# People Who Don't Know the Difference - What should we, as a society, do with them? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 3, 2009, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137 "2009-11-03T05:15:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![usedtobe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ec9cab/32.png) [@usedtobe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/usedtobe)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/1 "2009-11-03T05:15:19Z")
I say string them up… Folks, “gender” is NOT a fancy word meaning “sex”. Female and Male are sexes Feminine and Masculine are genders. There’s a difference. Thank you ---
**Author:** ![The\_Bith\_Shuffle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ce73a5/32.png) [@The\_Bith\_Shuffle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Bith_Shuffle)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/2 "2009-11-03T05:24:25Z")
> [@usedtobe](#): > > I say string them up… > > Folks, “gender” is NOT a fancy word meaning “sex”. > > Female and Male are sexes > Feminine and Masculine are genders. > There’s a difference. > Thank you I know that I’m not one to accuse (see: all of my recent threads), but this is pretty extreme. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_T](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Gary\_T](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_T)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/3 "2009-11-03T06:46:28Z")
> [@usedtobe](#): > > I say string them up… > > Folks, “gender” is NOT a fancy word meaning “sex”. > > Female and Male are sexes > Feminine and Masculine are genders. > There’s a difference. > Thank you Yeah, you know that and I know that, but the masses who don’t know that outnumber us. They might be able to resist our efforts to string them up. Not that the idea doesn’t have some appeal… ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/4 "2009-11-03T06:50:09Z")
> [@usedtobe](#): > > I say string them up… > > Folks, “gender” is NOT a fancy word meaning “sex”. > > Female and Male are sexes > Feminine and Masculine are genders. > There’s a difference. > Thank you No. Female and male are genders. Sex is what you do, not what you are. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_T](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Gary\_T](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_T)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/5 "2009-11-03T14:26:30Z")
Well, that’s just great. Now we’ve got to string up **panache45**. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/6 "2009-11-03T14:48:14Z")
> [@Gary\_T](#): > > Well, that’s just great. Now we’ve got to string up **panache45**. Heh, I’m usually the stringER, not the stringEE. ---
**Author:** ![Hampshire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hampshire/32/4887_2.png) [@Hampshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hampshire)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/7 "2009-11-03T15:44:43Z")
Sex is an instument that Kenny G plays. Gender is that tall redhead from Gilligan’s Island. ---
**Author:** ![G0sp3l](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c68b51/32.png) [@G0sp3l](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/G0sp3l)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/8 "2009-11-03T16:28:05Z")
Soylent green? ---
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/9 "2009-11-03T19:44:41Z")
I confessed in an earlier thread on the exact topic (but without the threat of hanging) that I never knew this, despite 19 years of formal education. I do now, and have reformed. So, maybe lighten up a bit, some people have never given it a second thought and have simply been wrong. We didn’t mean it. ---
**Author:** ![Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jimmy_Chitwood)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/10 "2009-11-03T21:14:31Z")
I’m going to treat the string them up bit as completely unserious, but I think it’s a very good question. I ask it of myself from time to time, because I’ve always found myself caught in the middle of the two worlds when it comes to stuff like this. To a lot of people, the distinction between gender and sex is an everyday phenomenon, and it’s as relevant as the difference between, I don’t know, race and vocation. To a whole freaking lot of people, though, the distinction between gender and sex is a complete irrelevancy; it’s something that never requires any thought. To 99.99999% certainty, every person with a wang is a dude, every person without one is a chick, and they can tell whether or not people have wangs by looking at them and their clothes and hairstyle, finding out their names, etc. This approach has never steered them wrong. To the extent that they’ve ever been required to think about such a thing, (if, like **Procrustus** says, it has ever come up at all) it’s been entirely academic and just a bit of trivia. They aren’t being hateful or bigoted, they just have life experience that makes such a distinction a tiny bit of grammatical trivia if anything at all. It’s been my experience that each of the above groups severely underestimates the number of people who are in the _other_ group. Your average person who travels in your average circles runs into very few circumstances where he or she is confronted with any question at all as to what gender label another person wishes to be identified with, and so, it seems to me, never really appreciates that there are significant numbers of people for whom the question of “him” vs. “her” is a very serious issue. I think that your run-of-the-mill American (for that’s the only people I have much experience with) just has no idea that this is an actual phenomenon. The other side of the same coin is that I think relatively few of the enlightened, so to speak, are willing to chalk your average person’s ignorance up to sheer ignorance, and most tend to associate any recalcitrance with some kind of intolerance or, at the least, stupidity. When usage changes, it happens over time. There are always going to be the first adopters of the change and there are always going to be the holdouts. This means that in the meantime, you’ve got people who aren’t yet aware of the valid distinction being drawn between sex and gender, and people who are aware, but who think that anybody who isn’t aware is somehow wrong for being unaware. Then you get the angry backlash, and the angry back-backlash, and so on, and the center of gravity moves slowly toward more general acceptance of the new usage, while there are still the radical edges but they become more and more distant from the center. Long story short, my opinion is: don’t be a dick about it, no matter which side you’re on. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_T](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Gary\_T](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_T)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/11 "2009-11-03T21:18:07Z")
