but not with the direct appropriateness of these entries from Urban Dictionary:
With MCQs, you are usually asked to pick the BEST answer, and they clearly want A, for the reason Bob Kraft gives above. Because gender is closely correlated with sex, sex chromosomes and hormone levels, D could be argued to be a misleading answer. But given the formal definition of gender, D is true by definition, so therefore not the answer, IMHO.
Well, yikes! Rob Kraft, above is succinct. (But what about clownfish?)
For me, question is incoherent, given the mash-mash of meaning of gender and sex in common language and academia. Because it’s on an MCAT prep test, I suppose questions like it are on MCAT, and I think it’s inappropriate. Are there questions about the various humors and chiropractic subluxations or acupuncture? Does the MCAT have a general knowledge of section on history of medicine, or for that matter psychology (eek)?
I chose A. One learns to answer questions of this sort according to the expectation of the test-makers, though that involves some guesswork and mind-reading. But I wonder if they actually recognize sex as a biological distinction, given the influence of WPATH, Butlerian “discourse”, and sex spectrum hoo-ha.
My guess if they wanted an “accurate description of gender” they would demand D as an answer.
I chose A, but reluctantly. Although “gender” is often defined as social roles and assumptions of masculinity and femininity, our experience has shown us that, in practice, gender ideologues will carelessly substitute sex-based concepts like male, female, man, and woman for the gender ones. Thus A now states that male and female are biological distinctions, and the “correct” answer is that this is wrong.
Yes, I have a feeling that the radical cutting-edge gender ideologues are going to want an answer D. That is:
“Gender”, that innate sense of self, that can only be known from self-report, is the thing that is real (and thus biological), whereas “sex” is a mere social construction.
And “gender” — the thing that is so essential to someone’s identity that “misgendering” amounts to erasing them — is not a mere “performance”, it is innate and real.
Hence “D”. I predict that shortly PCC will pronounce that “D” is the answer the test-writers were looking for (to gasps from the audience!), being the point of the post.
Great comments, Sastra and Coel. Within the context of slow-moving development in textbook psychology and sociology, the answer is A. But within the much swifter current of activist ideology, “We are born that way” clearly means biological claims are being made. And the performative aspects a la Butler are coming under assault in some circles, where it is insulting to suggest that core identity is all a stage play. I suspect a growing number of activists would answer D—and then scream that the hegemonic MCAT producers are erasing them and the truth that they feel.
I chose A.
But Kathleen Stock (here cited in comment # 6) is right: gender is also a synonym for sex which is clearly biological. So A would be wrong then.
For instance, type into a search engine “gender wage gap” (which is the male/female wage gap). You get many hits for documents recently written (Wikipedia; Pew Research Center; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/OECD, a club of rich countries; etc.).
I have also recently seen newspaper articles which talk about gender testing in sport while meaning sex testing.
I know the correct answer is A. However, for the question J.D. posed (… “which one was deemed correct by those who made the test”), I guessed D.
That’s a terrible question. I believe that it’s real but it boggles the mind that the people writing exams for admission to medical schools, would write one so at odds with how scientists think. I wonder if it’s because indoctrination to the trans-activist driven wokeish zeitgeist is so complete, that even they don’t see a problem with the way that question is posed?
Many medical professionals are not scientsts, and do not thnk like scienists.
Yes, true. And besides, I misread the piece. It’s not an actual MCAT question; it’s from an independent MCAT prep company. Thanks to commentor enl below for helping me see.
I recognize you wrote “medical professionals”, which would apply to doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, etc. Most medical doctors are not scientists, but we were absolutely taught to think like scientists (at least 25 years ago). That question Jerry posted is an embarrassment to a noble profession. It’s not worth the time it takes to read it. That should be a question about the Islets of Langerhans or arachidonic acid.
I have a daughter who also recently took the MCAT and is currently in med school, and a wife who’s a practicing NP. I don’t understand what the issue is with this question. Doctors and providers will likely see a wide range of patients over their careers, including transgender and intersex patients (my wife has), so it’s important for them to understand the distinctions between gender and sex and how that applies to patient care. Am I missing something?
Great – I messed that up. Supposed to pick one that is NOT accurate for gender.
Scratch one “D” from the poll!
… so…
Sigh…
I give up.
Good luck to the applicant!
