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.

The beginnings of a distinction between sex and gender in feminist discourse came from Simone de Beauvoir, who called gender the socialised obverse of sex.

And it came into queer theory by John Money and Isaac Bentley, so make of that what you will.

Period products were still labelled "feminine hygeine products" when I was a teen.
And "feminine strength" would have been more likely to mean "strength displayed by female people" rather than "strength displayed by people who like pink and glitter" or whatever it would mean now.
I've actually come around to thinking it was a false move to separate "feminine" from "female" and use it instead to mean "things stereotypically associated with female people." I think you actually just end up reifying the stereotypes.

That doesn't help with the word
"gender" though. I don't remember it being used outside of French classes in Australia in the 80s and 90s. But honestly I could be misremembering.

Mmmmm… Where is the etymology given to justify being ‘driven mad by’ to mean something other than ‘driven insane by’ in the UK? This is clearly a mistake made by someone who doesn’t understand the usage.

It was the Cambridge online dictionary, for one. In the online OED I didn’t see the same fudging.

In the OED there seems to be more of a suggestion of the link between genre and gender - type/category kind of usage where it is ambiguous and it not a synonym of ‘sex’.

"feminine hygeine products"

That always made me laugh. It was very much a euphemistic “quote marks” thing to avoid acknowledging the ‘unladylike’ thing of bleeding from your vagina every month. ‘Feminine’ always meant ‘delicate, ladylike, sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice’. Female on the other hand was exactly what it means - and when doing DIY it still surprises me to see a bolt being call the ‘male’ part and the nut being the ‘female’ part. In the ‘men’s world’ of construction, the physicality of the sex organs is what male and female mean.

I would suggest paper dictionaries, pre -1990 editions for 'original' (i.e. establisehd) meanings of words. Anything online can be edited to suit any agenda. And the average age of the staff in charge of 'techie' stuff tends to be low.

But in any case, I think this thread is getting a bit lost in the detail.

My conclusion is that the use of 'sex' and 'gender' as synonyms is not something that the average (middle-aged and beyond) UK MNetter has grown up with in their lifetimes. So from the perspective of 'lived experience' it is new - even if it harks back to some marginal, XVI century or poetic uses.

I would suggest paper dictionaries, pre -1990 editions for 'original' (i.e. establisehd) meanings of words.

This made me ruefully reflect upon the paper dictionaries I have thrown out, and I remember a Collins dictionary I once had, so I looked for the online version and it defines ‘gender’ far more in keeping with its British usage (since the appearance of ‘gender identity’) IME.

Definition of 'gender'

gender

(dʒendəʳ )
Word forms: plural genders

1. UNCOUNTABLE NOUN Gender is the state of being male or female in relation to the social and cultural* roles that are considered appropriate for men and women.*
It is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of race, gender or sexual orientation.
Gender stereotyping can be as damaging for men as it can for women.
Some people experience a mismatch between their gender identity and their biological sex.

2. COUNTABLE NOUN You can use gender to refer to one of a range of identities that includes female, male, a combinationof both, and neither.
Membership is open to people of all genders.
The new law would allow people to change gender by filling in a form.
Each of them identifies with a different gender from the one they were born with.

3. VARIABLE NOUN Some people refer to the fact that a person is male or female as his or her gender.
Women are sometimes denied opportunities solely because of their gender.

4. COUNTABLE NOUN Some people refer to all male people or all female people as a particular gender.
...the different abilities and skills of the two genders.

5. VARIABLE NOUN In grammar, the gender of a noun, pronoun, or adjective is whether it is masculine, feminine, or neuter. A word's gender can affect its form and behaviour. In English, only personal pronouns such as 'she', reflexive pronouns such as 'itself', and possessive* determiners such as 'his' have gender.*
In both Welsh and Irish the word for 'moon' is of feminine gender.

Word Frequency

gender-

(dʒendəʳ )
COMBINING FORMGender- combines with adjectives to refer to things that relate to people's gender or to people who have a particular gender identity.
Each electoral list must be as gender-balanced as possible.

In usage #3 - it is ‘some people refer to’ - [just like ‘some people’ use the word ‘literally’ to mean ‘figuratively’ - ie - wrong].

In usage #4 - the same - ‘some people refer to’.

Just because ‘some people’ use a word in a certain way, it doesn’t mean that this is was the word actually means.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/gender

I'm sure there are if you search assiduously. The point is that 'gender' has not been a word in common everyday usage in any way apart from grammatically, until relatively recently. I did not come across it in any other field until I started studying Sociology in the 1980's - and then it formed part of feminist discourse.

You don't think that English usage has changed in the last 33 years?

