When did gender stereotypes become gender?

[AWomanNeedingToVent]

I've missed what I would argue is the greatest social and legal accomplishment for the trans movement and I can't find anything on it! Was it debated? When exactly did this happen?

Gender was interchangeable with sex. Nobody even used sex when I was a youth, only gender. Gender stereotypes were not the same as gender. Gender stereotypes becoming gender has inevitably created social and legal confusion.

Should gender (stereotypes) really have a place in determining which prison someone is sent too, sport categories or eligibility for womens awards? Should gender (stereotypes) have a place in sexuality and what defines a same-sex relationship?

Someone around has a nice little history of this, maybe they will post.

The concept of gender as something to od with people is 20th century, close to mid-century IIRC. It was not the same as sex, it was meant to be used to talk about things that were associated with sex but were not actually biological. So for example customs related to sex in some way. They weren't necessarily negative customs from an anthropological perspective, or any perspective really. Radical feminists tended to put a negative spin on that with the idea that gender, customs and beliefs related to sex were essentially meant to control and oppress women, and that by getting rid of them we could improve women's lives.

This is slightly different again from the idea of gender identity which is a psychological idea, and related to other kinds of identity. So not our sex, but our sense of ourselves as sexed.

Gender came to replace sex in a naive way in I think the 80s. Many people failed to realise there were subtle differences in usage and preferred it to saying or writing "sex" which also means the sex act. This seems to be what you remember.

Now of course it's being used differently again. There was no widespread consultation on this, though, which I think is what you are getting at.

I feel that a significant part of the problem in the English speaking world stems from people's refusal to utter the word sex. If people hadn't been so reluctant to say it, maybe the all present 'gender' wouldn't have slipped under the radar.

As to the question being asked, I'd say it happened around the time men realised that they could roll back women's rights using this linguistic quirk AND get a pat on the back for it too, and best of all, they could even get (some) women to agree to it.

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper article:

'Gender is not a spectrum
The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to set us free. But it is both illogical and politically troubling'
(extract)
"What is gender? This is a question that cuts to the very heart of feminist theory and practice, and is pivotal to current debates in social justice activism about class, identity and privilege. In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due to a vague squeamishness about uttering a word that also describes sexual intercourse, the word ‘gender’ is now euphemistically used to refer to the biological fact of whether a person is female or male, saving us all the mild embarrassment of having to invoke, however indirectly, the bodily organs and processes that this bifurcation entails.

The word ‘gender’ originally had a purely grammatical meaning in languages that classify their nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter. But since at least the 1960s, the word has taken on another meaning, allowing us to make a distinction between sex and gender. For feminists, this distinction has been important, because it enables us to acknowledge that some of the differences between women and men are traceable to biology, while others have their roots in environment, culture, upbringing and education – what feminists call ‘gendered socialisation’.

At least, that is the role that the word gender traditionally performed in feminist theory. It used to be a basic, fundamental feminist idea that while sex referred to what is biological, and so perhaps in some sense ‘natural’, gender referred to what is socially constructed. On this view, which for simplicity we can call the radical feminist view, gender refers to the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary characteristics.

Not only are these norms external to the individual and coercively imposed, but they also represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a value system with two positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood above womanhood, masculinity above femininity. Individuals are born with the potential to perform one of two reproductive roles, determined at birth, or even before, by the external genitals that the infant possesses. From then on, they will be inculcated into one of two classes in the hierarchy: the superior class if their genitals are convex, the inferior one if their genitals are concave.

From birth, and the identification of sex-class membership that happens at that moment, most female people are raised to be passive, submissive, weak and nurturing, while most male people are raised to be active, dominant, strong and aggressive. This value system, and the process of socialising and inculcating individuals into it, is what a radical feminist means by the word ‘gender’. Understood like this, it’s not difficult to see what is objectionable and oppressive about gender, since it constrains the potential of both male and female people alike, and asserts the superiority of males over females. So, for the radical feminist, the aim is to abolish gender altogether: to stop putting people into pink and blue boxes, and to allow the development of individuals’ personalities and preferences without the coercive influence of this socially enacted value system.

This view of the nature of gender sits uneasily with those who experience gender as in some sense internal and innate, rather than as entirely socially constructed and externally imposed. Such people not only dispute that gender is entirely constructed, but also reject the radical feminist analysis that it is inherently hierarchical with two positions. On this view, which for ease I will call the queer feminist view of gender, what makes the operation of gender oppressive is not that it is socially constructed and coercively imposed: rather, the problem is the prevalence of the belief that there are only two genders." (continues)

aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison