Sex sex you mean sex Not gender

[Kit19]

Sex not gender fgs you’re a university

When we say who we are as humans, there's ethnicity, there's sex (m or f determined by chromosomes except for a small number of intersex individuals again determined by genetics) then there's gender, which most people never give much thought to but is trickier to define and the definitions keep shifting, and finally there's sexual orientation which is determined who knows how? and comes in a variety.

For a study like the one the LSE is doing, only sex counts. Covid19 doesn't consider your lingerie, your makeup, your sexual orientation or even your gender reassignment surgery. It goes hardest at those with that rogue y chromosome traditionally known as "men" ( can we still say that word?) and nobody who is xy can identify their way into the safer xx group and escape because:

You cannot bully, browbeat, threaten silence or in any way cancel a virus. It isn't even technically alive!

So LSE mean sex in this survey and they need to say so. I've reported the page to them

Oh, ethnicity counts too of course, for Covid19! We need to know why about that, as well. But LSE is looking at S.E.X.

Don't sex and gender really mean the same thing , just a convention to use the latter to describe the socially constructed expression of sex? For purposes of clarity maybe we should use sex as the default perhaps.

Don't sex and gender really mean the same thing

No. Read the thread.

I think the University is right to call describe it as a gender study. Women (and I mean biological women) are affected differently by Covid-19 not only because of their biological sex but also (and I suspect more) by their gender roles. It's therefore correctly, IMO, a gender study.

@BlackKite

I think the University is right to call describe it as a gender study. Women (and I mean biological women) are affected differently by Covid-19 not only because of their biological sex but also (and I suspect more) by their gender roles. It's therefore correctly, IMO, a gender study.

From the report: For example, the closure of schools has a different effect on women, who often provide the majority of childcare.

Women are more likely to be working in less secure jobs and lose employment due to COVID-19.

Are you suggesting that men who are the primary carers for their children or who are in insecure employment have a female gender?

Are you suggesting that men who are the primary carers for their children or who are in insecure employment have a female gender?

No.

I didn't think you did BlackKite. My comment was meant to highlight the inappropriateness of the term 'gender' to describe women's lives.

They could have looked at the effect of Covid 19 on carers or those in insecure employment compared to other groups. They would have looked at the effect on both women and men in those roles, and that would also be a worthwhile study.

This isn't the study they chose, though. They have chosen to contrast the effect on women versus the effect on men. Women and men are sex classes, so it is the effect on women as a sex class that they are studying. The sex roles play a part, as they have described in the report, but they are still studying the contrasting effects on the two sexes.

Some people Layla Moran say “woman” is gender not sex - I’ve been seeing more people say this. Man/woman is gender and male/female is sex. Who will win in the battle of the definitions

Layla Moran also said she can see into souls so I'd take what she says with a pinch of salt. I personality take my definitions from the dictionary.

I think possibly the last person in the world to trust on these issues is Layla Moran. Did you listen to her trying to define 'woman' on the radio prog with Nick Robinson?

Normal people and not these TRA nuts on twitter, use woman and female interchangeably, but they definitely mean biological female and not a bloke in a dress who 'feels like a woman'

@Ikeasucks

Some people Layla Moran say “woman” is gender not sex - I’ve been seeing more people say this. Man/woman is gender and male/female is sex. Who will win in the battle of the definitions

And then you get some TW insisting they 'identify as female'. Even before we've given an inch they're trying to take a mile.

So, no. These words are not Layla Moran's to give or for TW to take.

Male/Female denote sex - in any sexed species. A dog or a holly tree can be a male or female.
Man/woman denotes sex too, but specifically in humans. It's not a term for which there is a substitute so it's not up for grabs.

Masculine and feminine are the terms describing gender.

Here is their response (I sent a message too)

Right. So they can name the cooking/cleaning/childcare/low paid jobs as gendered activities, but not the sex class predominately doing those roles...

Is there still a good, accessible resource on the sex/gender distinction that hasn't been censored? Needs to be off MN.

I'm going to try to be generous, and wonder if this is a way of trying to stop the whattaboutery of 'not all women have children' and 'I work 90 hours a week and my DH is a SAHD and does all the cooking and cleaning and sends birthday cards too', NAWALT stuff.

Are they trying to say that these 'gendered activities' are not linked to sex because NAWALT?

I also had the above response and have replied to say that if they are looking at affects on women's health then that is very much about biological sex.
Also that gender is just about control to keep using the term when they really mean female isn't fair to those who don't conform or helpful to society. We know there's no innate biological reason for female oppression - it's down to sex and for clarity it would be better if their study used sex not gender.

So are they also looking at men doing lower paid work, male care workers, men who look after their children etc?

If the study is about women, it's about sex, not gender.

If the study is about women, it's about sex, not gender

I totally agree and also remember that when studies were about 'gender' they were about 'gender relations' or 'gender as a system' (or construction) and an understanding that we were talking about patriarchal gender hierarchy and power was implicit.

I've had exactly that response from them too and it's made me really angry. If they can identify these are "gendered activities" they can surely identify why these tasks are normally done by one of the biological sexes.

I got that response, too. At least they know people are noticing. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I use 'gender' in its linguistic sense, particularly in languages in which all nouns have a gender (masculine or feminine, also neuter in some languages). In humans and animals the gender often corresponds to the sex, but not always.

I use it in languages all the time too - I'm an MFL teacher. In that context it really doesn't mean the same thing at all.

But I don't understand what you mean by this:

In humans and animals the gender often corresponds to the sex, but not always.

How do you determine a human being's gender if gender doesn't mean the same as biological sex? And how (on earth) do you determine an animal's gender if gender doesn't mean the same as biological sex?!

@OldCrone

So, do you think the word 'gender' has no value at all?

lazylinguist
I was talking about gender in languages like German, where a girl is 'das Mädchen' - a neuter noun for a female person.

@Shedbuilder

Embarrassing, how do you construct a trial to take into account gender if as they say there is a huge spectrum of genders. I forget how many I've seen quoted: 700 or so was it?

I've not seen any trials that address 700 genders as that's a relatively recent development in trial design/funding terms - nor can I think of a clinical justification for investigating something with such poor/porous definitions.

The trials that I've seen would incorporate gender in sex workers (eg, the female-presenting males in some countries) as part of an investigation of the outreach work involved in promoting PrEp, say. That is, of course, relatively plain, old ordinary definitions of gender where they differ from biological sex.

There are observational studies and some longitudinal ones involving people who've had sex reassignment and they work off a similar view of gender.

There are observational studies that scrutinise sex and gender differences as they influence the expectation of social roles which can be problematic in the appropriate diagnosis of (say) autism. Similarly for substance use disorders. I've randomly selected this study as it identifies the need to understand sex and gender differences in this area:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29174306/

There have been some vaccine trials that also collected qualitative sex and gender data within the trial to investigate relevant differences and to explore if these resulted in different outcomes.