I’ve written sentences like this many times: “While biological sex is a binary, gender in humans forms more of a spectrum.” But I was never really sure what “gender” meant. I know that it’s generally synonymous with “sex”, but that is clearly not what I meant when I spoke as I did above. What did I mean? Some time ago, I read philosopher Alex Byrne’s book Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions, which parses the term at hand. Alex concluded that “gender” is a confusing term that shouldn’t be used. In fact, when I read his book I agreed with him. But somehow I continued to use the word “gender”, perhaps to show that I don’t impugn, erase, or dismiss people who don’t adhere strictly to the behaviors and appearances associated with the two types of people in the sex binary.
So I called Alex yesterday to get some more clarity on the term, and now I think I see what the problem is. He sent me an article from Fairer Disputations that gives about as succinct an account of the problems as I’ve seen. Click below to read it:
Gender is of course used as an indicator of what type of noun you’re using (“le/la” in French, “der, das, and die” in German), and it’s also been used for decades as a synonym for sex. But that’s not what people mean today when they refer to “gender”, as I did in my first sentence above. Sometimes it’s used only with respect to human sex: “a woman” is a gender in humans, as is “a man.” But that makes it synonymous with sex save that the two terms refer to adult versions of biological sex. A “woman”, for instance is an adult human female. You can then use “girl” and “boy” for the juvenile versions.
What do activists or “progressives” mean? It’s not clear! In the end, Alex’s article makes a persuasive case that instead of using “gender—which can mean other things like where one sits on the internal “sex feeling” spectrum, or the degree of masculinity or femininity expressed in a performed sex role—and so on, one should simply use simple English to express your meaning. For example, when I was younger people used the word “tomboy” to refer to a girl who showed masculine behaviors or appearances. Isn’t it simpler to just explain what you mean by “tomboy”, then, instead of classifying it as a gender, saying Ia girl who shows many masculine traits/behaviors. If we are referring to people who feel they are of both sexes, you can say the person is “androgynous”. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how Alex starts his piece:
It is sometimes said that “gender” had an exclusively grammatical sense before the 1950s, as in “The gender of ‘chaise’ in French is feminine.” Henry Fowler, the English philologist and author of the quirky 1926 style guide A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, sternly pronounced that the word “is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine g., meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.”
But the (non-jocular) use of “gender” to mean sex—male and female—goes back centuries, with the Oxford English Dictionary recording an example from 1474 (“His heyres [heirs] of the masculine gender…”). These days there is an embarrassment of riches: “gender” is used to mean social roles and norms attaching to the two sexes, or masculinity and femininity, or an internal sense of being male/female/neither, and more. Many words have multiple meanings, which usually doesn’t produce incomprehension, but “gender” is a kind of lexical brainworm, a parasite eating away at understanding. As Abigail Favale puts it in a recent essay, it’s “a word with no stable definition that is nonetheless endlessly deployed, shifting meanings to suit a particular agenda.” This “linguistic bedlam” prompts her to ask whether we should “abandon the word” or “attempt to redeem” it.
Here’s the crux of the problem: the two most common uses of “gender” by gender activists or confused people like me:
Other proposals for what the word should mean face a similar question. For instance, the UCLA psychiatrist Robert Stoller defined “gender” his 1968 book Sex and Gender as masculinity and femininity (more exactly, albeit rather obscurely, as “the amount of masculinity and femininity found in a person”). Masculinity and femininity are interesting subjects, but there is no obvious reason why we need a special word to talk about them. The words “masculinity” and “femininity” will do quite nicely.
To take another example, “gender” is sometimes understood to refer to sex-typed social roles, “the social roles expected for males and females within a given culture,” which we do not want to ignore. But again, alternative terminology is ready to hand: “sex roles” is a decent compact label, and “gender roles” is even better, with “gender” understood to mean sex. Abbreviating “sex roles” or “gender roles” with the single word “gender” only makes the intended meaning less clear. [Note that here Alex does countenance the use of “gender”, though I’d use “sex roles” as you don’t then have to define what a “gender role” is.]
