To find it infuriating when people use the words "gender" and "sex" interchangeably?

[Sugarcoma]

They do not mean the same thing.

So a man could never be female? Nor a woman male?

Without getting into the transgender debate too much bambambini it's a matter of linguistic specificity.

A bit like infer/imply - they mean slightly different things (ditto less and fewer) but are used interchangably. But this means they are often used wrongly.

A transgender man saying he has XY chromosomes would be wrong.

Unless you are intersex or have a chromosomal disorder, males are XY and females are XX.

Also, I agree with Lifeofpies that some folk are just uncomfortable with the word 'sex.'

Correct araiwa
You can't change your chromosomes

I don't care.

I think it's a very fashionable thing to get het up about ATM and I think while it's great that's trans children are being heard and believed and taken seriously.

I worry we will have a section of fucked up adults who made the wrong choice and have irrileversabley damaged their bodies.

There was a girl who transitioned into a boy and he was rightly held up as an example and was then seized upon by a LGBT charity to do speeches at school assembly etc. He suffered from panic attacks and anxiety and really struggled to do this and it made me very very uncomfortable.

There were then a huge number of kids from those schools who came forward as trans. Whether they are or they have other underlying issues will be told by time but I worry about this huge surge.

I know that's not a popular opinion.

I am a women I "identify" as a women. I am proud to be a women. I consider myself a supporter of equal rights and if the LGBT community.

There is a lot of navel gazing about this on here and it's really beginning to grate.

There are so many other things to worry about.

I know the difference between sex and gender but the categories within eluded me

Youve got it araiwa.

Girlonatrain, I wonder how many would be suffragettes thought that there were more important things to worry about? True we cant all be vocal about everything but this upcoming Bill should merit some attention from all women xx or otherwise.

This again?

I agree with a pp that gender was another word for sex until recently and it was fine to use either.

I think it's obnoxious to be annoyed at people for using a word as they were taught.

I am annoyed however at people who have swapped the word gender for the word sex because they think this is some how more pc, as though they can minimise sex and pretend it doesn't exist by using this current definition of gender

If someone is a woman, imo they are either female or transgender. And I have no problem with transgender women, or transgender men.

But if a man says he is female, and we are being pedantic/correct, then what he is, is a transgender man. You could say, likewise, that Caitlin Jenner is a male woman. I think that description would be massively offensive to her and any member of the transgender community, so personally I would never describe her that way, even though it would be technically correct, as she has XY chromosomes.

As above gendered was in use for the grammatical like spook being male or female in other languages but still meant sex for humans.

That's the Webstwr's American dictionary entry from 1828 if anyone is interested. You can look up random words from that site and get the old timey definition.

YANBU, these words don't have the same definition at all. I can see how in the past they were used interchangeably, but with the politics of today I think it is really important to use them correctly.

However I think a LOT of people do not understand the difference, judging by the number of "Guess my baby's gender!" threads I see each week...

thatstoast That is precisely why I think it is so important that women in particular use the terms correctly. We are not helping ourselves by blurring the lines still further.

Cannot wait for this latest "thing" to die down. So utterly ridiculous and it seems to be taking over mumsnet.

I think we've already lost from a pedantic point of view but I shall continue to say SEX until the bitter end!

To me they mean the same thing and use them interchangeably. The current situation revolving around this subject doesn't really interest me so haven't spent the time yo research it in detail.

I agree with you, op. Sex is what you're born with. Gender is an artificial piece of nonsense, dreamed up to keep women in their place but damaging to men too.

I think words matter because most of us use them to think. If you can control language, you control thoughts.

the word 'female' refers to sex, not gender

looks up "gender" in the dictionary

gender
ˈdʒɛndə
noun
1.
the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).

shrug

Well explain it then

GirlonaTrain glad I read about it on here as the whole scary agenda hadn't crossed my non virtual line of sight at all, so if I hadn't read about the issues on MN I would have been unprepared when DD watched some poor kid vlogging on YouTube at her friends' and had a million questions...

Sex is biological, gender is a social construction. It isn't actually complicated at all.

You don't try to work out what gender the kittens in your rabbit's unexpected litter are, you separate them by sex so as not to end up with still more baby rabbits...

If you Google 'what's the difference...' the answer isn't clearcut.

I've just looked up in my Concise Oxford English Dictionary 1982, and there it definitely does not talk about gender being a social construct.

So clearly, up until X years ago, the two words were colloquially used pretty much interchangeably, so OP YABU.

I am female. That has nothing to do with social constructs, it has to do with biology. We need single sex spaces, not single gender ones. Sport segregation, hospital wards, dormitories in boarding schools, should be based on sex not on gender. I really struggle to see how it has all got so complicated.

Yes I understand about gender dysphoria. But the current trend (for want of a better word) to say so many people are a different gender and to try to put them into areas of life reserved for the different sex confuses the life out of me.

Agreed. See also, vulva and vagina!!

It's like calling your face your nose.

Ilangennith some would argue that Google is not the route to clear cut truth on any topic at all, and that anyone with a bit of cash can create and host a website and pay a sponsor fee and include well chosen key words to ensure it is one of the first listed on Google...