Correct usage: ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender’

Factual Questions
1

Cos, although I’ve thought the distinction was clear and obvious, I now find myself less certain.

This example cropped up in a Pit thread yesterday entitled ‘It’s still not safe to be a woman’;

"I apologise on behalf of my sex."

  • I said the poster should have used ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’. This was considered by another to be erroneous. Fwiw, I rather though ‘gender’ was (broadly) concerned with behavioural matters and ‘sex’ with such as physical characteristics and matters of the flesh.
    On a related matter, it was also suggested that ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are synonyms - which causes me further alarm. Can that be so ?

… but then I thought ‘multi-tasking’ was a euphemism for ‘can’t concentrate’ so waddaiknow …

Help !

2

Things have changed. Not so long ago, “sex” was used to refer to “male or female” and “gender” meant “grammatical gender.” Sometime in the 70s, “gender” was used as a substitute for the “male or female” meaning of “sex.”

The OED dates its modern use from 1963, though there is a previous history of the meaning, with the last cite in 1896.

And “sex” has a long history of being used to mean “male or female” (OED cites from 1382). As a matter of fact, that’s the oldest use of the term; “sex” meaning intercourse only dates from 1929.

So, ultimately, it is not wrong to use either “sex” or “gender” to mean “male or female.” Both are correct. I’d say that the use “gender” is something of a euphemism (like the Victorians saying “limbs” instead of “legs”), but you can use whichever word you like.

3

Oh, and sorry to cause you more distress, but the OED defines “gender”:

In other words, yes, they are synonyms.

4

Yes, they are synonyms, in feminist usage. Those of us who don’t identify with that still look down our noses at the use of “gender” where “sex” is the right word.

“Sex” has always meant “male or female.” Sexual intercourse was referred to as “sexual intercourse,” meaning that thing that males and females do. That got shortened to “sex.” Then people felt uncomfortable using the word “sex” to mean what it always had, so people looked around for another word.

Then they noticed that linguists used a word, “gender,” to denote male or female, so they started using that. The problem is that gender had a specific meaning - it meant how nouns are classified in a language. In most European languages, that distinction is male/female, but other languages have different kinds of gender, such as whether a noun refers to an animal or a plant, tall or short, or various other ways that clever people have found it convenient to classify their nouns.

I do make an exception, though. If use of the word “sex” would be ambiguous, where it could either refer to the sex, or to sexual intercourse, it’s OK to use “gender” to keep Beavis from snickering. In all other cases, you’re better off just to use the word “sex.”

5

If one doubts the valid and long-accepted usage of “sex” to mean gender, look no further than the US Constitution. The 19th Amendment, passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote, reads:

“The right to vote… shall not be denied… on account of sex.”

6

First, an aside: in college, a conservative classmate objected whenever a professor used the term “sex,” insisting he should say “gender.” To which the professor replied, “Nouns have gender; people have sex.”

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2nd ed., 1965) insists on this distinction, claiming any reference to a person’s gender is “a blunder.”

Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage (2000) reluctantly accepts that the terms have become synonymous, and maintains that constructions with “gender” often verge on jargonism. “What [gender-based discrimination adds to sex discrimination – besides eight letters and one hyphen – one can only guess.”

He goes on to note the recent trend to use “sex” to denote physical characteristics, and “gender” to denote social and psychological ones. He even notes that using “sex” can lead to ambiguity. His example is fairly long, so I’ll use a shorter one of my own: “Sex should not be an issue.” Does that mean “sexual intercourse,” or “the fact that a person is a man or a woman,” or even “social roles assigned to men and women”? Could be any. If I meant one of the latter two meanings, “gender” would have been a less ambiguous choice.

7

In this thread, about a transvestite being beaten, there was interesting discussion about the ‘gender’ vs the ‘sex’ of the transvestite in question. Basically the premise (for many people) is that “gender” is said to be socially constructed while “sex” is biological. Thus a transvestite could be biologically male but identify as a woman, or vice versa. (See also Kimstu’s comment, very useful.) The discussion centres around things like ‘what do you call a transvestite, Mr or Ms’ (answer: if you’re stuck on ‘sex’ it will be a Mr if it has a penis, but if you’re using ‘gender’ it will be whatever s/he identifies him/herself as).

