"When filling out official documents, you are often asked to provide your name, birth date, and sex or gender. But have you ever been asked to provide your sex and your gender? It may not have occurred to you that sex and gender are not the same. However, sociologists and most other social scientists view sex and gender as conceptually distinct. Sex denotes biological characteristics and exists along a spectrum from male to female. Gender, on the other hand, denotes social and cultural characteristics that are assigned to different sexes. Sex and gender are not always synchronous, meaning they do not always line up in an easy-to-categorize way."