Apologies if this has been done to death, but when did the word sex become gender?

[Boscoforever]

I'm a nurse and doing a course in uni at the minute. Specialist area.
Have noticed that lecturers keep referring to gender when they mean sex.
Example: You need to make sure the patient's gender is on their armband.
What good would that do?? I need their sex, male or female, not their gender.
Has been mentioned in this capacity on lots of powerpoints etc.
I've seen it so many times in other places too recently. Are we not allowed to use the word sex anymore? It's really annoying me! Or do people not notice/understand the difference?

@Boscoforever

Janina I am not mathematically gifted, and I keep looking at your post and it's blowing my mind!.

I hope you don’t mind this explanation of @JaninaDuszejko ‘s example

Imagine two rectangular cakes, one is larger.
Cut one into four equal slices - the woman’s and one into five equal slices - the man’s.

All the slices are the same size.

The woman’s quarter is the same size as the man’s fifth.
Her pay is 80% of his (four fifths)
His pay is 125% of hers (five quarters).

He’s got an extra quarter, an extra 25%. It does sound more than she’s got a fifth less, 20% less.

Any slight man with longish hair could potentially be mistaken for a woman in passing when face not visible. It would be unlikely that the mistake would persist if you saw gait, etc. Because male people are generally quite obviously male.

However misogyny is prejudice against female people, not long haired males of any gender identity.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

Any slight man with longish hair could potentially be mistaken for a woman in passing when face not visible. It would be unlikely that the mistake would persist if you saw gait, etc. Because male people are generally quite obviously male.

I would honestly love to see any hard data on this.

Anecdotal or personal evidence here is completely unreliable though, it's exactly the toupee fallacy rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy

Elaine Fuchs, the two sources you quote above are not exactly what I would like to see when I say that like should be compared with like. It is certainly and clearly the case that MTF transitioning will, on average, reduce someone's earnings, while FTM transitioning does not. That is to be expected, given that there is what is called male privilege and at least some sex-based discrimination in the labor force.

The crucial missing comparison, however, is between women who have never transitioned and trans women, and between men who have never transitioned and trans men, and probably should be done over long time periods as the stage of transitioning will have perhaps passing effects caused by transphobia and similar issues. In other words, a trans woman might still earn more in lifetime earnings than a woman who has never transitioned (even one who has not taken time off for having children), especially as the MTF transitions appear to take place later in life, on average, as mentioned in one of the studies you quoted.

That is of course an empirical question.

But it is also important to control for all other relevant variables, as I earlier stated, and that includes mental and physical health variables. In other words, the comparisons should be done between individuals with the same education, occupation, experience, physical and mental health and age. Neither of the two studies I looked at seem to include more than a few of the relevant variables.

But it is also important to control for all other relevant variables, as I earlier stated, and that includes mental and physical health variables. In other words, the comparisons should be done between individuals with the same education, occupation, experience, physical and mental health and age. Neither of the two studies I looked at seem to include more than a few of the relevant variables.

This is an excellent point.

For instance, the Being Transgender at Work report that you link to seems to compare all transgender people to all cisgender people, so it does not compare transgender women to cisgender women and so on. There are more women than men in the low-pay service occupation, and there are more men than women in higher ranking occupations so that data would matter.

I am very uncomfortable with being assigned the identity 'cisgender' because the definitions I have read about it go like this:

Everyone is supposed to have an abstract gender identity which is NOT based on the sex of their bodies. For some that just happens to correlate with their biological sex and they shall be called cis. For others it does not correlate with their biological sex and they shall be called trans. The cis people are 'comfortable' with their gender assigned at birth and the trans people are not.

After enormous amounts of introspection I am absolutely certain that my own gender definition is not reflected in that definition, because it is embodied. I am a woman because my body is female and because the society treats me differently due to that body being female rather than male , including with sexism and sexual harassment and violence, and because my female body has affected my life also directly.

I am not a woman for any other reason, and I don't possess an abstract identity in this respect. Yet I am now simply assigned to a gender which I cannot interpret. What is a woman now? The answers I get often sound sexist and retrogressive.

You don't have to accept an identity based on someone else's quasi religious ideology. "Cisgender" can only make sense if you believe a minority group of male people are a type of woman. I do not, therefore I am never "cisgender" as it implies said belief. If it just meant "a non trans woman" then a "trans woman" would mean a biological female person who identifies as a man.

@JaninaDuszejko

Sadly the Gender Pay Gap regulations incorrectly uses gender, it should be the sex pay gap

It also presents the data as 'how much less women earn than men' rather than 'how much more men earn than women'. This minimises the difference (e.g. if a woman earns £80 a day and a man earns £100 she earns 20% less than him but he earns 25% more than her).

