To think that sex and gender are the same thing?

[StNinian]

I don't buy into the distinction many people make between the two terms nowadays. "Gender" was never a word used to describe how one feels/identifies behaves until recently. It has long been synonymous with "sex". Just curious to see if anyone else agrees with me.

I agree with you op. I just assume when people say gender that they mean sex. I get that people now use it as a ‘social construct’ and maybe that’s helpful, but I grew up with the notion that it meant the same.

To save my own sanity as a GC female I do always presume people mean it to be the same thing because the amount of times I see ‘gender’ instead of sex in everyday use - I can’t countenance how fucked up life would be if it genuinely meant ‘subscribes to female stereotyping but may not actually be female’.

Actually perhaps we are already there… 🤦🏽‍♀️

If sex is biology, how do you describe all the gendered behaviours? Of course everything from foot-binding through Hello Kitty to housework is gendered. But it's not sexed. You need both words to describe both things.

Which was NOT recent.

I think gender always existed as a concept - in the sense of 'gender roles' - but maybe wasn't much used unless you were involved in a conversation about societal behaviour.

Later, people started using it as a kind of euphemism for sex because it sounded more polite. That became the norm, so it became synonymous with sex in most people's minds.

And then the transgender debate arose and the waters were muddied, because TRAs and their supporters use it to mean something else entirely- a nebulous, uneffable but inherent 'essence' of womanhood or manhood independent of biological sex. Which is obviously bullshit. That's just personality and stereotypes.

Very good summary!

It became synonymous because lots of people were too squeamish to refer to sex.

It is different though - biological reality vs unquantifiable feelings.

Sex is biology, gender is stereotypes associated with sex.

Perfect answer!

A man can dress as a woman (well, what he thinks a woman should wear 🙄)
His gender is feminine. His sex is male.

Whatever label is used he's still and always a man in a frock.

Sex is male or female.

Gender are the rules around what males and females can do. Completely made up.

Gender is a word borrowed from latin-based languages that use it to describe the imaginary sex ascribed by humans to things that don't actually have a sex.
You know how bicycles and cabbages are considered masculine in french, and umbrellas and vans are feminine, and people think english speakers are idiots for getting their imaginary sex wrong? That's what gender is.
As someone pointed out above, the word means "type" or "class" of thing. As someone else pointed out, we use it in English both as a more genteel way of saying "sex" and of indicating sex-based stereotypes, and that has led to all sorts of confusion.

Sex = biology
Gender = how society constructs the social differences between male and female and can vary according to culture. What is considered manly or feminine can vary across time and different cultures. Eg pink used to be seen as a “manly” colour. Men in some cultures wear skirts, have long hair etc.

This is why I think you can dress more according to the way society constructs the opposite gender and conform more to those stereotypes etc, but it’s not the same as changing sex.

Gender is how you are perceived by society. Sex is when you were born..I think

I think a lot of people do use them interchangeably in casual conversation but they do have two distinct meanings that matter when it comes to legislation, healthcare, politics etc.

Gender in standard English means the state of being male or female. Which is biology. Which is medicine. Plus whatever the French, Spanish, Germans etc do with their language.

The meaning the Internet people are attaching to Gender is better described as Stereotype or Personality.

It’s insane how much the adult world has gone off on this nonsense and created chaos and danger for Women, Children and LGB. We can stop all this overnight if we make use of standard English. This is all it takes.

We will end up back in the dark ages if we don’t.

It’s up to us.

Sex and gender used to be synonyms. Or very nearly so. Then social scientists recognised the concept we call gender and needed a word for it so they could describe it and study it. They used sex for the biological sex, and gender for how you feel.

All was good. Sex and gender remained synonyms in common usage, and had specific meanings in social sciences. This is similar to the words stress and strain having very precise engineering meanings, but much wider and more colourful everyday meanings.

I think it was the 1990s where it changed with a pop science book introducing the general population to the concept of gender, and closely defining the word "gender". You then ended up with clever arses starting to tell people off for using everyday words outside their scientific meaning, and the meanings of "sex" and "gender" became restricted to the definitions forced on them by the social scientist.

So now we are in be position where words which once meant the same thing not mean different things.

"Always" =/= "since the 1990’s"

They are different things

Sex is how people know what babies to throw in the trash.

Gender is how rapists get put in women's prisons

Another thought.

How many Genders are there now? I've read 72 somewhere 🙄

How many Sexes are there? 2.

According to sociological theory, sex is biology and gender is societal roles that are placed on a person's sex. Sex is chromosomes and genitals, gender is pink and blue, masculine and feminine, football vs princess kind of stuff.

However you're right that gender has been used as a polite/less embarrassing term for sex for decades, and to that end they are basically synonyms, so I do get a bit oh not this AGAIN when someone objects to the term "gender reveal" or whatever, because of course you know what the person means and although sex is correct, it just sounds wrong in a lot of contexts.

The feeling/identity thing is much more recent. I find it a bit weird that people would identify with a gender because to me that's identifying with your oppression. And the idea of gender being a sliding scale makes no sense because most of the divides are just completely arbitrary and made up.

This.

Replacing real scientists with humanities professionals over the last 30 years has got us to where we are. Humanities professionals have demonstrated their expertise at deconstructing language boundaries that protect the most vulnerable in our society, and then making sure there’s no documented records. The Tavistock being an excellent example.

They really are very, very good at it.

We now know what happens. Can we now stop this and get the proper, actual scientific experts back, reinstate the boundaries we need and just get on with making everyone’s lives better.

Language really matters.

Basic sociological theory, not fact.

Gender - male or female

Sex - intercourse

Sex is biological - male or female, based on choromosomes, gonads and genitals/ reproductive organs.

Gender is anthropological. Where sex is what it means to be female, gender is what it means to be a woman. A social role. Anywhere in the world, being of female sex means the same thing. Being a woman however can mean drastically different things depending on what culture you ask. It means something entirely different to be a woman in an Amazonian tribe compared to being a woman in Afghanistan, but being biologically female means exactly the same.

No.