The idea is that if we use a rigid biological version - ‘sex’ - than anyone who is born with one set of organs but identifies more with those born with the other set, will forced into a category that they don’t belong in (“Why am I a ‘woman’ if I feel like a ‘man’?”). If we use the more socially flexible ‘gender’ than the category into which you are placed, is more under the individual’s control. Since this particular label is so fundamental to any person’s identity, it’s quite important to see that it is applied appropriately.

Unfortunately my work browser won’t let me view pages with the word “sex” in them so I can’t investigate further, for other, more insightful views. But I googled ‘difference between sex gender’ and came up with a lot of interesting-looking articles.

8

The sex = male/female and gender = masculine/feminine distinction is being lost in modern usage. This is very sad, and has led to the confusion pointed out by London-Calling.

And CurtC, I do believe you meant to say that linguists used gender to refer to whether nouns were either masculine or feminine (or neuter), and not whether they were male or female.

Finally, I equate this sex/gender mismash on par with the merging of these two words:

uninterested and disinterested

They used to mean two different things, and now sometimes they do, and sometimes they do not, leading again to confusion.

9

Here’s another vote for ‘sex’=physiological properties and ‘gender’=social construction. However, I’m going to slightly disagree with Janie’s rational that the ambiguity is the fall out of modern usage. Rather, I think there are many instances where both terms are applicable (i.e. X, in the context of the utterance, is a member of the set ‘sex’ and a member of the set ‘gender’). In such a case there is no default value for selecting a word to describe the relationship (X and the set) therefore people haphazardly select one or the other.

Hmmm, as I just re-read that, I realise that I’m not really disagreeing: just doing a bad job of elaborating on it.

10

Let’s start with Coileán’s proposal: when we speak of “sex” we are talking about physical morphology (and, by extension, those things that stem directly from it); and when we speak of “gender”, we’re discussing a socially shared concept, a “construct” to use the academic vernacular, and the experiences of being “of” that gender.

Do the experiences of a person of the female sex go into the sex column or the gender column?

Therein lies the problem. Within the scope of an argument about rape, if one is disgusted by a large range of male behaviors one has seen and happens to be male one’s self, does one apologize “on behalf of one’s sex”? Or are those behaviors the behaviors of a gender? Depending on whether you think those behaviors are bolted onto maleness in such a way that the behaviors will always be present if males continue to exist, or, instead, think that rape is part of a set of culturally defined personality-and-behavior stuff that makes up the gender “Man” (or “masculinity” or whatever), you could argue for either.

The transsexual-battery-hate crime thread was started by a person who apparently believes that a rigid and inflexible relationship exists between sex and the gender that is conventionally linked to it. If you are male, you are a man. If you put on certain garments and exhibit certain behaviors that are culturally designated as “Women’s”, you are "fooling men into having sex with " you; who you are is not “Woman”, and you are not a “she”; nor (for that matter) are you a “Man” who is simply choosing to dress in apparel that you like and flirt as you tend to flirt with people you find attractive and interesting, because the apparel and the flirting is “of women”, meaning it is “of females” and you, not being female, are therefore doing it wrongly, “fooling” men into having sex with you. So here’s an extreme world-view where essentially there is no gender as distinguishable from sex.

On the other hand, does gender float around ephemerally disconnected from biological sex? Given the assertions that there are more than merely two genders – e.g., instead of just “man” and “woman” we can have “straight man” and “gay man” and “straight woman” and “lesbian”, not to mention “bisexual man” and “butch” (see Stone Butch Blues) and M-to-F transsexual, even conceptual newcomers like me, “heterosexual sissy” – are there any restrictions on gender that stem from biology? Unlike Hermann Cheruscan, many of you would accept a male person declaring xy-self to be a “Woman”, not a “Man”, and saying “I was born in the wrong body”. But suppose I were to state that I am a “Woman”, not a “Man”, but that I was not born in the wrong body, this here male body is just fine with “Womanly” me? And if you do accept that as a reasonable gender identity, what, then, does it mean when Susan over there identifies as a “Woman” (whether straight or lesbian)? At this point, we’re at the opposite pole from Hermann and his ain’t-no-gender extreme – we are now essentially asserting that identity-wise there is only gender. Physiological plumbing doesn’t have a sense of identity of its own. You don’t say or think “I was harassed on my way out of the parking lot by a person who, as best as I could tell from the body parts I could see, was possessed of balls and a cock (not counting out the possibility of undescended testicles or surgical truncations, and entirely ignoring genotype)”. Quite aside from being awkward in a non-nudist world, it’s also irrelevant once you’ve decided that it means only what it is and has no implications for personality, behavior, or experience.

