gender and sociology

[Lookingforastronauts]

Hi there. I've recently started studying sociology and am seeing a lot of "gender"material coming up - I'm getting a bit anxious about how infrequently the word "sex" is being used in conflict theory etc...

Has anyone any experience of this in a uni setting?

Oh please someone

I'm early on so go easy on me, but conflict theory draws lines along class, racial and "gender" divides

This should be sex divide? Right?

I don't want to flag myself as a t*

Maya Forstater will do entire series of threads picking apart statements from various organisations with "they mean sex" annotations.

In a lot of cases any reference to gender must mean "sex" for the statement to be true.

In most of the remaining cases you could substitute "sex perceived/assumed by others" for the statement to be true.

In very few cases could "gender identity as perceived by the person themselves and not visible to others" be what was meant.

Certainly in feminist vs TRA conflicts it's achingly clear that the trans people are being correctly perceived as male and being reacted to on that basis. A female doing the same thing would not be treated the same way.

(James O'Brien is an amazing example of this - whenever there's a debate he speaks to women transwomen totally different to women. He's clearly responding to sex, not the "gender" allegedly shared by women and transwomen).

An apropos tweet from Ray Blanchard just now:

The constant re-cycling of the words “sex” and “gender” to mean completely different things has been one of the most foolish economies of language ever seen.

@Lookingforastronauts

Oh please someone

I'm early on so go easy on me, but conflict theory draws lines along class, racial and "gender" divides

This should be sex divide? Right?

I don't want to flag myself as a t*

Yes. "Gender" is the main means of imposing unnecessary differences between the sexes.

To be fair - in all the humanities 'gender' rather than 'women' became the go-to word in the 1990s, and was often used to indicate relations between the sexes and was considered to be a more political and critical form of analysis than considering 'women' on their own. 'Sex' as a word also fell right out of favour. Up until very recently, gender didn't carry any of the baggage it has now acquired with the rise of gender identity and your reading lists and course descriptions may well just be a few years old and reflect this older usage.

The give away is not the reading lists/titles etc but whether your lecturers use pronouns. Most don't ... and there's a very good reason for that!

I'm a lecturer and met my students today - just love them. None of them offered up their pronouns and several repeated over and over how they were really drawn to the study of women. There are students (and staff) who feel like you and I really hope you manage to connect with them!

I have just found one of my old undergraduate essays for a Social Policy course. It was written in 1987 and entitled "Why do some argue that it would be a good idea to have separate schools for Girls and Boys? Interestingly, I used the word 'sex' 21 times and 'gender' was only used twice.

It would be interesting to see if any more essay-horders can show a similar ratio.

Came across this today:

schweizermonat.ch/how-woke-activism-took-over-universities-and-descended-into-street-riots/

Structural Functionalism is ripe pickings for 'sex' and 'gender' (esp. Talcott Parsons). Then there is the sociology of gender - how gender roles came to be (a critique of structural functionalism). The women's movements of the C19 and C20 make wonderful examples of deviance, moral panics and so-on. There are many topics re family formation and where and how gender is reproduced. Lots of stuff. Bet this has all been forgotten now though!

I'm too scared to teach it in the courses that I teach that nudge the area of sociology because I'm bound to get called a four letter T word just for mentioning women and girls.

I think that they use gender as an indication towards the difference between male and female socialisation rather than biological sex (which inevitably does play a part in said socialisation). I suppose gender is a better word to use, since the different stereotyping of men and women is created by society, especially when talking about male and female roles/equality in theories like functionalism and marxism.