As to women, men, girls, and boys, there is no need to introduce any new vocabulary, because we already have the appropriate words. If we want to talk about women, men, girls and boys collectively, we can use “people” or “humans.” If we want to talk about women and girls, a single word will do the trick, namely “female.” That is because “female” has a restricted sense in which it applies to “a person of the sex that can bear offspring,” to quote the OED. (That is actually the first entry for the noun “female” in that dictionary; the broader sense in which the word applies to Lola is the second entry.)
More importantly, we must contend with the sense of “gender” on which it is a synonym of “sex.” As the moon pulls the sea to the shore, “the latter-day upheaval in sexual mores” pulls “gender” towards sex, male and female. Resistance is as useless as King Canute’s attempt to stop the incoming tide. Favale’s proposal inevitably introduces an unwelcome ambiguity where there was none before. In one sense, Taylor Swift’s gender is female. In Favale’s sense, Swift’s gender is either woman (the four-gender version), or else woman-or-girl (the two-gender version).
Byrne thus recommends that we deep-six the use of the word except insofar as it’s synonymous with sex, but it’s too late for that. As Alex says, “the high priests of genderology will not see the light.”
The pushback to Trump’s new EO (and the HHS definition of sex) specifying that biological sex be put on all government documents comes in two forms. One could specify the present and confusing notion of gender, but there are hundreds of specified “genders” and it’s impractical to do that, as well as confusing for anyone using the documents. The other suggestion is to put your “felt” sex on the documents rather than your biological sex. That’s entirely possible given that in many states you can go back and change your “sex” on your birth certificate to correspond with what sex you feel yourself to be Thus a trans-identified male could change the birth “sex” to “woman”.
To me that seems a bit of a lie, because, to me (and of course this will get me in trouble), a transwoman is not the same thing as a biological woman, and ditto for a transman and a biological man. It’s also damaging for women in sports, as the NCAA now says that what it says on your birth certificate tells you whether you can compete in men’s or in women’s sports. In other non-official documents, of course, anything goes. But the government, and the states, should not be participating in what is effectively lying when they countenance using “felt sex” to fill in the blank for “sex.” For none of this is intended to damage or “erase” people, though of course some may have hurt feelings. But of course women who are beaten in athletics by a biological male also have hurt feelings.
Finally, those benighted people who advance a multifactorial, multidimensional definition of “sex” (hormones, chromosomes, genitals, etc.), under which they don’t ever specify a way to determines one’s biological sex, must surely agree that there are more than two specification for “felt sex”! What do you do then?
Readers can (and will) dissent of course, but that’s what the comments are for. Oh, and I just realized that I’ve violated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which says, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
I agree with Alex Byrne. I use gender as the collective noun for sex, nothing more. There’s as much evidence for gender identity as there is for a soul, and I don’t believe in a soul.
Further, I find the enforcement of transactivist cult-speak repulsive. It’s an obvious attempt to remove our ability to speak and think clearly, reasonably, and critically. Has nobody read Orwell?
Orwell’s thoughts on Newspeak and totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Helen Joyce on enforced language and “hate speech” https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2024/a-sound-of-rowling-thunder/
Thanks David. Both good reads. I did not know the origins of Orwell’s Newspeak, so this was particularly enlightening.
This is why I love this blog – I learn a ton from our host, and I also learn from the various commenters as well. Thanks to all!
“There’s as much evidence for gender identity as there is for a soul, and I don’t believe in a soul.”
You might say the same about “personality.” We have a variety of measures of personality traits without any evidence that there is a “personality” that generates them. We have a variety of measures of gender traits as well, and there is some reluctance to abandon psychological phenomena of various types.
In the end, I was reminded by your comment of the old joke about the two fish, with the punchline “what’s water?”
