Conflating sex and gender

[NameChangeAgainandOncemore]

I have known for as long as I can remember that sex and gender are different, and I have been guilty of going around thinking that most people know that, but they simply think that one must be kind to those who feel they were born in the wrong body.

Turns out they do not. A lot of people think sex and gender are the same, and that you can change sex if you try hard enough.

This came up because I was trying to find out if you can determine sex from blood, and looking at academic articles, many of which use the terms sex and gender interchangeably (declaring that you can determine a baby's gender from maternal blood, etc). Then I was talking to someone who hadn't really thought about it and explained to her the basics of why the terms are different. She was visibly shocked to discover that 'even if you take hormones???' you don't change your biological sex.

There's a huge mountain to climb still isn't there?

I don't think it's that simple.

We had a thread a few days ago where I and others uploaded and discussed the recorded meanings of various words in UK dictionaries, and in the wider English-speaking world.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5090947-reflecting-on-the-recent-changes-in-language?page=1

Sex and gender have had overlapping meanings for a long time, and gender has been listed as a colloquial synonym for sex for a long time, occasionally for hundreds of years, and more commonly in the past 120 years.

In the dictionary I referenced, the academic meaning of "gender", i.e. the socialised obverse of sex, was not widely-enough used to warrant an entry at all even into the 1990s. Gender in this sense was first proposed by trans academics in 1945, and taken into feminism a couple of years later.

Certainly in my childhood and young adulthood, the words sex and gender were used as synonyms, with gender also having a meaning (as it still does) in languages like French. Terms like gender stereotypes and femininity would have been used to describe sex-based cultural and social stereotypes. Note that I am talking about a non-academic general usage here, based on my own experience.

I think there is some general lack of understanding about biology/science which leads some people to believe that what is done medically for "transitioning" means the person has somehow actually changed sex.

The "gender pay gap" referred to the difference is earnings between the two sexes.

The Gender Recognition Act 2004 Section 9 meant that holders of a GRC actually changed sex -
'(1)Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman)."

So considering 'sex' and 'gender' to mean different things is indeed relatively recent.

I’ve always known sex and gender to mean the same thing. I think at some point someone gave gender a different definition and this hasn’t necessarily been very helpful

I first started hearing people (specifically a couple of women academics) using 'gender' where I would have used 'sex' in the mid-1980s and was inclined to put them in the same category as people who referred to bitches as lady dogs (a century earlier they'd have had euphemisms for legs and trousers). I later realised that was the start of the movement to define and discuss something called gender as an academic exercise.

Before that, using the word (except as a punchline in an off-colour joke) was very very unusual. People knew what sex was and used the word correctly, even if they sometimes needed to unleash hard stares at the silly.

Sex was still sex in forms I filled out, and in the equality legislation, until 2000 at least.

Really interesting. My memory is, admittedly, not brilliant so maybe I haven't always known there is a difference. I feel like I have though.

I suppose the fact that it is possible to change gender but not sex is the crux of it, but the fact that people think you can change sex is always a surprise to me

I don’t think it’s helpful saying to people that they can change gender, even if you are saying they can’t change sex. It doesn’t even make sense to me. If gender is separate to sex and is an innate sense of themselves then why does it need changing. Surely it is what it is. Perhaps rather than “changing gender” they are just making it clear to others that their “gender” is not the gender that most people would expect based on their sex.

When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s they meant the same thing. Biology.

Now - is it because of Queer theory? - they have separate meanings, gender is social construction based on stereotypes, sex alone is biology.

At least this is how I understand things.

But you're still right. I had a crazy conversation/argument recently where some young women tried very hard to convince me that transwomen are biological women and I'm not even talking -they've-taken-hormones-so-are-biological-women-now- though that would be still an unscientific take...no, they meant they 'feel like' women (lots of cis thrown around) so are biological women from birth.😩😩

@Charliebrow you are right, 'gender' is apparently innate. So you can't change it you can only express it. And we know you can't change sex.