The usage of sex and gender as synonyms is definitely something that anyone who is reasonably well read will have come across from 19th and early 20th century literature. It fell by the wayside and gender became used in its grammatical context only (as I remember from French and Latin lessons). Sometime in the 90s a new meaning of gender emerged from academic circles and now the two words are, to many people, synonymous again. I make a clear distinction, but many people don't and they are not 'wrong' to do so. My personal bugbear is those who use jealousy as a synonym for envy but I accept IABU in this. 30 years ago they would have been plain wrong, but usage changes and modern dictionaries list them as synonyms.

@coureur , but surely 33 years IS recent.

OED has three sets of uses for 'gender', only one of which (the third) is relevant here. (The first is to do with grammar, the second is anyway obsolete.)(OED 'gender')

Third set of senses, then according to OED:
"'Gender'='sex'" has been around since the fifteenth century. (That amusing misreading of 'hair' for 'heir' earlier in the thread derived from the earliest example found.) That's 3a.

'Gender' referring to a set of culturally-determined stereotypes ("...the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, ...") dates from 1945, originally America. That's 3b.

OED also mentions the "euphemistic" use of 'gender' for 'sex' in C20th, as well as the way sense 3a is " ... now often merged with or coloured by sense 3b". It is this latter merging and colouring which lies at the root of the conceptual confusion at the foundational level of 'trans' discourse, of course.

Simply put, it's possible for you to be certain gender only in sense 3a. Some people want you to be a certain gender in a sense other than that, and 3b is the only other possibility. But that won't work: no-one can coherently be said to be a set of stereotypes. Hence the merging and colouring - fallacious equivocation of one sort or another.

--In fact it's worse than that, even. There's a further move people make, namely to talk of 'identity' ... in the sense of what it is that makes me who I am. But the only game in town if I'm not to use 3a's sense of 'gender' in this arena is 3b's sense. And attacking the idea that certain culturally-determined traits or attributes determine who I am in the arena of womanhood or manhood has always been definitive of feminism (at least for all my (now lengthy) life). Feminism, by definition has always been gender-critical in this sense.

[Searches for a sense of 'gender', neither 3a or 3b above, for 'trans' beliefs have proved nugatory. This is because of (ideologically-based) contradictory demands on any such sense. But that's another argument.]

[And OED is authoritative for this sort of thing. Really, it just is.]

33 years ago my father was arguing that using 'gay' to describe someone who was homosexual was incorrect usage as "that's not what the word means". Well, to be fair, he still argues that.

A 33 year old dictionary is ancient when you consider the huge technological and social changes that have happened in the past 30 years, resulting in huge numbers of neologisms (particularly in the areas of technology and online life) and changes in usage.

For navigating modern English, a 33 year old dictionary is as useful as a 33 year old road atlas is for navigating the roads.

Interesting.

I think we just take a very different view of time in linguistics.

Can I ask, how old is your father?

I still use them interchangeably and always have done.

Anecdotally, I think probably sometime after the early to mid nineties as I definitely remember people who wanted to ask the 'sex' of the unborn baby using the more 'polite' word, 'gender'. In everyday language, from what I remember from the 70s and 80s, 'gender' was pretty much universally understood to mean the same as biological sex.

@stickygotstuck 86

I was at school in the early nineties and we were taught that sex is biological and gender is a social construct, during both biology and sociology GCSE. It isn’t new. I think using gender to mean sex has happened purely because people were prudish about the word sex. They’ve never been interchangeable.

In everyday language, from what I remember from the 70s and 80s, 'gender' was pretty much universally understood to mean the same as biological sex.

Totally disagree. This was during the period of Women's Liberation Movement where the use of the word sex was as important to feminists as it is now.

It really wasn't until the 2000s that the erasure of the word sex started creeping into public language.

Although it may be in some communities some prim convention meant some chose to use the word gender.

But as posted earlier the deliberate erasure of the word sex from day to day language was as a result of queer politics creeping into universitied in the 80s and 90s, which meant by the 2000s new graduates going into the media took the weasel word gender with them. Some maybe not realising they were the advance troops of the TRA agenda which was influenced by queer politics which is about the "transgressions from the norm".

Many women, not just feminists, reacted really stronly against the move to close Women's Studies and make them Gender Studies. As I said above this started in the 80s and was completed by 90s.

Apart from queer and trans politics it also gave us the hugely reactionary 3rd Wave feminism, which spent most of its time acting older women for being ... dinasours!

The only time I heard the word gender being used in the 1970s and 80s was in the context of “gender bending”, which was used to describe the breaking of social norms of dress and behaviour, and nothing at all to do with sex.

Had forgotten that, but yes very example of how gender was not seen as being the same as sex.

Gender benders were in fact far more radical than trans, as they accepted that their sex was real, but challenged the societal notions that because of their sex they should dress, behave, have interestes in the cliched sexist notions of what is feminine and what is masculine.

Trans ideology is in fact about conforming.

Me too. I still believe in two sexes/gender though. What people mean by gender in these contexts I call ‘gender stereotypes’.

I agree that saying gender stereotypes is something people would understand.

Most people are not ever going to think that a masculine or feminine stereotype is what ‘gender’ means.