When did people stop saying "sex" and start saying "gender"?

Best I can recall the media talking heads started it in the eighties. About the same time they stopped talking about what they thought and started talking about what they 'believe'.
Social engineering, just as we were warned would happen.

Loving the Google book graph tool!
"Transsexual" starts appearing in the 1960s very similar pattern to "female gender"; "transgender" starts around 1990.

I have just registered on mumsnet and am shocked to have been asked my 'gender'!

It has been going for a good while now. I really only became aware of the distinction through the transgender issue. In fact, I suspect that the distinction is the new element here, but one that is here to stay.

Some NHS trusts are now using gender in the forms pregnant women have to fill out.

Of all places.

I keep posting this but actually 'sex' and 'gender' were used interchangeably by most people as recently as 30 years ago. I'm in my early 50s and in my youth they were synonyms. Gender in the 'social construct' sense was used but mainly by feminist academics or theoreticians. So the strict separation of meaning of 'sex' and 'gender' is actually pretty recent.

I'm always posting the definition from my Collins 1991 dictionary because it illustrates the point completely:

1. a set of two or more grammatical categories into which the nouns of a certain language are divided, sometimes but not necessarily corresponding to the sex of the referent when animate
2. any of the categories, such as masculine, feminine, neuter or common within such a set
3. (informal) the state of being male, female or neuter
4. (informal) all the members of one sex: the female gender.

So forms often used to say 'gender' meaning 'sex' not 'identity gender.' What's confusing now is that the meaning of 'gender' has changed so I wouldn't know if the form was asking for my biological sex or my identity feels.

• Filled in a survey for my GP surgery the other day. It had Gender m or f. So even the doctors don't know the difference any more. On a brighter note it did not give the option of 'other'.*

Ah, a form which is inclusive in being able to annoy both gender critical and genderists at the same time.

Filled in a survey for my GP surgery the other day. It had Gender m or f.
So even the doctors don't know the difference any more. On a brighter note it did not give the option of 'other'.

It's not that doctors don't know its that the NHS record keeping systems were subject to trans-inclusive lobbying.

I'm pretty sure some of the details were established on one of the Jess Bradley threads.

When did we start to see Women's Studies as university courses

I think I may have been one of the last cohorts to take a women's studies rather than gender studies course (early 1990s?)

Filled in a survey for my GP surgery the other day. It had Gender m or f.
So even the doctors don't know the difference any more. On a brighter note it did not give the option of 'other'.

Wow, I hadn't expected the usage to go back as far as the 70s. I wonder what happened?

When did we start to see Women's Studies as university courses - or maybe Sociology offered at A-level (ah, anyone else got Maureen Lipman and her "it's an ology!" stuck in their head now? ). It would make sense for a word to come into usage if more people were studying the subject.

Would be fascinating to see the last ten years.

Errol Male/female pay gap isn't too bad. Sex-based pay gap?

My French teacher in the mid 90s had a pet rant about everyone conflating sex and gender. It annoyed him very much that people were too prudish to use sex when that is what they meant. It stuck with me that rant because I think it was the beginning of my conscious realisation that gender is a social construct.

Re 'gender pay gap' Though I wonder if the term helped word gender gain exposure and possibly contributed to confusion that seems so prevalent around gender and sex definitions.

That may be true. I suspect in addition to the possible rationale for 'gender' in this context, 'sex pay gap' really could be a bit errrrr what? - is there a better way of putting it? (More succinctly than 'Male/female pay discrepancy' or suchlike)

Does the MN profile still have a choice of 'gender' rather than sex? I've mentioned this (many times) before, but it really is ridiculous for a parenting site (which couldn't exist without sex!) to be using a coy euphemism. It obviously did mean sex as there were only M/F or 'prefer not to say' options, IIRC.

I think it's seen as more polite and most people think sex = gender >> the words means the same.

I work in an industry where we produce a lot of forms for the public to fill in with personal details.

The majority say gender and have done for ages.

I had a chat with someone at work years ago (before the trasns thing) and said why do the people always put gender when they mean sex? He said, they are the same, aren't they? My response at the time was that gender = sex roles and sex = sex. Now, who knows? There is no single defiition of gender >> most people will take it to mean sex.

