This also leaves open that there is room for more genders while leaving sex as a somewhat resolved issue.
>This also leaves open that there is room for more genders while leaving sex as a somewhat resolved issue.
Until relatively recently, the terms "gender" and "sex" meant essentially the same thing and could be used interchangeably. But these days, a small, but very vocal, vicious and vindictive segment of the population has decided that their definition of the word "gender" is the only one that is acceptable in public forums, so they deploy tactics ranging from public shaming to career destruction to enforce their own cultural taboos.
If someone wants to hold the unscientific (and IMO weird) view that, for example, "otherkin" is a gender, that is perfectly fine by me. I'm not going to try to stop them or convince them they're wrong. What is not fine by me is any assertion that I may no longer use the term "gender" in its traditional (and IMO correct) sense of the word.
You left off the "or we will destroy you personally and professionally" part. Those are the people whom I describe as "vocal, vicious and vindictive".
If you are polite to others and "respect the wishes of people who want to be referred to in a specific way" you will have no issues.
If you're being a dick you can be expected to be called out for being a dick, we live in a polite society, this is how these things work.
True enough. And I happen to think that people who are trying to establish that referring to men as "male" and women as "female" are violating the rules of polite society are giant, throbbing dicks. So I'm going to call them out.
I've already agreed with that. And referring to men as "male" and woman as "female" is not violating any social norms, at least not in the United States.
You also claimed that gender is some sort of scientific concept, which is also objectively incorrect.
If someone asks you to call them by "him" and you call them "her" instead, you are just being unnecessarily mean. This is not a hard concept to understand, be polite to others if you don't want to face problems in your personal life and career. Refer to people as they wish to be referred as. Asking you to do that is not "vocal, vicious and vindictive... [people] ...enforc[ing] their own cultural taboos" and quite frankly I find it disturbing you think is it.
Um, no, absolutely not, it's literally the opposite, the term "gender," was essentially introduced to be distinct from biological sex. Its entire purpose for existing is to be different from "sex."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
>Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or an intersex variation which may complicate sex assignment), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity.[1][2][3] Some cultures have specific gender roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra (chhaka) of India and Pakistan.
>Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences[4][5] and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).[3]
>If someone wants to hold the unscientific (and IMO weird) view that, for example, "otherkin" is a gender, that is perfectly fine by me.
Gender is not a scientific concept, it's a social one. Gender categories and concepts are not uniform throughout history or cultures.
Even biology isn't so clear cut, there also exists people who are intersexed to varying degrees. Is it "unscientific" to call someone who has female sexual organs but has a Y chromosome a women? Maybe, but it makes sense on a social level and if she wants to be referred to as a woman.
Of course, the aspect of cultural arbitrariness of grammatical gender (with different languages assigning a different gender to corresponding words) leads directly to the new psychological meaning of the word.