Hmm. Thx for offering personality for consideration. Nice try, but it fails at the first hurdle. There is foundational research (Allport and Allport 1921) that offers strong evidence for the existence of personality and the ability to measure it. Nothing like this exists for gender identity. Further, Allport’s foundational findings have been vigorously challenged, as they should be, and found to be robust. Personality theory, including Allport’s foundational work, has also been elaborated upon over the past century, utilized across numerous disciplines, and evidence for it has strengthened. Additionally, strength is given to a theory when it has predictive value, which can certainly be seen with personality theory (Soto 2019).
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1926-05605-001
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30950321/
So as it stands, I still see no evidence that gender identity exists. No study to disprove the null hypothesis. Until that time, a liberal and skeptic should withhold belief.
Big differences, IMO. Alleged “gender identity” is a very recent phenomenon (i.e., within a fraction of my lifetime); “personality” goes back at least as far as the late 1300’s [https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=personality]. If you ask almost anyone today to describe someone’s personality, they won’t boggle.
There is also a fair bit of non-looney theory regarding personality traits (‘tho I do consider Jung’s work as looney-adjacent). Issues around how non-personal bio-mechanisms can generate personhood are also addressed; my personal (🙂) recommendation is Minsky’s Society of Mind.
When I was a pup, I was taught that the word gender was to be used exclusively in discussions of grammar. If you used it as a euphemism for sex, that was like sticking your pinkie out when you sipped your tea. People who were comfortable with their social class wouldn’t do it; pretentious insecure people did. I am not endorsing what I was told, merely recounting it.
Sadly, it’s too late to eliminate the term. It will have to die a natural death over time, if ever. When President Trump meant in his address last night that the government will now recognize only two sexes, he misspoke and said “two genders.” Since one of the uses of the term is as a polite synonym for sex, we’re stuck with it and all the confusion that the word entails. A great deal of that confusion is purposeful, unfortunately.
“Gender” is the spark – the gnosis, “performativity” is the fuel – for the gnostic engine of social transformation :
gender performativity^* :
Judith Butler
Gender Trouble – Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Routledge 1990
Bodies That Matter – On the Discursive Limits of Sex
Routledge 1995
A centuries-old gnostic preoccupation – it will never disappear :
Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought – Behmenism and its Development in England
B. J. Gibbons
Cambridge U. Press
1996
Also to go with the reference to Stoller, see:
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl –
Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity
John Money
Anke A. Ehrhardt
1976, 1993
Jason Aronson Inc.
Northvale, New Jersey
London
Come to think of it, I don’t recall Stoller or Money analysing this word at all. nothing to do with audio/video or power cables – which are either “male” or “female” anyhow. But saying “sex” out loud is embarrassing, so saying “gender” serves as a euphemism.
*Footnote:
Drag is Life, Life is Drag encapsulates Butler’s idea – but she never wrote that – it’s not a quote of hers.
[ returns after reading in entirety ]:
Byrne : ” “gender” is a kind of lexical brainworm, a parasite eating away at understanding.”
Saving that one in my quote archive!
Judith Butler engenders great controversy.
These days, I only use gender as a grammatical term. I don’t make a big deal about it. I just say sex.
Sometimes other cultures can help – particularly with human universals. In the only three foreign languages I’m competent in, Japanese, Russian and Arabic in order of competence – there is no word for “gender” at all. Just “sex”.
One can say in all of them that a man is “feminine” etc., has female traits, but the new anglophone world ideas haven’t sunk in to these cultures. Lucky for them.
D.A.
NYC
Off topic, but impressive suite of foreign tongues, David. Those seem (TMA) particularly difficult languages for native English speakers to master all together.
That’s good to know.
I was going to say that “gender” sounds like a late addition from a Latin source. But it turns out that “sex” is also Latin.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/sex#23308
In German there is only one word for sex and gender – Geschlecht. If I want to differentiate, I need to use.an adjective or use a rather cumbersome compound noun in “Geschlechtsidentität”.