Of course the confusion around terminology is helping certain matters e.g the idea that most people are "cis" which will be backed up by people saying they are the gender they were assigned at birth becasue they don't know what the questions are actually asking.

They have never actually checked to see whetehr in reality most people are "cis" AFAIK >> I suspect most people aren't. And where does that leave things? A free for all is where, and when things are in flux / chaos, it's an opportunity that predators always take advantage of.

It'll be a shame if we have to give up the distinction between gender and sex as lost - it's a useful one. I'm generally in favour of language evolving, but not when it means that you have to use more words to make it clear what you mean, which is what tends to happen when you can't use one word in the expectation that it will be clearly understood to have a precise meaning.

Article by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper
'Gender is not a spectrum
The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to set us free. But it is both illogical and politically troubling'
(extract)
"What is gender? This is a question that cuts to the very heart of feminist theory and practice, and is pivotal to current debates in social justice activism about class, identity and privilege. In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due to a vague squeamishness about uttering a word that also describes sexual intercourse, the word ‘gender’ is now euphemistically used to refer to the biological fact of whether a person is female or male, saving us all the mild embarrassment of having to invoke, however indirectly, the bodily organs and processes that this bifurcation entails.

The word ‘gender’ originally had a purely grammatical meaning in languages that classify their nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter. But since at least the 1960s, the word has taken on another meaning, allowing us to make a distinction between sex and gender. For feminists, this distinction has been important, because it enables us to acknowledge that some of the differences between women and men are traceable to biology, while others have their roots in environment, culture, upbringing and education – what feminists call ‘gendered socialisation’. (continues)
aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison

Interesting. When I had my eldest c. 2005 there was an uptick in the offering of private ‘gender’ scans - maybe it was deemed more palatable in terms of branding than ‘sex.’
I’m regularly in the company of first time parents and they all refer to gender. (And then go on to demonstrate they’ve fully bought into genderism which should render finding out the gender in utero impossible but they’re not big on logic, as we know.)

At a work meeting (medical/biology/pharma related) recently where everyone was not an English speaker (and I was the only one there who lives in an English-speaking country and speaks it daily) I noticed that everybody used gender, even in presentations of data where sex mattered. I asked one of the presenters (Italian, and one of the leading experts in his field of medicine) later why he uses gender and he said he thought it was the polite term to use in English. I had a long chat with him about trans and sex/gender and he said he would try to use the term sex where approbriate in future but he didn't think it would catch on, it's too ingrained by now.

Re the 'gender pay gap' - Thats arguably appropriate usage.

I can see that though last few times I've heard it discuss on Radio 4 the biological underpinning was at the fore front - pg bf rather than societal expectations.

Though I wonder if the term helped word gender gain exposure and possibly contributed to confusion that seems so prevalent around gender and sex definitions.

Regarding rubber and condom, I do know someone who tried so hard not to ask for a rubber to erase her work, she actually asked for a condom. No, it wasn’t me.

Well, no, Boy George et al were actually gender benders, not sex benders. They were men who wore the trappings of femininity

Put it into the context of the kids, parents/grandparents of the time. There was a lot of "is it a boy or a girl" "does it know what it is ?" dark muttering going on.

Most people would have blinked like a confused owl if "gender is a social construct" were presented to them.

Back in the day what you wore, what you did, how you expressed yourself had more acceptance as being a natural, normal, necessary part of your sex.

Which is why effeminate boys and men got a lot of "he thinks he's a girl/woman! Ha ha ha" style bullying going on in their obit. Same for less feminine women.

My poor cousin got a lot of stick. Her status as female was under constant attack. She got a lot of "well if you try to look like a boy we'll hit like you're a boy". For their perspective she was trying to step out her sex, not gender. Cos clothes and interests belonged to sexes.

Feminist theory didn't have a huge following in many circles and the media/technology of the time wasn't making it particularly accessible to the masses.

So for most people sex was gender and gender was sex. Two words, same thing, as far as a great deal of ordinary people were concerned.

The Red Tops may have known what they meant by the headline. But they also understood that most of the readership would conflate sex & gender, viewing them as having the same meaning, but one rhyming better with (the not so subtle dig laden use of) bender.