🩺
Many genderists like the fact that people think gender and sex are synonyms.
Slippery language is key to their agenda.
given the derogatory connotation of “performative”, D seems likely
[1. relating to or of the nature of dramatic or artistic performance.
“films which push past the limits of current performative trends”
2. done or expressed insincerely or inauthentically, typically with the intention of impressing others or improving one’s own image.
“is their outrage real or just performative?”]
That’s a very good point. I am suddenly pessimistic with deep foreboding about what the prep course calls correct. I hope PCC(E) posts the answer before midnight. Otherwise “D” is gonna get my 2026 off to a terrible start!
I would hope that (A) is the `correct’ answer, but, given that the question was posted here, I fear that it is not.
Having spent much of the last four decades, in the education side of my career, helping students prep for standardized tests of various forms, I have a low confidence in the quality of most commercial prep materials. Rarely do they align well with the style and content of the actual exams, though some are at least reasonably close. I do not have experience with the MCAT (I am not a bio person), but have worked with GRE subject area students, AP students, IB students, and Praxis (teacher license exam) within my range, as well as LSAT students in the past, and base my opinion on the several name brands of prep books, and the on-line tools I have seen students use or had pushed at me by my day job, supported by feedback from the students after taking the exams.
Unlike many, I do not collect questions, other than in cases where they are released officially. In the not-too-distant past, I have had students offered cash to memorize questions and debrief after the exam.
Thank you for this comment. I didn’t understand (actually, I missread) that this was not an MCAT question but one from an independent source. Makes a bit more sense. I was flabbergasted. I need to do better at reading. Thanks.
Hmmm … “praxis” … hmmmm… where is that word found … hmmm …
[from Stack Exchange ]:
“Religion is certainly one of the topics that the word praxis is most commonly used in, so in the right context, the term religious praxis is, as far as I am concerned, perfectly proper to use.”
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3008/use-of-the-word-praxis
When I took MCAT back in 1973, the med schools advised prospective candidates against incurring the expense of prep courses as there was no evidence they improved performance. Looking for a chance to save a few hundred dollars (a lot of money before stagflation) I accepted this advice without critically appraising it and took the test cold. I can imagine that an undergrad today who doesn’t have to take science courses to apply to medical school (including my alma mater, I’m embarrassed to say) might be flummoxed by the format of a multiple-choice exam and could do with some tutoring in test-taking skills. But at least according to the advice going around back then, the content preparation wasn’t useful.
Undergrads today don’t have to take science courses to apply to medical school? To further clarify my question: ???????????
The University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine MD program now requires one “life” science course taken during the four-year baccalaureate degree and one “humanities” course. The life science can be a biological science — hard to see how it couldn’t, although psychology or sociology could count. Many students will of course take math, physics, and organic chemistry to prepare for application to other med schools but they can’t cite their grades in these courses as meeting the requirement for a life science. I suppose you could bet the farm and not take Org Chem at all, to protect your GPA and apply only to U of T and its similarly oriented schools.
In this context, it could be that MCAT and the med schools that use it might regard “A” as a true statement and “D” as transphobic. (Based on the public pronouncements I get as an alumnus, it’s likely that U of T officially does.) It’s conceivable that undergrads could have imbibed the idea that sex is a spectrum influenced by gender, gender itself is “real” (not performative) and have not had any hard grounding in university-level biology to disabuse them of this before they matriculate into medical school. And if they were reading Nature during their Bio classes, they might still be “open-minded.”
OMG – I think I had to take five organic chemistry courses at Stanford to apply to med schools in the states. Maybe it’s only three and one in organic and one quantum mechanics. ‘twas many years ago. Very glad we didn’t have questions like this on the MCAT.
I asked google AI what courses do most med schools require as prerequisite. The answer was
Biology (1 year with lab)
General Chem (1 year with lab)
Organic Chem (1 year with lab)
Physics (1 year with lab)
Biochemistry: Some med schools require, all recommend it,
Math: Calculus and statistics
I checked that Johns Hopkins and Columbia med schools require the above.
Hope this doesn’t get dinged as an over-comment. It’s an expansion on Michael’s request for information while I nervously await the correct answer to the MCQ.
