When did "sex" and "gender" stop being used interchangeably?

[WookeyHole]

Prompted by another thread where the OP is getting feedback on using gender reveal rather than sex reveal of a baby...

Until perhaps 10 years ago, possibly more recently than that, I, and everyone I know, would have used the words sex and gender interchangeably.

Now I know they are seen to have different meanings, but doesn't the very use of the word gender by TRAs and the fact women have to use sex mean a concession by women?

Or is it that language evolves and it's been a necessary step to ensure clarity?

I just can't help thinking people on mn calling out other women for using gender is using the term in a way which is a trans construct.

Please don't flame me, I am not good on the nuances of this whole thing, and I am posting to learn.

So is it only humans that have gender?

Without using the usual pink/blue, make up, dresses cliches what is gender?

Additionally, we need to be really careful about what historical sources we refer to where activists have been very much present in universities and publishing, and of course all over online sources like Wikipedia, trying to retrospectively change our knowledge and understanding of the world to give their ideology more credibility. Think about female vikings buried with weapons are now ‘transed’, apparently Marsha P Johnson started the Stonewall riots, even though he wasn’t there at the time, etc.

That's from johnsonsdictionaryonline. The URL is cut off.

I am British, in the UK. The Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries are the usual online versions.

Here's yet another screenshot, from Britannica this time, showing that gender and sex are interchangeable (definition 2).

Right - the word 'femelle', in either it's noun or adjectival form, is never applied to humans in French. The words are 'femme' and 'féminin.e'. Similarly, describing women as 'female' or 'females' in English outside of a medical context was considered improper, and 'feminine' was often substituted as the adjectival form.

Yes you do. It's point 3 of the English definitions at the top, which I already screenshot. You have to scroll quite far down to get to the American English section, which as you pointed out does in fact agree with the English dictionary, proving that this use is commonplace internationally.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gender

I think it’s very helpful to distinguish between social construct and sex, but
I don’t think it’s helpful to generalise the idea of gender identity as many people don’t view their identity in terms of gender.

Also, things like breasts, gait and voice pitch impact other’s perceptions, but they are more influenced by sex and genetics than identity.

I see. Now this just does not ring true. I simply never heard of the two examples until very recently- fads like the ‘gender reveal’ parties in America. It sounds as American and wrong as calling aluminium ‘aluminum’ or calling scones ‘biscuits’ to my British ears to hear the quotes there:

“used to refer to the condition of being physically male, female, or intersex (= having a body that has both male and female characteristics):
Does this test show the gender of the baby?
Forensic scientists can tell the gender of the victim from the skeleton.”

Since when has anyone heard of ‘intersex’ being referred to as a ‘gender’?

Oh well if you'd never heard of it then I guess several of the major dictionaries with all their professional staff and hundreds of years of collective experience must be wrong. You should write to them post haste.

I need to correct my children when they call biscuits ‘cookies’, feeling angry being ‘mad’, etc. Perhaps this Cambridge dictionary is written by young Brits who can’t distinguish American idioms from ours. Shocking.

You're shocked at something you've made up in your head?

You're right of course, however I said it was 'being used as' - i.e. being used synonymously. 'female' as either an adjective or noun was considered impolite in the 19th (and well into the 20th) century as it equated humans to animals and feminine was frequently used as a synonym, especially in non- medico-scientific writing. This distinction still stands in French, where femme/féminin.e is used for humans and femelle is used only for animals and plants, even in medical and scientific contexts.

all their professional staff

I beg to differ about the professionalism of activists trying to re-write history to suit their own agenda.

and hundreds of years of collective experience

Sadly these hundreds of years of collective experience are currently being undermined by these activists. It’s tragic.

You should write to them post haste.

I am pretty convinced the person opening the post bag will be one of these activists, so there would be little point.

Sounds like tin foil is really en vogue round your way.

The recent queering of dictionaries invalidates their guidance on the topic.

The historical examples given are extremely weak evidence of conflation. His heyres of the masculine gender of his body tickled me, because masculine is a gender word. The sentence means hair of his manly body, again a gender word. You could describe a woman as manly but never (before now) as male.

The conclusive proof that gender doesn't mean sex, but qualities ascribed to the sexes by human society, is that we don't talk of animals' gender. You don't gender chickens or kittens, you sex them. We observe sexual dimorphism in species, not gender dimorphism. Bodies have sex organs, not gender organs.

Seriously, what self-respecting British person would have said “Does this test show the gender of the baby?” or “Forensic scientists can tell the gender of the victim from the skeleton.” before the mid nineties?

It just was not heard of. It is American creep.

That is quite clearly an updated version to show contemporray uses. Dictionaries do update themselves now and then to take account of new colloquialisms, slang usage, and contemporary parlance.

'Gender' as you are now using it comes straight from the U.S - just like Queer Theory from which it originates.

I think we have gone way beyond accusing people of tinfoil-hattery at this stage. Have you not seen what has happened in publishing, in universities? Where has your head been buried for the last decade?

I think you must be quite young to not realise just how recent this use of 'gender' is in the U.K.

You've grossly misunderstood that sentence.

"His heyres of the masculine gender of his body lawfully begoten" means legitimate male children. "Heyres" = heirs.

Not manly body hair.

And yet there are examples from centuries ago in the many other screenshots.

For fun, I put ‘mad’ into the Cambridge dictionary and annoyingly the third example makes no reference to it being American usage https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/mad

You also get a nice little American SJW lecture on how we are meant to use the word in the British, original sense.

Oh, haha!

Man, that's annoying! To compound the error, one of the UK usage examples is Bill's untidiness drives me mad. I'm pretty sure mad here is meant in the older sense of crazy, insane. Not angry; we were saying "drives me mad" long before we became aware of the American meaning.

Yes. I saw that too. I am starting to feel enraged by these clueless little squirts wrecking our language and feeling so righteous as they go.

You do understand that dictionaries document usage? Every single entry in the OED will have etymology to back it up. They don't just make it up as you seem to believe.