Especially on forms now. It used to be Sex: M/F, now its Gender: M/F
I have two hypotheses. (1) Gender is used to allow the inclusion of transvestites. Their gender is the sex they identify with and they can correctly say “F” even though physically male, for instance. (2) It is an attempt to disassociate sexuality with reproduction. Our gender is seen as an “accident” while sex has a purpose: procreation. Some people don’t like to be reminded of that.
I think you’re reading too much into it.
IMHO, someone just decided they didn’t like the word SEX sitting right there in the middle of their Jack-in-the-Box application.
WAG here: perhaps it’s for cultural reasons, just as “Christian names” and “Surname” is now “First names” and “Last/Family Name” respectively.
Also – it puts paid to a long-running humour schtick by stand-up comedians.
When the bureaucrats discovered that sex was used to engender babies.
Yes, but gender is also used to sex babies.
It was simply because “sex” as in “intercourse” became the common meaning of the word, so that it became embarassing. All the double entendres and lame jokes (“sex?” “Yes” or “Sex?” “Love to”) was a sort of Gresham’s law of language and people switched to using “gender,” which didn’t have the connotation of “intercourse.”
The OED has 1963 as the first ever recorded use of gender to mean sex. So it’s a very modern change alteration of meaning.
Seems to have been initiated by feminists to distinguish between strictly biological sexual differences and the much more ambiguous social diffences between the sexes.
" b. In mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes."
Well, techically, “sex” and “gender” are two different things.
Sex: Refers to a person based on their anatomy (external genitalia, chromosomes, and internal reproductive system). Sex terms are male, female, transsexual, and intersex. (Sex is biological, although social views and experiences of sex are cultural.)
Gender: A socially constructed system of classification that ascribes qualities of masculinity and femininity to people. Gender characteristics can change over time and are different between cultures. It is one’s sense of self as masculine or feminine regardless of external genitalia.
Simply put, sex refers to bodies, and gender refers to personality characteristics.
The change in terminology may be a reflection of this. Recently, some social scientists have argued that making a distinction between sex and gender has not been particularly useful. This group recognizes that separating biological from social and cultural influences is nearly impossible, except with respect to reproduction.
maybe because too many are answering:
Sex YES
Or more generally, “to persons, beings, objects or ideas”. As in grammatical gender, such as found in Romance languages. When I was in school, it was clear to me: living creatures had sexes, words (nouns, articles and adjectives) in the Spanish language had genders (where BTW, the word género also means biological genus and literary genre). But indeed the thrust of it was to emphasize that it was an “artificial” social construct.
… and yes, it did help keep the freshmen from giggling every time the Prof talked about “inter-sex relations”…
All this talk makes me want to have gender!
They stopped asking for your sex on forms for the same reason that companies that build things stopped referring to their work as “erection” and authors stopped using the phrase “he ejaculated” to refer to their characters’ speech.
Sex: Male or Female
Gender: Masculine or Feminine
I had always heard that it was the feminists who first tried to confuse the two terms. In fact, wasn’t there some sort of international conference a few years back, where the feminist contingent threatened to walk out unless the term “sex” was replaced with “gender” in the conferences literature?
Romance languages do it that way, but in other languages, gender is whatever system they use to classify nouns. In some languages, gender refers to whether the noun is a plant or an animal, whether it’s found low on the ground or high up, things like that. So when they ask your gender, you should respond “animal!”
Or:
Sex: Frequently, please.
I think it was because too many people answered the question on job applications with a “yes”