Given that the feminist left has succeeded in making gender the more prevalent meaning of Geschlecht, I envy the English language for having two words.
I used to think I knew exactly what gender means: “the social roles expected for males and females within a given culture”. Except when it referred to nouns when I studied a Romance language. Then people used it as a way to say “sex” without saying sex. In the last 10 years it has been so misused/ overused in so many permutations it has come to mean anything at all. Some writers use sex and gender in the same discussion to imply they are synomyns in one paragraph, but have unique meanings in the next paragraph. Once you have to define a word each time it is used in order to communicate with clarity, the word is no longer useful.
“the social roles expected for males and females within a given culture”
That’s what I thought it meant. That definition seemed to have utility…as the expectations for male and female do actually vary among cultures…so we needed another word for that reality.
Me too. But I find the very idea of gender roles and other “social constructs” to be fascinating.
NO, the term gender has scientific uses, well established in reproductive biology, at least outside humans.
Sperm and eggs define the 2 sexes, for very good reasons. But just how sperm and egg production gets divided up among individuals is another problem entirely. Biologists, particularly plant biologists, have long called the many variations of that feature functional GENDER. And they even have measures of relative gender, aka maleness and femaleness, all with respect to reproductive allocation to male versus function.
Here is a recent overview, free to read, by a leading plant biologist:
https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_7C4C98D60311.P001/REF
And plants are often quite plastic in their sex expression, aka gender, and the plasticity is related to the competitive environment for reproduction, consisting of other individuals of the same species.
Plant biologists are not at all confused on what they mean by gender.
Thank you for that. I would never have known.
Perhaps goes out of his way to get rid of the term. Yes we have “masculinity” and “femininity” but what word refers to the dimension with masculine at one end and feminine at the other? I guess author would suggest “sex roles” perhaps? As well, although gender might have been used for sex historically, gender was certainly rarely used in English in the past, until it started to be used for the “sex roles” sense around 1980 or so. Enter “sex” and “gender” in google’s ngram viewer to see the striking pattern. Perhaps this will work?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sex%2C+gender&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
The apparent jump in 1980 (closer to 1978) is a delayed effect of Sandra Bem’s publications on measurement of masculinity/femininity (androgyny). The main publication coming in 1976.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Bem
The high similarity between the two meanings canvassed for “gender” is an indication that the word does have a pretty clear meaning, when applied to people and not just to linguistic forms. To wit, degree of masculinity or femininity, or better, a person’s presentation vis-a-vis sex roles.
Adding an extra word to get “gender roles” doesn’t seem like an improvement.
Is there some vagueness? Sure, but that’s normal for language, outside of math and science.
Section 9.1 of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act (GRA, 2004) reads:
Clear as mud! The “becomes for all purposes” is entirely untrue as the Act goes on to set out exceptions where it doesn’t. Notably, the eldest son of an aristocratic family still inherits the title and estate even if he legally changes sex/gender and his older sister can’t identify as a man to become the oldest “son” and inherit them in his place – it ALWAYS works to the advantage of men, however they “identify”! Another exception is carved out for religious bodies, so that a woman can’t change sex/gender to become a Catholic priest, say. Heaven forbid!
The whole thing is such a mess that our Supreme Court is currently deliberating over whether the GRA means that a man with a GRC is female for the purposes of the Equality Act (2010). If he is, there go the rights of women throughout the UK in a similar manner to those of Australian women following the shocking judgement in the (not at all funny) case of Tickle v Giggle.
Edited to add: Time to get rid of all the gender bollocks (pun intended) – and the stupid sex stereotypes while we’re at it!