Yes, it is about sex, because the gap is largely caused by employers' fears that a worker will get pregnant in the future and so needs temporary or permanent replacements. Now that all genders can get pregnant, of course, the real reason for why women earn less will be a little harder to fathom.

But it is also partly caused by the vast sex-segregation at work so that female people are dominant in low-paying jobs and male people in higher-paying jobs. That comes from gendered expectations, views about femininity and so on, so this part the new gender ideology would probably make worse rather than better: If we start defining women as feminine people, then they WILL be expected to choose jobs which are caring and nurturing and don't require leadership skills. Those are lower paying jobs, as we all know.

And yes, if you calculate the same difference in pounds as a percentage, then we will get a bigger percentage difference when we use the smaller base in the calculations. But the actual difference has not changed.

@nepeta

Elaine Fuchs, the two sources you quote above are not exactly what I would like to see when I say that like should be compared with like. It is certainly and clearly the case that MTF transitioning will, on average, reduce someone's earnings, while FTM transitioning does not. That is to be expected, given that there is what is called male privilege and at least some sex-based discrimination in the labor force.

The crucial missing comparison, however, is between women who have never transitioned and trans women, and between men who have never transitioned and trans men, and probably should be done over long time periods as the stage of transitioning will have perhaps passing effects caused by transphobia and similar issues. In other words, a trans woman might still earn more in lifetime earnings than a woman who has never transitioned (even one who has not taken time off for having children), especially as the MTF transitions appear to take place later in life, on average, as mentioned in one of the studies you quoted.

That is of course an empirical question.

But it is also important to control for all other relevant variables, as I earlier stated, and that includes mental and physical health variables. In other words, the comparisons should be done between individuals with the same education, occupation, experience, physical and mental health and age. Neither of the two studies I looked at seem to include more than a few of the relevant variables.

Thank you @nepeta for the thoughtful responses.

As far as I can tell the study you specify does not exist yet sadly.

The evidence we do have does seem to point to trans people being discriminated against on the basis of their gender presentation rather than their sex. Please DM me if you want to discuss this further, as these threads can become very hard to follow.

Since you seem to be somewhat receptive, I hope you don't mind me making a comment on your language (please don't take this as a personal slight!), the term MTF (and FTM) has largely fallen out of favour with trans people as it emphasises previous maleness (most trans women will say that they were never men, and vice versa for trans men). I understand that transfeminine (and transmasculine) to be more inclusive terminology.

@ElaineFuchs

But gender is how people tend to interact with society, so it makes sense that it's being used more often. There's certainly a time and place for knowing about the sex of a person (like in a medical setting), but by and large, knowing the shape of someone's genitals/hormonal profile/chromosomes is totally irrelevant and an invasion of privacy.

Hey amazingly if you had read the OP you would have observed that she is a nurse undertaking further study and the material is about patients. So you had no reason at all to speak about genital inspections, did you? Any opportunity I suppose, to think about inspecting genitals works for you, I guess (bleeee)

Thank you for the links EleaineFuchs, I can't add much to nepeta However, when you say

doesn't that prove that misogyny in this regard is based on gender presentation, rather than someone's assigned gender at birth?

surely most women's gender presentation corresponds to their observed sex at birth, so I have rather lost track of what your point is. If you look like a woman you get woman-type shit dumped on you, if you look like a man you get male privilege, and it doesn't seem to be that much worse for trans people overall than it is simply for women.

And indeed from the "Before and After" paper you linked, being transmasculine in the workplace seems to be one up on being butch / lesbian:

"Five FTMs elected to write comments. All five praised their workplaces for their tolerance and acceptance. One respondent in a blue-collar job wrote: “My transition went extremely smoothly. I was shocked at how smooth. No one even talks about it and it had no effect on my pay. If anything, I have been better accepted at work because people don’t see me as a dyke like before.”"

(PS sorry if that was a thread derail, not about language and nursing)

AmaryllisNightAndDay:
A good point. Transitioning up the ladder means something different than transitioning down the ladder. And 'down the ladder' means becoming more like female-bodied people of all sorts.

Sorry, but this is bugging me a bit - when a transwoman is being discriminated against, how do you know when it's misogyny and when it's transphobia? Or is it both? How do you know whether or not they're being discriminated against for the same reasons that women are discriminated against? And if you can't tell, how do you develop conceptual models to underlie your statistical analysis?

It's always both, and it is automatically more serious than anyone else's.

When did you first realise you were working within a corrupt industry?