The question is: When are they genders and when sexes? The answer seems to keep changing: at least my idea of what the preferred usage is has passed through several stages over time. If I attempt to review my own successive understandings, I come up with something like the following:
- At the beginning, as far as I knew, they were called sexes. When I first became aware of the use of gender in this sense, the explanation I heard was that it was begun by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and that she did it to avoid the word sex because it made her uncomfortable [1]. Anyway, I haven’t heard any more about her role in this, so maybe this explanation had no basis in fact.
- Subsequently this use of gender seemed to grow, and at some point I got the understanding that it was being actively promoted by advocates of the idea that the differences in human male and female behavior are in large part due to socialization. The explanation I got was that to emphasize their point, they advocated using sex for the biological distinction and gender for the culturally-assigned roles and to behavioral differences between those males and females socialized into them.
- From some later point, it seemed that some kind of discomfort had become attached to the word sex so that people felt easier avoiding the word entirely and just saying gender for all (at least human) instances of the male-female distinction. At any rate, one now regularly hears talk of the gender even in the earliest stages of pregnancy.
- But maybe some distinction is still being promoted here. Might this, for example, be intended to make some point about the extent of influence from the external environment on the intra-uterine development of the fetus? Or is it simply that gender just gathered a momentum that has carried it beyond its goal?
- What then is to be the fate of the pariah word, sex? It does seem to have re-emerged as the way to refer to the act of sexual intercourse so that people who copulate are now said to have sex. (Does the expression have sex fill some previous semantic gap? That explanation hardly sounds convincing since English-speakers had previously seemed to experience little difficulty in finding ways to refer to the act.)
- But should the replacement of sex by gender in reference to male and female be regarded as now complete? There are still some loose ends as far as my understanding is concerned. First, I don’t know the rule for other species. Is the distinction between bulls and cows one of gender, or are they still sexes as of now? Is the answer the same for peafowl? Bees? Black widow spiders? Papaya trees?
- And there’s the word sexist? One would expect it have been replaced by genderist. In fact, one might expect that someone who was sexist would be someone who likes having sex. (But that condition appears to be so common that one might have felt that it was its absence that was more in need of a name).
Any clarification would be welcome.
Note: [1.] Ginsburg would have been exploiting the facts (1) that the noun classes of certain languages, such as the Indo-European, have traditionally been called genders (from the Latin root genus meaning kind), and (2) that the individual two or three classes have traditionally been named after the sexes (or absence of sexual status in the case of neuter). Thus the word gender has become associated in people’s minds with sexual distinctions."
Clarification
One does sex; one has (or is) gender. A 'celibate' might superficially or categorically reject both, that is, with or without psychic or other mutilation, and since everybody doesn't always do it or even want to, but given the occasional need for seclusion or breathing room, everyone needs a social relation to avoid psychic or other mutilation. One neither has nor does gravity; it is experienced, and not in isolation from another body or according to a vote – two corollaries of authority. Disregarding consensus altogether (since that only invites questions of normality and opposition best left to political statisticians), could it be that sex has merely transformed into an adverb (occasionally an adjective) and gender a noun, and that the confusion is largely over an inability to distinguish between structure and function – really meaning that in constrained systems, it's always safer to appear like it than to do it?.
It may be that the argument over superiority between verbs and nouns (or doing it and being it) is only a feint to avoid the heavier topics of gravitation and the magnetic propulsion which keeps poles apart, and that to posit poles, one must presume a ponderous middle before it can be either excuded (a mere squeeze) or excluded (a disfiguring amblyopia like a poke in the eye). Or is it the difference between a nexus and omphalos or a fishing line and lake or consuming fish and consumating them or beaching an archepalego from a cove or a disagreeable taste for festivity as opposed to the serious work of maintaining an appearance? Because structure and function only create a pragmatic but opaque bubble enclosing one from the rest of the world not deemed useful, interesting or secure like an adventurous sperm seeking to nest but swallowed and digested by an hungry egg. It is said the opposite of consent is either refusal or an accident, and how often is that just a reference to one's dialect, or in musical notation, a note whose pitch does not correspond to the key signatory but not necessarily an unwanted intrusion by the party of the first part or the second?
If gender is merely a mistranslation of Latin genus (or 'kinder') being a literal interpretation of an indended metaphor, which might include or express any grammatical classification, then perhaps Hamlet's big dilemma would have been over whether or not to do it or at least make an effort. Well, that really was his problem, wasn't it? To stop being would have been a cop out – end of problem. It is, after all, a cop's job to keep others from doing it, a soldier or hangman's job to stop them from being. Still feel repressed? Get thee to a nunnery – let's not forget the importance of an adequate division of labour! Do we not tell the sheltered egghead to act more spermishly? Or just less squeamish about a little dirt under the nail? To promote receptivity or assertiveness, do we advise seeking a surgeon? Why then get so hung up when it's all just a matter of language games over the simultaneous but indeterminate in and out or up and down of it all?
It is the lack of mutual spontaneity which produces uncertainty, hesitation and compels respect on the part of the investigator or probe into any experimental or exploratory situation, regardless of appearance. With unsupervised youngsters at play, the problem rarely comes up. So in a reverse-flit back to the question of consensual linguistics, this "respect" is typically what is meant by "kindness", a thing much confused with genius because of its rarity. The traditional solution is an incurred or dog-like sense of duty or tit-for-tat exchange (that is, a dog whipped into place), but even in shakespeare's day, the nunnery was free and econimosity pretty much leaves out questions of more or less gravity and mobility and that makes sex work. As an adjective, sex can go either direction, but gender is supposed to be set in its ways, much like a cement block. For example, isn't there a difference between a sexy car (or coat) and a masculine (or feminine) one? When in doubt, there's always neutering or melting ice cream into or for oral cavities.
So from another perspective, gender is that aspect of being which, when found entangled with other beings, generates new and unique beings (as opposed to an entanglement in factories which concerns itself with the reproduction of identity). When it is not generative, we are referred to sexing, which exists in the same genre as playing (being an unproductive ex-spenditure or a-logical transaction of sensory organs in an imitation of the dance of motion with gravity), as opposed to, for example, work. The first is, in fact, often thought a cure for the second. One's gender is, therefore, not deducible except after the proper consideration of children, and that is an empirical claim and not a deductive generalisation (one either gets pregnant or doesn't and the exudate is not a diffuse knapweed or potato). Sex and gender stand in the same relationship as generation and productiion, two competing genres of discourse ongoing between naturalists and construction workers. These are not necessarily poles of activity except under external constraint, as little is actually shared between them. In Liberation Chemistry, the ionic bond presents the new molecule as an identity, but it is not left unsaid (though often taken for granted) that this bond is only possible with the sharing of electrons, or whatever it is the two (or more) participants find so attractive. Even if it is a hot potatoe, the bond is secure. The key term is of course, "sharing", otherwise there'd be a chemical explosion or a big bounce and then we split.
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