“it ALWAYS works to the advantage of men”…
Funny how the modern feminists at colleges today seem to be strongly on the side of male dominance (or at best remain silent) when it comes to issues like this, mandatory hijab wearing, execution / stoning of women in Islamic countries, FGM, Che Guevara and other “revolutionaries”, men in women’s sports / spas / waxing salons / bathrooms / and prisons, the rape / murder / burning alive / kidnapping of Israeli women, etc. Not to mention supporting (alongside BLM) George Floyd, Duante Wright, and Jacob Blake, all of whom had been arrested for crimes of violence against women (would they march in favor of Trump?).
If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, this looks like what might happen if a couple of CIA operatives were sitting at the bar one night placed a bet on who could use psyops the best, and one of the guys said, “I bet I can turn a whole generation of feminists into supporting the most domineering and evil men in existence”, and then did precisely that.
Indeed, Darryl. I’m not sure if your CIA scenario is funny or worrying!
Interesting! As you say the law lets you change what it calls sex but does NOT let females horn in on male privileges under any circumstances.
But a man can compete as a woman in sports!
Yup! And for some strange reason, women who claim to be men nevertheless compete in the female sports categories.
At Hampstead Heath there are three open air pools: one for men, one for women, and one that is mixed-sex. Men have the choice of all three, should they wish to identify themselves into the women’s pool. That leaves women who don’t want to share with males – or can’t for reasons of religion or sexual abuse trauma – with a choice of precisely zero. It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World. Although the “Man Friday” protesters did their best: https://archive.is/hYkOm
Wow! Thanks for the link.
“What do activists or “progressives” mean? It’s not clear!” – J. Coyne
“The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.”
(Mikkola, Mari. “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/)
“Debates in feminism and trans politics are often framed in terms of a background assumption that “gender” names some particular thing and that the important questions and disagreements are concerned with what it truly is, where it comes from, or whether it is good or bad. In this book, we’ll argue that questions posed in these terms are usually confused. “Gender” doesn’t pick out any one thing; it equivocates among many.”
(Briggs, R. A., & B. R. George. What Even Is Gender? New York: Routledge, 2023. p. 5)
“We might as well get the awkward part out of the way: despite the title What Even Is Gender?, we’re not going to tell you what “gender” is because this is a book built around the idea that “what is gender?” is the wrong question.
…
On a more abstract philosophical level, our central thesis is that “What is gender?” is the wrong question because there is no one thing that answers to the name “gender” (or, for that matter, to the name “gender identity”). One major purpose of this book will be to identify some of the different things that “gender” talk is often gesturing at, to suggest an approach to distinguishing among them, and to show how conflating them under a single heading does real harm.
…
This is a book about “gender” and some of its problems, written by two of its problems (more specifically, two nonbinary trans people). It is, in an important sense, written for our past selves. It is a product of years of deeply felt confusion and frustration, produced by our experience of trying (and often failing) to make sense of “gender” discourse and to find ourselves within its stories and conceptual frameworks.”
(Briggs, R. A., & B. R. George. What Even Is Gender? New York: Routledge, 2023. pp. 1-2)
¡Que sorpresa! Two “nonbinary trans people” write a book called What Even Is Gender? that doesn’t answer the question.
Ha!
Shoot. I did it again. You know who it is…Miss Fat fingers!
There is a review of “What Even Is Gender?” by Holly Lawford-Smith available only to subscribers to Medium. I am not a subscriber but could make out that the book describes Alex Byrne and Kathleen Stock as transphobic authors, which doesn’t increase confidence in the book.
I too have been called transphobic for saying that there are two biological sexes. Lawford-Smith has been called transphobic, too.
Sorry, but I don’t buy your argument that because something is called “transphobic,” you shouldn’t read it. Did you read Byrne’s book? I did. If you didn’t, then you shouldn’t post aspersions about it here; this is guilt by association.
Sorry not to have been clearer. I greatly admire both Byrne’s and Stock’s books. Neither is transphobic. That those books were called transphobic in “What Then Is Gender?” indicates the weakness of the Briggs/George book.