> [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](#): > > I’m going to treat the string them up bit as completely unserious… What!? You mock our threats? > [@](#): > > Long story short, my opinion is: don’t be a dick about it, no matter which side you’re on. Oh, sure, take all the fun out of it. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![mnemosyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@mnemosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mnemosyne)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/12 "2009-11-03T22:03:18Z")
I had a classmate a few years ago who was writing a paper on the correlation between drop-out rates and “gender”. When I started talking to him about what kind of studies he’d found regarding gender identity and school, he looked at me like I was crazy and said “no, I mean boys vs girls!” I told him that there is a difference and he might want to change the title to the correlation between drop-out rates and _sex_. He was kind of noncommittal at the time, but we were going into a class, so the conversation kind of ended there. A few weeks later he tells me he didn’t do very well on the first (review) draft of the paper, since the teacher asked the same thing…shouldn’t this be about sex, and not gender? I guess he wasn’t comfortable writing the word “sex” all the time, or he didn’t believe there was a difference. The scary part? He was an education (and math) major! :smack: ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/13 "2009-11-04T14:03:38Z")
IMO … In modern corporate-speak, “sex” is an unmentionable word which is shorthand for “sexual intercourse” and has no other meanings. The old meaning, refering to the reproductive category of humans, is officially obsolete. The new usage is fully enforced by the Sexual Harrasment Police. For lack of another widely-known word for reproductive category, “gender” has been appropriated for that meaning. The grammar-related meaning, all but irrelevant in English anyhow, needs to move over and accept that it is now a secondary meaning. The discussions about chromosomes versus reproductive category versus personal identification & mate preferences are all red herrings. Valid to the people who care about such things, but irrelevant to what’s really happening linguistically in society at large. I generally sit on the fence between prescriptivist & descriptivist. In this case I think the prescriptivists are rapidly losing the battle. ---
**Author:** ![SecondJudith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5ac83/32.png) [@SecondJudith](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SecondJudith)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/14 "2009-11-04T14:11:29Z")
In the use I’m familiar with (when the topic is human rights and gender issues, rather than grammar), sex is your physical type and gender is your identity. For example, a MtF transgender person is born with male sex and female gender. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/15 "2009-11-04T14:13:52Z")
> [@mnemosyne](#): > > I had a classmate a few years ago who was writing a paper on the correlation between drop-out rates and “gender”. When I started talking to him about what kind of studies he’d found regarding gender identity and school, he looked at me like I was crazy and said “no, I mean boys vs girls!” I told him that there is a difference and he might want to change the title to the correlation between drop-out rates and _sex_. While you’re absolutely right, “the correlation between drop-out rates and sex” could refer to a correlation between whether students drop out and whether (or how often) they have sex. The problem is that, when people see/hear the word “sex,” they think of **sex** —sweaty, nekkid, naughty-bits-rubbing-together, panting, moaning, throbbing, sex. The word “gender” isn’t as… distracting. ---
**Author:** ![mnemosyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@mnemosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mnemosyne)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/16 "2009-11-04T14:44:09Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > While you’re absolutely right, “the correlation between drop-out rates and sex” could refer to a correlation between whether students drop out and whether (or how often) they have sex. Of course. But you know what I meant, which is good enough for me. I don’t recall the exact conversation, I just remember that he lost points for using “gender” instead of “sex”. It wasn’t _my_ paper anyways, so I didn’t need to come up with the best title for it! 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/17 "2009-11-04T14:50:39Z")
I think part of the problem is that I recognize that there IS a difference, I just don’t see it as something very concrete. Like, it’s very theoretical and not something that seems to apply to real situations. Yes, there are people whose gender doesn’t match their sex or who don’t have a clearly defined sex or whatever. But most people I meet, their gender does match their sex and so you get into the habit of thinking, of feminine as a female trait/masculine as a male trait. I know it’s not exactly right but in my head, I see it that way. I mean, I know to revise that when I meet people who aren’t like that. ---
**Author:** ![Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jimmy_Chitwood)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/18 "2009-11-04T17:01:01Z")
> [@Gary\_T](#): > > What!? You mock our threats? > Oh, sure, take all the fun out of it. Oh, don’t be such a girl. ---
**Author:** ![filling\_pages](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b9bd4f/32.png) [@filling\_pages](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filling_pages)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/19 "2009-11-04T17:56:26Z")
> [@usedtobe](#): > > I say string them up… > > Folks, “gender” is NOT a fancy word meaning “sex”. > > Female and Male are sexes > Feminine and Masculine are genders. > There’s a difference. > Thank you Feminine and masculine are not genders, they are adjectives. A person may have a male gender and be feminine or a female gender and be masculine. A friend of mine is a transsexual man who performs as a drag queen. His gender is male, but he’s mighty feminine at times. And that’s just an extreme example - there are plenty of people who are comfortably male or female but do not follow that gender’s socially assigned roles of feminine or masculine. ---
**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137/20 "2009-11-04T18:01:07Z")
From a sociological perspective, there has to be a difference. A chinese female and an American female don’t (in certain usages) have the same gender. You’re not born with a gender, you’re taught it. I don’t wear a tie because of my genes, I wear it because I’ve been taught that that’s what ‘masculine’ is. I don’t ever expect to be proposed to because I’ve been taught that it’s ‘feminine’ to receive a proposal. In China (or wherever), the rules aren’t the same. So to a sociologist, the two women are of very different genders. There _needs to be_ two different words so that we can talk about how the two women are the same and how they’re different. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-who-dont-know-the-difference-what-should-we-as-a-society-do-with-them/516137.md?page=2)