Reflecting on the recent changes in language

[Ingenieur]

I stumbled across a hard copy of a dictionary from the early 90s recently and thought I'd take the opportunity to reflect on quite how recent a lot of the changes are in the discourse surrounding sex and feminism.

My hope is that this will serve as something of a record of what was understood to be the meaning of words in the living adult memory of most of those who use this board, as recently as 30 years ago.

Dictionaries of course aren't necessarily definitive, they record current and historic usage, but they are referenced when laws are drafted and determined in courts so having an appreciation of what was meant when laws were written is useful. Also, it is a snapshot of language at a given time so one can track when new usage appears.

It is clear from the screenshots that woman/ man, female/ male until this point had only sex-based meanings. Gender too had none of the social and cultural meanings we ascribe to it today - it was a grammatical term, or a reference to one's sex in the last entry.

Interestingly, in the entry for "sex change" it accurately refers to it as an "apparent change of sex", which of course it is.

Anyway, feel free to peruse the definitions, see which ones are listed as "archaic" and which ones deserve to be, and let's wonder at how such stable definitions because mangled in a single generation.

I must have imagined my childhood, then.

Maybe have been in some circles, but in terms of new reporting etc., it wasn't, I dont think it was in public use, for legal purposes etc..

And of course not at all with the same use of the word gender as promoted by TRAs.

@IwantToRetire

Gender was never a "polite" substitute for the word sex.

You say that, but it had a sufficiently established history of use that it is included in the dictionary excerpt I included above.

That's not to say gender replaced sex at that time, just that there was a synonymous overlap in uts recorded usage.

Gender has and still is used interchangeably with the word sex and yes people feel embarrassed to say the word sex, especially in mixed company. Why wouldn't they? Why is it something to sneer at?

It was in America. Use of "gender" for sex in formal situations there has been common for decades.

This was shown in the film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg where to make a secretary who seem embarrassed to have to type the word sex, was allowed to use the word gender.

So would be ironic that because one young woman got flustered what was to become the historic battle (not yet complete) for sex equality has helped, for the wrong reasons, the TRAs perpetuate the tranferability of sex and gender.

In the mid-20th century, a terminological distinction in modern English (known as the sex and gender distinction) between biological sex and gender began to develop in the academic areas of psychology, sexology, and feminism.]

Before the mid-20th century, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.]

In the West, in the 1970s, feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender.

The distinction between gender and sex is made by most contemporary social scientists in Western countries, behavioural scientists and biologists, many legal systems and government bodies, and intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO.

ie even in the 1970s and onwards the use of the word gender was distinctive not about sex.

But then of course it was only a decade later that queer academics overturned the use of the word gender as put forward by feminists to be about social constructs, and through gender studies gradually moved the use of the word to be about social stereotypes and to become a substitute or the same as the word sex.

I recall a biology teacher saying to us in the late 80s (in the UK) that "sex is an activity, gender is a state". I remember it really clearly because I found "sex is an activity" a really racy thing for a teacher to say!

I get he was wrong but it was definitely a thing in the UK too. Until very recently, from my elderly standpoint, gender was either about your french vocab or it meant the same as sex.

Gender was most certainly extensively used as a "polite" alternative word to sex on forms, the PP who said it wasn't is talking twaddle (maybe very young?). I have come across it all my life. And it still is in places. I had occasion to have to fill a form for a South African firm about a year ago and it gave me two options for "gender", M or F. No question for "sex".

I have seen forms with Gender : Male, Female, Non-Binary, Other

I appreciate the vague attempt to be inclusive or whatnot but what the actual flip is that?

I hadn't anticipated quite so much emphasis on ferns, TBH.

Gender was most certainly extensively used as a "polite" alternative word to sex on forms, the PP who said it wasn't is talking twaddle (maybe very young?). I have come across it all my life.

So you distinctly recall its use before mid-20th century? Can you show some examples?

And even after that, it crept in as an Americanism, slowly, and reluctantly, because it was seen as a wrong (and American). The educated sorts (like the teacher above) would know that gender didn't mean sex, but really meant either grammar or some sort of social studies thing.