I’m as “gender-critical” as Stock, Lawford-Smith, and Byrne, but I think Briggs’ & George’s book is worth reading. I just noticed that it’s an open-access title that is freely available at the publisher’s website, so see for yourself: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003053330/even-gender-briggs-george
(See page 28, where Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, Alex Byrne, and Kathleen Stock are mentioned and apparently counted among the “transphobic authors”.)
Lawford-Smith’s review can be read without subscription here: https://quillette.com/2023/06/26/what-even-is-transfeminism/
In my view, gender as a word tries to describe different clusters of behaviors that are associated to sex: each gender corresponds to a different fuzzy cluster of behaviors and presentations. So it’s a matter of clustering, which basically tries to solve a classification problem: people who belong to cluster X have those and those properties or tend to have those properties. In reality, we solve classifications problems every day, as we classify people in groups and use the prior knowledge we have about the group to manoeuvre ourselves in each social interaction. Of course, this particular classification is a bit different, as it interferes with our sex classifier(s), some of which are built-in, in various ways, including the linguistic one.
The very first step of the problem arises when activists use words that are “already taken”, such as man and woman, overriding their meaning, and from there all hell breaks loose.
My thoughts are similar, but I would go a bit beyond behaviors. Given that there are two sexes, male and female, my perspective is that gender entails the phenotypic, psychological and behavioral characteristics that generally define male and female. I consider Caitlyn Jenner’s sex to remain male but gender is female. Works for me, but I’m old 🙂
So are you saying that there are only two genders, male and female? What if the phenotype is partly male in a biologically female species and the behavior is intermediate. What gender would you call such a person? Surely you see that your definition of gender allows for a gazillion variants.
Yes, I think that gender is a spectrum.
Dr. Coyne, if you haven’t seen this, you might get a kick out of it. According to MedicineNet, there are 74 genders. I hope it doesn’t make me a bad human being that reading these descriptions had me howling with laughter:
https://www.medicinenet.com/what_are_the_72_other_genders/article.htm#all_72_genders_list
KenS, that is hilarious! I definitely will use some of these 😄
Like any language policing, saying that we should eliminate the term “gender” is just asking to be ignored (other than for sparking interesting discussion). People will use it for whatever they want it to mean, and no one but no one can can stop it. The problem with the term is that it means different things to different people. But also that is the utility of this much abused term, because it can mean whatever you want it to mean and remarkably, others will understand its intended meaning by context.
The term “tomboy”, though… hasn’t that pretty much fallen out of use?
Re “tomboy”, it used to be a common and rather cute term for a boyish girl, and was not generally a slur. I am not aware that there were any such non-slur terms for a girlish boy; all such terms were linked with homosexuality, which commonly was considered Bad (e.g., to pick one of the less offensive, “nancy boy”). Even today, “effeminate” is often used as a slur. And don’t forget Arnie’s “girlymen”.
I don’t know if it ever was Arnold, but I think it came from Hanz and Franz on SNL.
I took the question to mean “Should we drop it on this forum?”
Obviously we can’t control what the wider world does.
Umm. . . no, I disagree that everyone agrees with what it means when it is used. Byrne is trying to make the point that you EXPLAIN what it means because, as you yourself admitted, it means what you want it to mean. It is remarkable that everyone will immediately understand what you mean given that Byrne shows that people like Judith Butler can be confusing on that issue.
Much of the confusion between the terms sex and gender arise from a category error. Sex is an empirical term while gender is an ontological one. Using the latter as a synonym for the former has completely erased this distinction.
It reminds me that words do not have meanings. People do.
I would say that sex refers to physiology and gender refers to psychology. The two are highly correlated but not synonymous. It is the incongruence of sex and gender that underlies the phenomenon we call “transexual.” If they were not distinct things, there would be no trans people. Even if you argue that transexuals are suffering from psychosis, it is still mismatch of physiology (biological sex) and psychology (felt or expressed “gender”).
You make a clear and dispassionate distinction. That’s great.