So you start off with what ought to be a simple distinction and still get damn little agreement on what is sex and what is gender when speaking of behavior and identity, even when people understand and agree to the definitions. And in the resulting spray of confusion, where folks hear one person say “sex” in the same context where someone else would say “gender”, you soon get folks using the words interchangeably.

11

Another problem, if a little minor, is that the word “gender” seems to imply a faceless, almost sexualityless semi-anonymous person. Sex is a word that denates a living human, to me. Maybe I’m just picky, but I never use the word “gender” unless I’m talking about der/die/das formations. It just sems to denigrate the individual to a feminist idea.

12

Dictionaries aside, it’s strange that such an unambiguous usage would cause such alarm. Was there really anybody in that thread over on GD who literally didn’t understand what the poster meant by “gender?” Or was it political wranging over what the meaning should be?

There are a lot of usages in English (accepted and unaccepted) which have the potential to cause confusion, but in the real world rarely do. Language can (and does) handle much more ambiguity than people give it credit for. A good illustration of this fact is the frustration many students have when learning a foreign language… a lot of basic syntax in the new language seems impossibly ambiguous to the student, but is clearly not causing the native speakers a moment’s hesistation or confusion. The students are envious of the foreign speaker’s seemingly magical ability to know what is being said, but somehow fail to credit their own similar ability with their native language.

I just can’t see how using “gender” where prescriptivist style guides would recommend “sex” is any more ambiguous than the thousands of ambiguous uses that pass unremarked upon every day because they have no political dimension or are not one of the handful of grammar nitpicks used to telegraph alleigance to prescriptive usage.

Again, when you add the knowledge that the choice of which term to use is politically loaded re: feminism, it’s hard not to see the problem as purely political or rhetorical. Or possibly plain old linguistic insecurity, which is a bigger problem among English speakers than the speakers of many other languages.

-fh

13

In English, the gender of a noun happens to match up with its biological sex most of the time. In general, biologically female creatures are “she”, biologically male creatures are “he”, and inanimate objects, or creatures whose biological sex cannot be determined, are “it”.

This is not the case in all languages. The word gender comes from a root that means “type”, and gender categories do not have to match up with biological categories at all. One language has a gender that includes “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”, inspiring the title of a book by George Lakoff (one of two books I keep on display just because I love the title so much). (And for the record, there are other objects in the gender category in question; Lakoff admits he tweaked it to get a good title.) Sometimes the gender a speaker uses for a noun reveals something about her place in society or even her politics. I learned that the Norwegian words for book and sun are feminine, and while I lived in Trondheim said boka and sola. But here in the western suburbs of Oslo, those forms are regarded as “radical”, and I’ve had to learn to make them masculine, boken and solen, in certain situations, or my listener may make false assumptions about my politics.

So, with one language in which grammatical gender is strictly logical and one in which it’s sometimes arbitrary competing for space in my head, this linguist and feminist prefers to use “gender” for nouns and “sex” for people. But sometimes, when a person’s biological sex doesn’t match up with their role in society, I will use “gender”, and wish there was another word!

14

In English, the gender of a noun doesn’t exist. English doesn’t use grammatical gender. To be more technically accurate, all English nouns have the same gender–which has no name. To confuse you all more, gender need not be restricted to “masculine”, “feminine”, and “neuter”, although they are called “classes” in that case.

15

I thank what you mean is that nouns are not inflected for gender. But a noun certainly does have a grammatical gender, which one can easily discover by replacing it with a personal pronoun. Each personal pronoun in the third person is inflected for gender–he/she/it, him/her/it, his/her/its, his/hers/its–which must agree with the antecedent noun’s grammatical gender. The grammatical gender of most nouns in English is natural–that is, consistent with the biological sex of the object to which the noun refers. The grammatical gender of a noun in English referring to an inanimate object is sometimes called the “common” gender, since it isn’t masculine or feminine, but isn’t really “neuter” either.

Other than nouns that describe actual individuals or roles differentiated by gender, such as actor (m.)/actress (f.) and administrator (m.)/administratrix (f.), whose feminine forms are rapidly disappearing in favor of a nonsexist “common” form (usually based on the formerly “masculine” form), there is at least one exception to the rule that nouns and adjectives aren’t inflected for gender: nouns and adjectives based on hair color, as blond (m.)/blonde (f.) and brunet (m.)/brunette (f.).