Gender being used to describe behaviour

[OutsSelf]

I was reading a book the other day, a book on feminism written for men by a man, which casually states that the notion of gender as a set of behaviours (we might say identity now, but this was written in the 90s) wasn't in usage until the 70s. Until then, gender was a grammatical concept associated with some European languages. It was expanded as a way of describing conditioning sexed people into a way of behaving that was naturalized as sex but newly theorized by feminists at the time to be not natural but constructed (like language: the table isn't inherently male or female but constructed by language as such).

I found this really interesting. I hadn't fully got a grip on the way that gender as a set of behaviours wasn't even a thing in living memory.

Now, we are supposed to believe that such behaviours are an innate part of natural identity that are unrelated to the sexed part of the body, but some how emanate from an unsexed but independently gendered organ - the brain. It's all very confused. It requires a certain ahistoricity in the idea of gender itself, a lack of recognition about where an idea of gender comes from, to accept trans ideology.

Thanks for this. I wasn't aware that's how the word gender became adopted by feminist. To me gender was a grammatical concept- which tbh never made much sense to me.

I was introduced to the expression "gender stereotypes" and understood that to be the acceptable/typical behaviours assigned to each of the sexes. I generally considered these to be sexist. Not long after forms starting asking for gender not sex. We joked that is because jokers would answer "yes please" we still thought they were asking for our sex.

I have never gotten into the habit of using the word gender when I mean sex. The only time would be using the phrase gender stereotypes/roles. That's because using the word sex might have different connotations.

What's the book, please? Sounds like an interesting read.

The book is called The Gender Knot, I bought it (10 years ago) for my then boyf because he had been looking at porn and I said he had to read it beforw he watched any more/ we had any further discussion on it because he had to stop doing that devil's advocate on me when we were discussing my oppression. It's very bloke friendly and also now 20 years old so not up to date at all.

I think feminists appropriated rather than adopted the use of the word, because they used its conceptual basis to make a wider argument about how societies construct stereotypes. Thinking historically, the word gender always implies social construction and also always undermines the idea of any innate behaviours.

The contemporary use of it by TRA is interesting if not Orwellian. They use it in a way that asserts or naturalises behaviours in the fabric of our bodies, rather than sees them as being constructed socially and narrativised as innate for political purposes. This is what the notion of gender as a way of describing behaviours or tendency does - it asserts that apparent sex differences in say nurturing, propensity for cleaning, aptitude for unpaid labour and so on are not sex i.e. body based but linguistically constructed by societies for political purposes and merely framed as innate in order to escape rational analysis

Spot on Outself. Now look where we with laws around gender personality

Thank you. Gosh, that's surprisingly expensive even as an ebook.