Hacker News Reader

Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

You appear to be confusing grammar and biology. Why shy away from the word 'sex' when discussing sex?

Honestly? Because sex is a borderline bad word in polite company, and can get you into trouble if someone misses context and thinks you're talking about sex sex, while gender isn't a problematic word. The United States is so damned puritan in its culture that it's risky to use words that have a normal context that's problematic.

[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

Well here's the thing: if you're talking about socially presented traits of a person, you're talking about 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...

To support your point: I've seen products avoid using "sex" on a form in favor of "gender", when what they mean is "sex". Like, the difference was brought up in meetings, and they just didn't want to have the word "sex" appear in their program because it seemed more immediately eye-catching and distracting (and they're probably kinda right).

To be fair, until recently almost everyone considered gender to be a synonym for sex.

Now people are taking "gender identity" and shortening it to be gender and taking exception to people using the synonym as we always have.

I saw the shift to "gender" as the social side of sex way before I ever heard or read the term "gender identity". Though maybe that is what happened and "gender identity" was just very, very niche at the time (like, 25 years ago, probably) such that its descendent term "gender" outran it, so to speak. However, I got the impression that the distinction between "gender" and "sex" predated my encounter of it by decades.

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.

Yeah the shift for social psychologists probably happened 25ish years ago. Though, I'd argue up until 5 or so years ago if you asked the average person the majority would tell you gender == sex. Even today I'd guess close to half couldn't tell you the defined difference between the two.

> Even today I'd guess close to half couldn't tell you the defined difference between the two.

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.

If someone wants you to refer to them as $GENDER, then just refer to them as $GENDER. Don't treat people differently because they don't conform to the traditional gender binary. Don't treat attraction between the same sex as being fundamentally different than attraction between opposite sexes.

That's 99.9% of it, right there.

I don't even mean pronouns. I mean the stuff like elsewhere in this thread where people are stepping in it (depending on the perspective of the reader) re: whether gender identity is wholly a social construct. "Yeah, it's entirely social" is no longer the safe fallback answer for careful liberals (I write, as a careful liberal)

I think you have to accept that gender identity is a contentious issue for a lot of people, even among the liberal/feminist/LGBTQ set, so any possible position you take is probably going to offend someone.

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.

The only way for the political correctness nonsense to go away is to desensitise society to it.

Sex is not a bad word. If someone misinterprets your use of a word, that's their problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com