Oh boy, research showing differences between biological genders. This is going to either be ignored or absolutely explode.
You can't study that these days. The orthodoxy insists that any differences in outcomes are solely due to environment, power structures, implicit and explicit biases.
Please. Take this nonsense elsewhere.
The word you're looking for is "sex." There's no such thing as a "biological gender."
Don't try to rewrite grammar to fit trends.
[For instance, someone could overhear it out of context and think you're being inappropriate. That may not amount to anything in isolation, but then they might start selectively watching for problematic things you say or do based on their initial mistaken impression, and if you look for something hard enough you're likely to find it.]
Also, I've noticed even when I use the word sex in that context, I'm immediately on guard against making any kind of sexual reference or anything that might have double meaning, and that's just exhausting. I'd rather use gender and save myself the trouble.
GP quoted the wrong definition, but the right definition is there too, also from Merriam-Webster:
2a: SEX sense 1a the feminine gender
If you're needing to use the word sex, it means you're talking about the difference in shape of a person's private parts. The word is exactly as socially acceptable as it seems to be.
If you're trying to compare a bunch of people in a room, like to say you should divide up teams by ___, you probably want gender, not sex. It's medical professionals who usually have cause to care about the sex of a person they know. Unless you're dating someone, and then it is sex sex you're talking about...
Now people are taking "gender identity" and shortening it to be gender and taking exception to people using the synonym as we always have.
Webster's 1913 does appear to regard "gender" as exclusively a grammatical quality, so far as definitions related to this topic go. So the modern usage may not be quite that old.
[EDIT] huh, whaddaya know, Garner's Modern English Usage puts the move to "gender" in places where "sex" would previously have been used (to refer to all or to any part of the whole deal, not just the biological bits) as right around when I first encountered it, at least outside an initially-narrow set of academic disciplines. Go figure. It is newer than I thought, by a long shot. I figured it dated to the 60s or so in academia, mainstream by the 80s and I just hadn't encountered anyone who cared to make the distinction until later.
I kinda halfway try to follow this stuff, and honestly, I'd have trouble defining most of the terms involved in a way that didn't step on someone's toes—and I'd be trying not to! No wonder people are put off by it.
That's 99.9% of it, right there.
So just be honest and try to be polite, that's the best you can ever do. Whether or not you claim that gender is "entirely social" should depend on what you believe, not what you think the safe answer is.
Sex is not a bad word. If someone misinterprets your use of a word, that's their problem.
Language is fluid, or we would all be speaking some variant of old German on this forum (try reading Beowulf in the original).
It's not grammar, it's semantics.
Words are social. When one person tries to rewrite the meaning of a word, unless they have significant social clout they are just going to be misunderstood. When many people rewrite the meaning of a word, they change the meaning of that word.
But using the phrase “biological gender” isn't using them in the old way: the way in which they were synonymous is in reference to a idea which conflated sex, gender identity, and socially ascribed gender. If one wants to refer to that meaning, there's really no reason to prefer one or the other, though either will be unclear to many modern audiences without additional explanation referencing the outmoded concept being invoked, because the concept being referred to has lost currency.
But if one is discussing the separated concepts, then one cannot honestly use “sex” for the sociological or psychological components or “gender” for the biological component and say it is the “old way”, as the old way doesn't recognize the there being separate components.
You just contradicted yourself. If the term 'gender' conflates several ideas, and adding the term 'biological' distinguishes them, then the previous poster hasn't changed the meaning of the word 'gender'. He's incorporated the new understanding but adapted the older language. Either way, the mere fact that nearly every person reading this understood his meaning shows that his expression was adequate to express his meaning.
It doesn't. It, when used in the old sense for which sex was equivalently used, refers to one idea which does not recognize the physical, psychological, and social elements as distinct. It does not conflate different ideas, it predates the idea of a distinction; the idea of the distinction is concurrent with the terminology which incorporates it.
“Biological gender” is neither the new common usage (which labels the biological element “sex") nor the old usage (which refers to an indivisible trait.)
Also, motherhood and fatherhood are biologically gender-linked roles. They are measurable biological phenomena that tie strongly into your definition of gender.
