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

[Sugarcoma]

They do not mean the same thing.

pants

everyone always asks which gender I identify as’

^tTHis was also from the above definition. i think you can't take it to mean they are attempting to be down with the kids.

It also says it has been used since the 14th century to mean sex.

Gender and sex used to be fairly interchangable and is probably used by people embarrased by the word sex, until some people started to use gender when referring to people who don't like particular things or present themselves in a way that is strongly associated with their own sex. Which is bollocks. Men can like make up, dresses, pink gin and kittens and still be men, as can women drive trains, wear boiler suits and drink pints, or whatever.

If anyone wants to campaign for the rights of anything, it should be for people to like what they want without feeling the need to insist that despite having a penis they feel like a woman usually because they like to dress as an extreme cariacture of what a glamous woman looks like.

As an aside, my work is currently involved in updating some 20 year old legislation and I happened to notice that the current regulations uses the words sex and gender interchangably in relation to protecting pregnant women from a particular hazardous substance, so it is quite obvious that sex is the appropriate term to be used. It will be interesting to see if it has been corrected to sex throughout in the new version.

Exactly teenandtween, even trans people called henselves trabsexuals not transgender. Part of me wonders if we're making a rod for our own backs playing this game with them.

It annoys me when people use the word gender when they mean sex, so yes it does annoy me to a slight extent.

how do folk know what chromosomes they have?

I can't quite tell if you're being serious with that question.

Teen we need sex segregated spaces. Gender really is nobody else's business. If I'm an engineer with short hair and never wear a dress or make up but have female genitals people can assume whatever about my gender, but my biological sex should determin which single sex public toilet/ swimming pool changing room I use. The same for a person with a penis wearing a dress.

drinkingtea I agree. That's what I said.

In what circles do people ask what gender others identify as in a regular basis? I can only imagine this happening in a mental health context, a drunken Freshers week party or in a very right on media workplace...

Sorry teen - I must have meant to answer someone else! I do think the words sex and gender are useful and have different meanings now, even if they weren't and didn't 30 years ago.

If separate meanings were universally understood we could fight for the end of gendering of jobs/ toys/ clothes/ colours / hobbies without infringing on protections or health provision of fair and appropriate segregation (eg sport) etc based on biological sex.

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

It has taken over Canada, the US and the UK and Ireland. That's why it is being discussed on mumsnet.
It won't die down if you don't fight it. It won't go away. It is already law.

In what circles do people ask what gender others identify as in a regular basis?

Feminist groups are infected by it, even in Germany. I was encouraged to do it at a feminist meeting. Just didn't do it, and most other relatively sane people also didn't, but in Germany, people are still mostly sane. I imagine in the UK, it is everywhere.

Though mostly, people just state what gender they feel they are without even being prompted, and then force everyone to treat them as the biological sex onto which this gender was traditionally attached.

It used to be rude to ask didn't it... I can remember telling the children not to ask a neighbor who walked her (it later became clear) dog past our house daily whether s/he was Herr or Frau ... What a strange turn of events that in some circles it might now be rude not to ask...

Would you like to have gender with me? Doesn't really work does it?

What a strange turn of events that in some circles it might now be rude not to ask..

Yeah, before, it was clear that people were addressed according to their actual, real sex, and if they looked androgynous it was seen as polite to not call attention to it, as they'd likely not have chosen the ambiguity.

But that was back when one was allowed, yes, even expected to recognize a bearded dude as the male he is.

But in those days of allegedly female penises, how would you ever be able to tell as what gender someone wishes to identify by looking at them?
If a dude wears a suit, he could be a dude who wishes to be allowed into female spaces, while not being treated as outcast by his fellow males. And he would argue that women wear suits, too.

Would you like to have gender with me? Doesn't really work does it?

Spurious reasoning. Gender isn't used interchangably with the word sex when means sexual intercourse.

Well i think the future is non binary rather than transwomen and transmen. I remember when Jamie Shupe became the first person to have their NB identity legally recognised in the US. Didn't realise Jamie was actually a desisted TW who has made a lot of enemies in the Trans community. Their view on the Trans ideology and community is a long read but very interesting. Hope Jamie has folk watching their back - the trans activists won't be happy.

youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/2017/07/22/you-cant-feel-like-a-girl-an-essay-by-jamie-shupe/#comments

This explains a lot of the variation in usage:

Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences[4][5] and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).[3]

In other contexts, including some areas of social sciences, gender includes sex or replaces it.[1][2] For instance, in non-human animal research, gender is commonly used to refer to the biological sex of the animals.[2] This change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s. In 1993, the USA's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started to use gender instead of sex.[6] Later, in 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using sex as the biological classification and gender as "a person's self representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual's gender presentation."[7]

Wikipedia article on Gender

I think it's a useful distinction but I can't say I get annoyed by people mixing up the terminology.