According Statistics Canada, in the 2021 census, birth sex aligned with gender in 99.66% of Canadians, whilst 0.14% were non-binary and 0.19% were transgender.
I suggest 99.66% constitutes the norm (even congenital heart anomalies are commoner than than the two small groups above, at around 1%), and while we must recognise and have sympathy for the very few where sex and gender are not in agreement, we can describe them as abnormal, just as someone with Fallot’s tetralogy is abnormal. It would be perverse to introduce new language to make 0.33% of the population feel included.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2022049-eng.htm
The word gender has been utterly brutalized by post-modern “gender theorists.” That, and the obnoxious use of the word as a synonym for sex. I use to complain to collogues who would create questionnaires with the item:
Gender: [] Male [] Female
I would ask them if they knew what the words meant, because they ask about gender but the options offered are sex. Of course they’d rather confuse people with a non-sense question than risk offence by asking about sex.
However, the term gender once had a meaningful use in social psychology. It referred to a dimension of gender ranging from extreme masculinity to extreme femininity. Sandra Bem (wife of the infamous proponent of parapsychology, Daryl Bem) published a self-report questionnaire to measures a person’s perception of their masculinity/femininity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Bem
I think it is a useful construct, and the only defensible use of the word in research. Unfortunately, gender is now viewed as an “identity” and the meaning as been thoroughly politicized by social justice ideologues.
I never use the word gender. These days the word seems to mean anything and everything and therefore nothing at all.
Word inflation has a way of destroying the meaning of perfectly good words. The word genocide has, or at least had, a clear meaning reserved for the rare event that one people tried to exterminate another. It does not include what Israel is doing in Gaza or even what China is doing to Uighurs. Violence has, or at least had, a clear meaning which does not include misgendering a trans person. Racism used to have a clear meaning which did not include real or imagined microaggressions.
And “trans person” used to have a clear meaning. Now, according to some authoritative sources it means any sort of sexual nonconformity — transexual, transvestite, “queer”, etc. Useless, IMO.
Sex is binary. The gender war is puff.
One more thought if I may:
Consider the symmetry of “handedness” :
Either left- or right- handed objects … perhaps readers can think of some … there can be two possibilities. Some molecules are like this – protein alpha helices,… etc. .. actual hands are,… etc.
The accurate word to use is chirality – the relationship between left-handed and right-handed objects.
I think gender is serving a similar purpose. It seems like a mirror symmetry, but male-female, or +/- etc. is definitely not.
But the analogy is strong being pairwise. So it “sticks” in language.
I mean :
handedness : gender
chirality : sex
Many of us ditched the word years ago; others refused to ever adopt it at all. It can be done. The word will eventually go the way of “base and superstructure,” any number of Freudian terms, and the once-far-more-common invocations of religious language among the elite. The biggest impediment will be those elite. Many embraced the word without critical reflection. Worse, many insisted that others do so or risk career and social penalties. Others continue to use it in confused, unnecessary, or trivial ways. It is not uncommon to think one understands something simply because one hears it often repeated, especially when one is doing the repeating. These are all difficult hurdles for proud and intelligent people to overcome. But overcome them they will. The more who drop the term altogether, then the more those who cling to it will stand outside of the circle. And there is nothing, literally nothing, that many people in various elite circles fear more than being involuntarily outside the “in” circle. It is some combination of that fear and empathy that got us into this “gender” mess. For the sake of our children, maybe we can find our way out.
Deepest respect to our host for thinking out loud on this subject and entertaining a change of mind.
Hi Jerry,
I’m the guy who posted on your blog comments a week or two earlier saying that you “shoot yourself in the foot a bit” by giving credence to ‘gender’, which is a completely incoherent term.
I apologise if I offended you by saying that, but looks like you now agree with me with respect to gender.
This is a very positive development – courtesy Alex Bryne 🙂
I’m also strongly in disfavour of putting ‘gender’ on legal documents.
