Why use gender when you mean Sex ?

[Parsley1234]

Why do people ask the gender of their baby or have gender reveal parties ? The correct question is what sex is my baby or maybe I’m just getting totally fed up of woke nonsense.

Ah, my apologies. Clearly I have not had enough coffee this morning!

Serious question, is there a difference?

I've always used the word sex

I think there must be in law because we have ridiculous laws which allow someone to 'change their gender' when of course, sex is immutable.

Historically 'gender' has been used instead of 'sex' because 'sex' has another meaning.

Society, for a long time, respected it as interchangeable and knew what was meant. In the same way that people respected that women use them womens and men the mens. Things that were accepted and agreed by society without it needing to be explained in detail, a sort of quiet understanding and respect.

There is a group who have tried and, in many cases succeeded, to disrupt these socially acceptable norms and constantly seek to take advantage of this 'understanding', they change, stamp their feet and/or question meanings to get their way. They are trying to erode the very things that act as safeguards in society.

This is what happens when you have weak leadership and people in power who can't seem to see the bigger picture and understand how to ensure laws are precise and not open to abuse.

I mean did anyone think that children were included in the rules around changing gender. Of course they didn't and this sloppiness and lack of definition of terms is being taken advantage of at every turn.

It's not conflating and it's definitely not lazy. The language used to justify racism is the same language being used to justify women's oppression. The point is the opposite to what you're making.

@literalviolence - what I'm complaining of as 'conflated and lazy' is the uncritical, unthinking lumping of gender critical politics alongside Nazism as the more extreme example. This is the rhetoric coming from the TRA movement. It is lazy, because it absolves them of any requirement to thinking critically.

Feminists are weary of batting off this particular (offensive and inaccurate) accusation. Most GC feminists couldn't be less 'aligned' with the US alt right. They are misogynistic, they are racist, they are homophobic. To align self-professed feminists with a movement seeking rob women of their own bodily autonomy seems muddled thinking even for TRAs. It just goes to show how the lines between left and right have become obfuscated, and the colonization of the left by those who occupy the old far right ground is indeed an irony and does, I have to agree, follow the patterns of racism.

Colour blind policies supported a racist agenda. Language blind discussions support an anti woman agenda.

Accepted. I do recognise the real problems associated with supposed colour- blindness, and why this is tantamount to erasure. Calling us 'non-women' or reducing us to our anatomy is a similar strategy.

These are all, in addition, useful lines of defence against those who would lazily tarnish GC feminists with charges of racism. It's yet another instance of DARVO. It also must be incredibly frustrating for POC who have to contend with both.

Your latter two paragraphs below don't appear to be responding to me. I've clearly stated above that sex and gender are far from synonymous, and that this isn't a new thing.

"Sex and gender have been synonymous for centuries. It is only the way the use of gender has changed in the last decade or two that has caused this.

Your issue should be with the people who have changed the meaning of the word, not those who use it as it always has been used." Yes it is. But it is also with those people who are 'like who cares anyway' about it all. If those people want to say 'I care enough to want language to stay with the meaning it always used to have' then all good but that's caring isn't it?

Forced teaming is not OK. Logical teaming is.

I am not anti teaming the trans issue with racism. Clearly it's no more acceptable for a man to identify as a woman than it is for a white person to identify as a person of colour.

Who do you think is anti seeing this connection?

Sounds like we agree then. The second bit was a quote from someone else. Apols for not putting their user name in. I had meant to do that.

I think it's two sides of the same coin - both sets of people think it's normal for people to stay within a very stereotypical, narrow window of behaviour depending on their sex. The trans people look as if they're rebelling against that binary but they're actually only saying that they personally are too special for it, not that it's wrong about everyone.

