Unit 73
What Happened to the Word "Sex"?
What ever happened to sex? I had to fill out a government form the other day and it ask for my gender, giving town boxes to check, male or female.
It wasn't too many years ago that it would have asked for my sex, male of female.
When did the term "gender" replace "sex" to describe the difference between males and females? And why? The term "gender" has become ubiquitous.
My old college dictionary says that sex is a difference among living beings, as in the male and female sex, while gender is a difference in some languages partially corresponding to the natural order, in which the names of objects are either of masculine, feminine, or neuter gender.
The most recent American Heritage Dictionary advises that, while gender has traditionally been used to refer to grammatical categories, the word has been used in recent years to refer to sexual identity or sex-based social or cultural categories.
According to Stoller, an early pioneer in gender identity research, "sex" is defined as the sum of physiological differences between male and female. In contrast, "gender" is viewed as a strictly psychological phenomenon and refers to the sum of behavioral or psychological differences between the sexes.
So there is an important difference between sex and gender. The sex of a person is biologically determined. The gender of a person is culturally and socially determined.
The past two decades have produced a wide body of academic literature on gender, along with corresponding university and college departments, centers and courses focusing on the issues of gender identity and gender studies. Textbooks for such courses all agree that gender refers to the roles attached to biological sex; femininity and masculinity in this view are mere social concepts.
As one correspondent puts it, "Sex refers to a biological statement of fact. Gender is the way one is socialized according to some standard of behavior associated with a role."
"Only women can bear children, but not only women can be mothers."
It is now clear that when the government asked for my gender, there was something more involved than wanting to know my biological sex.
There are only two sexes, but at least six if not eight genders: male, female, lesbian, homosexual or gay, bisexual of both sexes and transgendered of both sexes.
The simple change from "sex" to "gender" on a form hints a change in how we are coming to view our society and how it is being restructured. |