24 August 2004 (Tuesday)
people have sex
Let's get this straight. Please. Words have gender. People have sex.
Yes, there's a double entendre in there. Sue me if you don't like it. The point remains. When you get an ultrasound to find out if your fetus is a boy or a girl, you are finding out the baby's sex. When you, a man, talk about your relationships with women, you are discussing the opposite sex. When you decide whether to use "blond" or "blonde" to describe someone with light-colored hair, the choice is based on the sex of the person, although you are choosing a gendered word.
"Gender" properly describes people only when you are talking about their emotional and physiochemical identity. A biological male (that's his sex) who feels as if he should be a woman is transgendered. If you have some paperwork where you want to know whether the person is male or female (for whatever reason), you want to ask about their sex. If you ask for their gender, you should expect an answer consdierably longer than "M" or "F." It is not more polite, or more proper, or more discreet, to talk about someone's "gender" as a substitute for "sex." In fact, if you want to use the proper definition of the word, it's pretty damn intrusive. Now who's being rude?
using gender to describe emotional affiliation with a sex is a secondary definition of the word gender.
In MW, using gender directly as sex is given as 2a while using gender as emotional affiliation is 2b.
etymologiclaly, gender is not sex-specific, nor is the primary definition, which, as you say, is about grammatical classes.
You are right. The primary definition of gender in Merriam-Webster is not related to biological sex at all. Hence my initial comment: "Words have gender. People have sex." Definitions 1a, 1b, and 1c agree with this basic assertion.
Definition 2a basically defines "gender" as a synonym for biological "sex." I suppose that means that using the two words interchangably is not actually wrong, but "sex" is still the preferred term in American English (ask any biologist), and therefore it is more correct. I accept the 2b definition (as described in the last paragraph of the original blog entry) out of necessity, since otherwise we would have people describing their "biological sex" and their "emotional sex." Using "sex" for the former and "gender" for the latter keeps things tidy and readily understandable.
Blonde is a gendered word? Are you sure it's not just your country f*cking with the language of mine?!
Go bitch to Noa. "Blond(e)" is from the French.
(Also, I think it's generally ungendered in English, as are most words, but I wasn't going to get into the fine points of the grammar of Germanic and Romance languages.)
Yes, I'm weighing in on an old topic, sue me. :-)
In a lot of my EMT texts, they'll have techs using dialogue like "I have a 24-year-old male with (insert injury here).
No, you have a 24-year-old *man* with injury X.
Or, I suppose, a 24 year-old male patient, or male human being.
meh. Picky.
Hey, there's no law against being behind the times.
BS"D
Being Canadian, I write "blonde" for a woman & "blond" for a man because of the French being ingrained in me from a very early age.
That being said, I would like to quote to you from one of my very favourite episodes of "Newsradio":
Beth: Sex & gender are the same thing.
Max: No, because I would rather have sex than have gender.
Lisa: & since you have neither, the point is moot.
About blond and blonde - if I wanted to make an implied judgement about a woman's intellect (nnot that I would, of course), I would call her a blonde. If I was just describing her physical attributes, I would say she has blond hair.
Blonde being the noun, blond being the adjective.
- But that's just me.
I prefer sex at home. At work I prefer gender to sex. As in what is in the sex field. You gotta have sex to make this program work. Where are we getting (the) sex (field from). NO NO NO gender is better and EQUALS sex.
Its sad I have made it a pet peeve to block out sex and have gender instead. Its a sad state of our society. I've been told by older people at work here comes big dick was once just a nick name for a guy named will.