Yes. The trans movement only means anything if the assumption which trans ideologists make - that it's normal for people to feel very closely aligned with gender stereotpyes - is right. When you accept that most people are busy breaking down gender norms and do not actively support them, then you realise that to state that you are trans is a somewhat meaningless and actually pretty offensive statement. Meaningless because it's like 'yeah so what?' and offensive because it's actually saying that you think I have internalised gender stereotypes in an uncritical way and believe that they apply to me. Actually, that's something for me to say about myself if I believe it to be true, it's absolutely not respectful for you to assume that's how I feel and them jump up and down like a toddler who's told they can't have an ice-cream when I point out the error in your logic.

Who gives a fuck really

@porridgecake "
A transman IS a biological woman.
A transwoman IS a biological man."

🤣🤣👍🏻 yes, ok then

Seriously, did you realise you had got it the wrong way round? Really, this is very important.
A transman is a biological woman who identifies as a man. This person may just dress in stereotypical male clothing, or take cross sex hormones, have a double mastectomy and, even worse, proceed to having all the flesh taken off one lower arm to create a facsimile of a penis.
The Cass review explains a lot more about this.

A transwoman is a biological male who identifies as a woman. They may take cross sex hormones, have breast implants, dress in stereotypical female clothing, wig, make up. Around 90% of these individuals have no hormone or surgical treatment whatsoever. Look up autogynephilia.

@porridgecake a man can never be a woman. Ever

I agree.
Humans cannot change sex.
I am trying to establish whether you understand what transman and transwoman mean.

@porridgecake not sure why you're so bothered what I understand. They are men dressing and living as women or vice versa.

I think it really does matter if you are using the wrong words though!
You said that a transman is a man dressing as a woman. That is completely wrong. A so called transman is a woman dressing as a man.
We are both in agreement here that humans cannot change sex, but you can't argue the point if you get the descriptors the wrong way round.
I am just trying to clarify for the benefit of others on this thread who may not know.
If you look at all the violent, masked transactivist males threatening and abusing women, they are holding signs saying "Transwomen are women".

@porridgecake no benefit for me thanks.

Glad we agree on the first part.

Not sure what relevance your point about activists has to this..?

Yes. This!

Gender used to be a polite manner of determining sex, and was used to avoid the sniggering and "yes please!" responses.
It refers to man/woman rather than male/female.

Sex needs to return as the primary identifier as gender has become a corrupt term.

It's ridiculous. I noticed on my employers HR system it asks you "what is your gender" and also "what gender do you identify as". To me that's the same question worded differently. I've selected "prefer not to say" for both questions because I personally don't recognise gender.

People are bothered because women and trans women are two distinct groups. And there are some occasions when the needs, rights and dignity of these groups conflict.

Forced teaming on the part of TRAs insist this is not so, because trans women are women. Yet it's biologically and anatomically impossible to change sex. Any deviation from these 'rules' has been silenced with accusations of transphobia.

There are times when sex matters and should rightly override the recent prioritizing of gender. Prisons, fair competition in sports, spaces where women are vulnerable or in a state of undress, etc.: are all scenarios in which the needs of women override the 'wants' of self-gender determination. Women are being told they have to roll over and capitulate these wants to ensure others' comfort.

To hell with theirs - even in scenarios where trans women are distributing pictures of their arousal when standing in the queue for the Ladies'.

No, thank you.

NO.

It’s so depressing when we have to fight for our right to single sex spaces without igniting the Be Kind narrative and TERF being punched in the face all you apologists for TWAW need to really look at the bigger picture. Women’s rights are being eroded Roe vs Wade, men competing in women’s sports, mixed wards and a million other examples

There is no conflation between sex and gender. They are synonyms as any dictionary will tell you. There is a more recent meaning of gender (dating since the 2010s) which means “whatever I feel like today”. This is not the meaning that people are using when they talk about the gender of their babies. They are using the meaning that has been in common usage for 300 years: a synonym for biological sex. I honestly don’t understand why so many GC people accept this new meaning of the word. I’m GC and when I say gender (assuming I’m not talking about grammar) I use it as a synonym for sex, as English-speaking people have done since the 17th century.

What if she shaved off her beard?