No need for any transing at all when you think of it like that. Almost as if you can dress however you want, sleep with any consenting adult who will have you..... Oh hang on

I'm not ancient, but sex and gender used to mean the same thing as far as I was concerned.

Then suddenly "gender" meant "gender stereotypes".

So on all the forms in existence ever that asked for "what's your gender?" actually meant "what gender stereotypes do you ascribe to?" - this was presumably around the same time that gender ideology and trans stuff started up.
It stopped making sense.

Sex and gender have NOT been used interchangeably until the queer activists took over Women's Studies in universities and Gender studies were created.

You can look at any old news paper reports, or tv news and see clearly that gender was very rarely used accept in academia.

Ironically it may have been when 70s feminists starting talking about gender stereotypes that gender as a word started being used popularly.

So when the law was passed about employment rights etc., we had the Sex Discimination Act. And when this was incorporated into the EA we still had Sex as a protected characteristic. And also Gender Re-assingment which is probably along with the GRA when the law / law makers implied that somehow biological sex was the same as having a gender identity, or could be made to be legally.

But suspect anyone educating in this century, has probably, thanks to the dominance of the TRA agenda, not realised they are different things.

ie sex is a biological reality, gender is a social construct.

One of the things when you are young is you assume your (very limited) experience of the world is THE experience.

Best response to young people who try to imply you are out of date is to ask them if they would take the opinions of toddlers to be the best analysis of the world.

Along with the active campaign of TRAs to try and blur the worlds, the other problem is all the young people who have grown up with parents who are so desparate to be liked by their children they have never said to them, actually you dont know enough of the world to be that certain about anything, instead of "being kind".

We've had this discussion a lot before but I'm a believer in a further separate between 'gender' (perceived sex role) and 'gender identity' which is a lot less clear - something about what body you believe you "should" have (presumably because one type of body houses a certain type of person/soul/brain and another houses the other type of person/soul/brain).

But yeah people use them interchangeably because if they realised the difference they might have to face the fact that having a female or male body doesn't mean anything about what kind of person you are.

Whenever people try to pin down the meaning of a word in a TRA's lexicon they change it again. Hence they've started to argue that sex is a social construct 🤯

The real definition of gender is something we don't yet know. All we have right now is opinion.

I have always assumed that the GRA used the word “gender” precisely because to have used the word “sex” would have implied that someone’s sex could be changed , whereas since gender in modern parlance is more of a sociological concept it has more leeway to be flexible.

@IwantToRetire

I know we discussed this on the other thread, but it's just not true that it's a TRA plot that sex and gender were conflated. That came first, and then the subsequent distinction (gender as the socialised obverse of sex) was initiated by trans ideologues in 1945, then inherited by feminist academics.

The dictionary definitions from the other thread show gender colloquially meaning sex into the 90s, with no reference at all to gender being a social construct, none at all, because in common discourse gender could mean sex, but gender as a social construct was only an academic meaning exclusive to those interested in feminism and women's/ gender studies.

Read Section 9 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 Section 9 - my bolding
"(1)Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman)."

@Chersfrozenface this seems to indicate that sex in law doesn't refer to biology but to the category of 'man' and 'woman', and gender in law refers to 'female' and 'male'? what kind of mushy nonsense is this

That is so badly worded it makes my teeth itch, but thanks for the heads up.

I always think male/female is sex. Gender is masculine/feminine.

one is binary. Other is a spectrum.

one is onjective, one is subjective

one is fact, one is opinion

one is science, one is culture

I think the wording is deliberate and that the intention was that a GRC would be proof that a person had changed sex.

Remember that April Ashley and Jan Morris were widely described as having had "sex change operations" in 1960 and 1972.

Elegantly stated, Dargwan, thank you!

But I think it's a lost cause, the confusion of meanings is just too entrenched by now. I use 'biological sex' when referring to sex, and I find that I very rarely used the word 'gender' at all these days.

Was there any point in history that there was a debate about "sex stereotypes"?

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!

Jane Austen, Persuasion