Sex and "sex"

[PrincessZog]

Does anyone have any insight on how the same word came to mean biological sex and the act of intercourse came?

Because - and I think about this often - part of the problem that has led to so much of the nonsense women are currently fighting is people (especially in the US) being so prudish about using the word "sex". And so they substitute it for "gender", which obviously has its own distinct meaning. (And of course the obsession with "gender reveals" - "sex reveal" obviously has a completely different vibe).

Apologies if this has been discussed before on here.

Well, it's sexual reproduction isn't it? Or am I missing something?

I know what you mean, but if you look up 'gender' in a (sensible) dictionary, it says "The state of being male or female", which essentially is the same as sex. Some people seem to have decided that gender is a 'feeling', separate from your biological sex, based on a bunch of stupid stereotypes about how women and men should dress and act. I don't buy that definition, so I don't think gender is a real thing (except as a synonym for sex).

Btw in answer to your original question, I don't see why it matters why the word 'sex' means both those things. Lots of words have more than one meaning. The second meaning of 'Sex' is surely just an abbreviation of 'sexual intercourse'.

We use the term gender linguistically for languages that assign one of two or three genders to nouns. We only tend to use the term sex for living organisms. A bridge, bottle or brush can have a gender but not a sex.

I do think gender became a synonym for sex, probably because it sounded 'naicer', and that's where confusion crept in. The two words diverged in meaning but most of us didn't notice. Than goodness the drafters of the 2010 Equality Act had their wits about them!

I feel like this is a question for pedants' corner.

"Sex" is just an abbreviation of sexual intercourse, which is a quicker way of saying 'intercourse between the sexes".

So sex to mean male or female came first, was used as an adjective (sexual) to describe the process, and that form was then shortened to become a different noun. I was going to say they're homonyms, but I'm not sure that's technically true since they have the same root.

Perhaps we should all start writing "We had sex. last night." to show it's an abbreviation!

But when did gender start meaning 'the sex-related category someone feels they belong in, solely according to superficial, stereotyped ideas about clothes, hobbies and personalities'? Surely it didn't always mean that? And if it didn't, what do people actually think it meant before, other than in grammar terms or as an alternative word for sex?

I always thought gender was the polite term as Brits are stereotypically prudish but I have nothing to base that on.

I always ask to clarify what is means when I see gender being used.

I think sex as a category word came first. Shakespearenhas Lady Macbeth say, "Unsex me..!" when she is nerving herself to daub Duncan's blood on his drugged guards after the murder of Duncan. Austen and later novelists freely sprinkle the word sex around without self-consciousness as in Anne Elliot asserting to Captain Harville that she claims no special virtue for her sex and the Victorians talked much about the fairer sex etc. Intercourse with them meant conversation, which in turn could be a euphemism for the sex act. Sex the noun meaning simply m or f came first, I contend, followed by the adjective. The blunt Anglo-Saxon term never went away but never features in polite reading for leisured ladies, but sex does!

When someone says gender to me, I always ask whether they mean sex. It only takes a moment. If we all did, including questioning daft official forms, things would be much clearer for everyone!

I think it was highly humorous (?) men filling in the space after Sex on a form with "Yes, please!" that did for it. Drop-down menus could see to that.

When someone says gender to me, I always ask whether they mean sex.

Yy. But in my head I'd be wanting to ask the follow-up question "... and if you don't mean sex, what exactly do you mean?" It's a weird distinction. Do transgender people actually say, for example, "I am male sex but female gender"? It seems the tendency now is to only acknowledge gender (i.e. identity stereotypes) and avoid referring to biological sex at all. And that the confused general public now use 'gender' not so much out of prudishness about intercourse, but because they feel 'gender' is more politically correct and they don't want to get in trouble.

Gender has become such a confusing word because basically everyone means something slightly different when they use it so it can be used (and misused) to conflate ideas and meanings etc. Whereas when sex is used, 99.99% of people will understand that this means biological sex.

If you go to the "gender" Wikipedia page they have a section on the history of gender and when the meaning of the words "gender" and "sex" parted company.

The page also highlights why the word "gender" should never be used for data collection purposes because it clearly doesn't have a single straight-forward definition and nobody can agree on what the definition should be. The page has been "semi-protected" which basically shows how contentious it is as a concept.

The concept of gender, in the modern sense, is a recent invention in human history. The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades. The term gender had been associated with grammar for most of history and only started to move towards it being a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s and 1960s...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender#History_of_the_concept