Someone on Reddit made up this helpful Google doc tabulating the admission course prerequisites for all 19 of Canada’s medical schools. I verified the information for the English language schools. Only McGill and University of Ottawa (plus at least two French-language schools in Québec according to the Reddit) still require anything like the traditional grounding in the biological and hard sciences. MCAT is being de-emphasized.
The most commonly required pre-matriculation preparation now is academic courses in indigenous studies that require recitation of the damage colonialism has done to indigenous health. I should mention that if it’s not obvious from the Reddit document, all of Canada’s medical schools are deeply steeped in explicit DEI as a core mission, not only bending over backwards to admit more indigenous and “Black” students as reparations for colonialism and systemic racism but also expecting their non-black, non-indigenous students to acknowledge that their biases make them fundamentally incompetent to provide “culturally safe” care.
When I say I am more than a little worried about Canada, this is what I mean. Happy 2026.
That really is mind-blowing, Leslie. May they get the healthcare they deserve for being so stupid!
A
A
B
Answer is A.
More importantly, I would like to comment on your choices for the world’s best cuisines. I think it’s reasonable to accept that Great cuisine demands great ingredients. Great ingredients start at the farm, but also require an infrastructure that can get them all to the kitchen and keep them impeccably fresh. If you agree with that, first Japan, and then Italy have to be at the top of your list. Japan has a reason why it separates itself from everybody else which is the cultural obsession with the art of perfecting.
You should comment on the relevant post, not on this one.
My answer is A. The rest remind me of that crazy statement made by one of the staff at the Freedom from Religion Foundation that said “A woman is who she says she is.”
That said, I would like to know what the test authors say is the best correct answer.
A is correct
A
A
We don’t know what MCAT means by “gender” here. If MCAT has not been captured by an activist gender agenda then clearly (A) is MCAT’s correct “not accurate” answer. Otherwise, since being born in a wrong-gender body is a very big deal, and since bodies are biological, then (A) can not be not accurate¹; the best not-accurate answer then is (D), since Gender is not a performative aspect of individual identity, it’s an essential aspect. I voted (A) because it’s just too hard to figure out what crazy people really mean.
. . . . .
¹ FWIW, as someone who took the job of constructing clear test questions seriously (since assessments were the one thing that most students took seriously), I never failed to avoid not eschewing negation questions, particularly ones without just a single negation. (See what I mean?)
That pretty much fails to not provide an accurate assessment of this absurdly posed question.
Chat GPT has spoken …. A
[TTTO “Morning Has Broken”]
GPT’s spoken
Sometimes it does suck
Often seems broken
But what the f***
Has such a quick wit
Not bug but feature
True, false, or bullshit
Who can be sure?
© 2025, no charge for noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.
The question cannot be answered without knowing the bias of the people who asked it.
If the people who asked the question associate sex with reproduction and gender with social mores, then “A” is the answer because gender is NOT a biological distinction. If the people who asked the question associate gender with sex, then “D” is the answer because they do NOT see gender as a performative aspect of individual identity, but as some sort of biological reality.
Alas, medical schools in the US and Canada have so accepted progressive ideas about sex as a spectrum instead of a binary that, I fear, the test will reflect that bias. Thus, while thinking “A” correct, I picked “D” because that is probably the answer the test-makers are looking for.
Gender is a social interpretation of sex. Not an independent system floating free of biology.
I think that the trans cultist ideologues would say a) is inaccurate. These antiscience wokists have something against biology. It’s too white, male, cis, hetero, colonial, transphobic, misogynistic, islamophobic, etc.
Because gender is a grammatical term and not a biological one, I pick A.
I think the answer the question-devisors want is A.
D is interesting, because of course it clashes with the notion that “gender identity” is innate and more important to society and the individual than sex. But the notion of gender-as-performance is central to Queer Theory, and to Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble.
Oh well. What genderists lack in consistency they make up for in impenetrability.
Gender is whatever you want it to mean.
Individuals of a species are, almost always, only ever one of two sexes – female or male.
Therefore, ‘A’ is incorrect, thus making it the correct answer to the question… if you know what I mean 🙂
I chose “D”, because I can’t see any way to interpret the term “performative” to mean something other than an invalidation of the patient, something a potential physician would be loathe to do.
A is my choice as an inaccurate description of gender. Plus any biologist worthy of that position believes that gender comes from belief and sex comes from genes and gametes.