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Comment by ksaj | Hacker News Reader

In Botany for example, I've never heard reference to a plant's gender. It is always sex. Even for plants that can change sex, either on their own accord, or induced by human processes.

Even in animal husbandry, determining one from the other is called sexing and not gendering. Some fish and other aquatic animals change sex over the course of their lives - never a mention of gender.

Gender is a human social construct, albeit closely connected to sex. Loosely you could perhaps say that gender is the cultural and societal presentation of one's sex.

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Sex is biological and social.

Gender is about grammar and pronouns. It is a lot more important in other languages than English, and often has nothing to do with sex. There are languages where the genders are "alive" and "dead", or "adult" and "child or animal".

True enough. As to my botany example, you don't really hear of plants being referred to as he, she, boys, girls, men or women. Or cow/bull etc., as with humans and other animals. Just male and female.

To reiterate one of my other comments, the time of appearance and usage of the terms show how language changes over time. As of yet, I'm unaware of "homogender" and "heterogender" terms, although they can be translated directly into known/existing sexuality categories that aren't the same as heterosex and homosex.

Which languages have genders like alive/dead or adult/child-or-animal? Can you share other interesting genders?

I can't answer specifically, but let me direct you to hours of fascinating exploration:

https://m.youtube.com/c/JuLingo/videos

The word “gender” comes from a Latin root involving “birth” and shows up in English in such verbs as “engender” which literally means “to beget offspring” (and idiomatically means “to cause”).

If you were person speaking English before about 2000 or so, maybe a bit later, and you were neither a gender studies researcher or in touch with that discipline directly, the words would literally both mean the same thing and basically it’d be a question of which the scientific field in question used more.

But gender never means sexual union.. hense the misreading

Agreed. Nobody would confuse sex play with gender play. Both terms exist, and are well understood.

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