If you can't get your head around WTF "Gender Identity" is about, try this:

[Melroses]

It is by The State Media who made another film last year.

I am trying it out on confused relatives.

When did we start using the term 'gender' instead of sex?

Just wondering as I read Sense and Sensibility recently and they use the word sex instead of gender - and this was written in the early 1800s.

its all very tiresome isnt it??

When did we start using the term 'gender' instead of sex?

I don't know - the suffragettes seemed to know. I think it was probably post-war. Before that, gender was mostly about grammar.

Definitely in the 1970s, people were using it as a polite term for sex, as we were told to use "sex" in biology. Even social sciences were using sex. I can only remember gender being used in terms of roles and toys by academic types.

I believe the use of gender to describe cultural roles of the sexes imposed by society began to be used by some feminist academics in the 1970’s.

In the time of Jane Austen sex primarily meant male and female rather than the reproductive act so there was not that element of embarrassment around the word.

Sexual intercourse (communication between the two sexes) was a euphemism for physical intimacy which later stopped being a euphemism and became the most commonly used term for the reproductive act/physical intimacy.

In her book Male and Female published 1950, Margaret Mead refers to the sexes and sex. Gender was at that time used as a grammatical term in the study of language.

FF's