To grit my teeth at the phrase, "gender scan"?

[magneticfield55]

For a start, unless you're paying for one which is specifically for that purpose, it's not. It's a medical scan to check organs etc.

But it's also not a, "gender" scan. All it will tell you is whether your baby has a penis or a vagina. That's it. It'll tell you that they're biologically male or female (intersexuality, androgen insensitivity syndrome etc aside). The inaccuracy of it irritates me. That penis or vagina will probably determine their position in the gender hierarchy, but it's still all we know about them at that point.

I'm a feminist and believe gender is socially constructed, with girls and women at the bottom. So I get really irritated by, "team pink!", "gender reveals". I know it can help us to bond with our bumps, but they're not even born yet and we're already basing our preconceived ideas of who they might be around their gender.

I don't begrudge anyone this, it just annoys me. AIBU?

MrsRuffallo, I was at the Homerton in Hackney.

clarabella I think it's a difficult thing to define (maybe someone with more academic knowledge in this area can help) because the other way that I've had it described, is that sex is the biological fact I have 2 x chromosomes and a vagina so am female, wheras gender is the fact that I wear a skirt/makeup/am identifiably feminine by our cultural standards. I think I've seen this run into problems though when it comes to transgender identities.

I've been thinking about this thread and would like to point out that not every language (and therefore every society) has the distinction between gender and sex.
I'm in Germany, and here you are "männlich" or "weiblich", and that is your "Geschlecht". That's it. There's no distinction between sexual organs and social construct (or however it's being defined on here).
I think (though I'm not positive) that it is the same in French.
That's interesting, isn't it?

It is interesting, Kitchen. English is a much richer language than many of its Indo-European cousins, and we have a number of near-synonyms which have evolved to take on subtly different meanings. Linguistic determinism suggests that this shapes our thinking about the concepts described.

To give another example - DH is an anthropologist and is terribly irritated when people treat 'monkey' and 'ape' as synonymous. He was aghast when he learned that there is no such distinction in either French or German.

I happen to love the subtle precision of meaning offered by English but I appreciate that this is a fairly niche view Nevertheless, I intend to observe and uphold the difference between 'sex' and 'gender' in English...

Well, there are also quite a number of German words for which there is no English equivalent (hellogiggles.com/10-fabulous-german-words-english-equivalent here for some amusing examples :o).

I thought "Menschenaffe" was ape, whereas "Affe" was monkey (though they are often both described as "Affe" in everyday speech).

The richness and subtle differences within a language can be wonderful and very useful, but can also cause difficulties if not everyone is aware of (or indeed agree with) what they are, as demonstrated here and also on the recent "disabled person v. person with disability" thread.

I think that in this case, the purpose of the scan is clearly not to find out the gender/sex of the baby, but for a lot of people it's an extra bonus that they are happy to have, and again for many there is no real distinction between gender and sex.

Even the dictionary states:

sex: the state of being male or female
gender: the fact of being male or female, especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences, not differences in biology

So yes, especially when considered within a social context, but not exclusively. Unless you're having a discussion specifically about gender within a social context, I think most people wouldn't differentiate. It's common usage to use the two interchangeably.

I mostly hear it being called the 20 week scan.

I found out what I was having when I was pregnant, it didn't matter to me in the slightest but made me feel abit closer to "bump" knowing if I was having a daughter or son