Even if you think that it means “what sex you feel that you are” – which not everyone does – it is completely unverifiable and non-empirical.
Legal documents should record facts about an individual, not unverifiable beliefs.
I’m of the age where I get mailings for Supplemental Life Insurance. In one male Non-Nicotine Users would have to pay $96 – $1018 more monthly than female Non-Nicotine Users in all payout categories. Why hasn’t some female-identifying-man tried challenging this, declaring himself female for cheaper rates? Why hasn’t some trans activist challenged this to be stunning and brave?
I realize that assigning guilt may not help much, but maybe we could avoid future abuses of language by reviewing the history of this one. The epidemic misuse of the word “gender” leaked out of the lab of academe—specifically from units that began to be called “Gender Studies”. They had typically started as “Women’s Studies”, and began changing their names in the early 2000s, with the approval of academic committees. If the ivory tower had authorized departments of “Astrology Studies”, today we would be brooding over the proper usage of terms like “aspect”, “house”, and “conjunction”. It would be helpful if Academe exercised more care about things which it elevates by the award of academic credentials.
+1
And, if they don’t feel a duty of care for public truth, why expect them to care for public language?
I’ve seen that “leaked out of the lab of academia” metaphor and I think it can be vastly improved by comparison to a zoonotic spillover — see, even, how you describe it, bubbling along for years, recombining, adapting, finding various hosts along the way. I can accept a metaphor of the trans/wole-mind or virus (see also: meme) but then I insist that that virology be done right.
(A full explication of the metaphor would demand a longer essay, but it could be good.The ‘lab leak’ notion for SARS-CoV-2T is shaky, chancy idea that has great political legs but no evidence. The biological argument and evidence overwhelmingly favors a zoonotic spillover via the wildlife trade from southern China into the Wuhan market and thence to the human population. I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for a long time. Most human viruses have zoonotic origins. None are lab leaks, despite widely circulating conspiracy theory.)
Situation Normal, I like the zoonotic spillover metaphor, but I think there is one defect. Let’s see. The meme of the language misuse in question is a virus carried by disciples of Judith Butler, analogous to bats from southern China; and it jumped to human hosts around grievance studies departments, which are analogous to the Wuhan market. Seem to fit, except that the Wuhan market is always described as a live market; the adjective “live” doesn’t seem quite right for the verbiage that normally emanates from grievance studies.
Again, my thanks. This site put me onto the sex/gender issues as a serious political/social problem and I’ve learned a lot. This has been helpful to my thinking. Alex Byrne is on my to-read list. Cool that you can just call him up. (OK, OK, I was thinking about other stuff the past few years, mostly viruses and some local concerns and was a bit removed from some of the campus for-de-rol)
Last one tonight, late to the party. Surely on this blog there has been this reference at some point: Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
Here is how trans activist Julia Serano defined the word “gender” in his book, Whipping Girl:
Aren’t you glad Serano cleared that up for us?
The above demonstrates how useful the word is to trans activists. Equivocation is one of their favorite fallacies. (Phallusies?)
King Canute isn’t a valid comparison. He didn’t try to stop the incoming tide. Quite the opposite. He wanted to prove to his people that he could NOT stop the incoming tide. He knew he couldn’t. He just needed to convince others of that fact.
Every trans identified man knows he’s male and needs prostate checks, not cervical smears, but many still try to ‘prove’ to others that they are women. We need a relentless tide of women to continue telling these men that they cannot be part of us.
The only exception to the above is India Willoughby. But I suspect he may be clinically insane. He insists he is a biological woman and has a cervix, and even offered to show it on national television. But, as he hasn’t actually done that, he probably does know he’s a man.
Yes, we should stop using the word gender. Being male or female naturally includes a cultural dimension, so having a separate term to describe the cultural aspect of sex is misleading. It wrongly suggests that culture and biology are entirely separate, when in fact they are inherently connected.