This is not an extremely recent development in the slightest, the distinction was being made almost 60 years ago in modern dictionaries.
> The exclusion of sex from gender is an extremely recent development that isn’t widely accepted yet.
What are you talking about? The use of gender as a sex “role” was coined in 1955, over 60 years ago. Before that “gender” referred to grammatical gender, not to people. So if you use “gender” relating to people, that form of the word has always meant the social aspects of sex, not the biological aspects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
There was never a time when “gender” meant the same thing as “sex”.
> Also, motherhood and fatherhood are biologically gender-linked roles.
You’re confusing yourself. Being a mother & father are sex based facts. Fatherhood and motherhood as words that can mean that someone is factually a mother or father, or it can in context be referring to the gender roles of motherhood and fatherhood. The stereotype of a father playing catch with a son is a gender role, not biology. You’re choosing words which have both meanings, which doesn’t help you understand what sex and gender actually mean.
1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23273798.2018.1...
That's... that's the point. I'll refer to you however you want to be referred (inb4 helicopter joke). There's nothing more to it. Just accept other people's preference and move on with your day. It's that simple.
For instance - it was once considered perfectly masculine behavior for men to wear pantyhose, high heels and makeup, and to kiss each another on the mouth. Now, those traits would likely be considered feminine (or at least, not masculine.)
Does that mean men were formerly somehow more biologically female, because they expressed what we would consider feminine traits? Obviously not. Was their gender female, then? Not in the context of their own culture, they were men being what men were considered to be.
It does mean the constructs of "masculinity" and "femininity" are not innately biological, and that the correlation between sex and gender is mostly a manifestation of cultural norms, not biological imperative.
All of the confusion in your comment seems to stem from the assumption that sex and gender are a priori the same. You may find Wikipedia's article on gender to be useful[0].
Visible light is a spectrum, yet we still use labels for distinct colors, despite "color" being arbitrary (a "social construct".) Labels can still be useful for communicating concepts and establishing a common ground, even if they're imprecise, or if different cultures don't even agree on the difference between "blue" and "green."
>Do a Ctrl+F of the linked article for "Gender" and "Sex" and then tell me that the research isn't also confused because everyone is confused all of the time, especially people who are "confused".
Everyone isn't confused all the time. People do disagree, though, and society is still working out just what gender means in the modern day.
If you believe that a persons gender identity is put onto them by the expectation of society, might as well forcibly decide which identities are valuable and supress all the rest. It would have no downside.
Second, you should probably also know that sex is also not binary even on a cellular level and is much more complicated than most laypeople understand[3].
Those things said: differences between biological sexes are not at all controversial except for maybe a few fringe-y people on Twitter or reddit. You really shouldn't assume that the loud, anonymous people on the internet represent any larger group.
The actual argument from social liberals (in the US, where I live) is that there are biological differences on average, but that does not allow you to draw conclusions about a specific person based on their sexual organs.
There is also a long history of extremely flawed gender research in the social sciences, partly because it's very easy to design and conduct a biased social experiment that no one will ever reproduce.
1. https://www.who.int/gender-equity-rights/understanding/gende...
2. https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.003...
3. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sex-gender-and-sexuality-it...
Of course there was a particularly public reproduction crisis, but the problem is endemic to academia as a whole, if perhaps in lower numbers (this remains to be seen).
Sexes are biological: chromosomes, hormones, body morphology.
Genders are social: baby boys and girls have definite sexes, but their gender identifies are not the same as of grown-up straight men and women, to say nothing of genderqueer people, etc
My hope is that the biological aspects are still in the realm of science.
Phew. A bastion of sense in this crazy w--
>Genetic women with Turner syndrome have only one X chromosome; they often display less-developed female sexual characteristics than other women. And people with a genetic mosaic possess XX chromosomes in some cells and XY in others. So how do we determine if they're male or female? Hint: Don't say that it depends on the chromosomal makeup of the majority of their cells, since women with more than 90 per cent XY genetic material have given birth. [0]
I--
>Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD. [1]
>When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health. [1]
>These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female. [1]
... ¦´C
0: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/opinion/think-gender-com...
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...