In formal situations - like census forms:

https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/learning-hub/census/resources/census-forms/

"Sex".

I can imagine "gender" showing up in maybe the 1970s or 1980s on some sort of photocopied form on a school run off by an individual without any sort of editorial input, but then so would all manner of grammatical or spelling errors.

I'd not saying it was totally unknown - it is there in the dictionary as "colloquial" - it just wasn't accepted as standard English.

And I imagine the increasing (mis) use as a sex synonym was linked to its increasing use for sex-based things in academia - people picked up that it was now being used formally in a sort of sex-based context, and people inferred that it could be used directly as a sex euphemism.

Well, my personal memory doesn't extend back further than the mid-20th century, so no, I can't myself recall examples from before then! Growing up in mid-century South Africa though (a socially conservative society where euphemisms were paticularly rife) the word gender would invariably be the word on any form, including official forms. Never sex.

And literally a year ago, on a form for a major South African financial institution I was asked whether my "gender" was M or F. No question about my sex. (There didn't seem to be any grammatical or mathematic errors in the form as far as I could see, either).

rowing up in mid-century South Africa though (a socially conservative society where euphemisms were particulatly rife)

Okay, not being in the UK makes your memory make more sense. I'm only looking at British usage.

Maybe some colonial distance from the base of the language helped both America and South Africa accept gender-meaning-just-sex earlier.

And literally a year ago, on a form for a major South African financial institution I was asked whether my "gender" was M or F.

A tragically high number of overseas outfits do seem to use American rather than British English. And that would be totally normal American. You very rarely see Americans use "Sex" formally in that context, the opposite of the UK.

I often see "Gender: M/F" where I am too, and I roll my eyes at it the same way I do at "color" or "-ize" or "cookie". Just another Americanism...

Have never seen a "gender" question with anything other than "M/F" to make me get awkward with "well if you don't mean sex, I can't answer this".

The UK was able to have and pass a SexDiscrimination Act and no one taking part in the campaign, drafting the text or debating in the HoC had a fainting fit about using the word sex.

“This place exists to remedy injustices and half the population of Britain, for one reason or another and largely on grounds of their gender, think they are unfairly treated right across the spectrum.”
Mr. William Hamilton
(Fife, Central)

From the debate. Recorded in Hansard. He’d have been in his late fifties at the time

I don't believe South African government departments and banks in the 1970s were much influenced by Americanisms, to be honest. We didnt even have TV and most people would have been unaware of most Americanisms....

It's really more a case of "sex" being a saucy word in a prudish/religious conservative society, so using what would then have been seen as a complete synonym. The same root impetus as the American (socially conservative) context but not influenced by it.

So where does “have sex with” come from? I thought that was an Americanism to avoid the vernacular.

I’ve never heard anyone say “have gender with”

You can't make any assumptions about how the words were used in the UK from your experience of how those words were used in South Africa.

I'm not. I was replying to the PPs who were saying that gender was never used as a "polite" word for sex, or alternatively that this happened only in America.

I'm fairly sure that I encountered it in the UK in the 1980s too, but I can't give specific examples the way I can with SA, so I could be misremembering that.

Not too different, but I happen to have a 1934 (3rd) Concise Oxford in my bedside bookcase. (It's the same as the 2nd, but with some extra words and definitions added on to the end, including a bit extra for "sex".)

Here's gender, sex, and the extra bit about sex.

Man (two images), and woman.

It's just short for have sexual intercourse with like sex is short for sexual intercourse. You wouldn't say have gender with as gender has never as far as I'm aware been used to mean sexual intercourse.

Sorry I feel like I missing your point!

Masculine, and feminine (and surrounding words).

Gender wasn't used in this way in the UK. The PP who said that it wasn't is probably from the UK (this is a UK site). They are not "talking twaddle".

It possibly did happen in other English speaking countries apart from America, just not in the UK.

I would think it was in the last decade that I noticed gender stopped being used for sex on forms and surveys in the uk. I don't think I was really aware of the difference until the 'butterfly' drama on tv. Probably when I became aware that transexuals were to be referred to as transgender. You would skirt around using 'sex' in polite conversation. Possibly the access to constant porn via internet removed the taboo