Re: OT: sex/gender

On 18 Oct 2003 at 15:03, Tim May wrote:

> Paul Bennett wrote at 2003-10-17 21:16:52 (-0400)
> >
>  > Well, the first antithetical part was that only "sex" refers to
>  > biological sex. It doesn't. Every dictionary I've consulted says
>  > that "gender" refers to biological sex as well as grammatical sex
>  > and social/mental sex. One even went so far as to say it's only
>  > recently (for suitable values of the word "recent") starting to
>  > become used for social/mental sex.
>  >
>
> As I understand the history of the term, _gender_ was commonly only
> used to refer to the grammatical category until the 19th-20th century,
> when it came to be used as a more "polite" alternative to _sex_.  The
> division of _sex_ and _gender_ into biological and
> social/psychological aspects respectively is indeed somewhat more
> recent.  The words are in this sense essentially technical terms as
> used by anthropologists and social theorists.  Obviously this
> distinction is rarely observed in ordinary discourse; however, it
> seems reasonable to employ it in a discussion where you are, in fact,
> distinguishing between these senses.
Fine. A worthy choice. However, I wasn't using either term
(originally) as contrastive to the other. My point was on the
multitude of birth sexes that occur fequently among the human
population. This degenerated into an argument over whether I used the
right word, which is so far off the topic I was trying to discuss as
to verge on the absurd.




Paul

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