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S*x versus Gender (psychology, linguistics, anthropology, trans)

Created on: 2024-09-29

Modified on: 2024-10-08

Background: a non-native speaker of English asked for clarification of the difference between "sex" and "gender". Here is my response:

Hi folks, I AM a native speaker, a language geek, and a graduate in anthropology.

For most native speakers, gender means sex (as category - male or female).

You used to get asked on forms: name?, age?, sex?, etc. But "sex" also refers to the act, and some clever people tended to answer that question with, "Yes please!" But you can't "have gender" in the same way you can have sex, so it became the norm to ask for someone's "gender" instead.

There's also grammatical gender - particularly for inflected languages where inanimate nouns can be male / female / neuter. But in English, all inanimate objects are neuter, except when romanticized, like a sailor referring to his ship as "she".

The dictionaries I learned English from date from the 1930s to the 1990s. They all show the two primary meanings of gender as biological and grammatical. There is no mention of "identifying" anywhere in them. This is how the vast majority of native speakers use and understand the language. Which is to say, this is what the words mean to the majority.

Anthropology's Dilemma

Then anthropologists had a problem. They looked at tribal societies which had social categories based loosely around gender. E.g. some tribes had clear roles for men, and women, but there were some men who lived "as women", and among the women.

Anthropologists needed a word to describe the social roles of (most) men, women, and the men-living-among-women. They repurposed the word "gender" to describe these categories. This is relatively recent.

That's fine: any profession creates its own special uses of words that are different from how the rest of the population uses them. Therapists have special uses of many words, as do programmers, mechanics, etc. So it's fine for anthropologists and sociologists to do the same.

It's not fine for any profession to attempt to enforce its new definitions on the rest of the population and say they're wrong if they don't go along with it.

Changing the Language

What's happened is, starting with the gender-studies departments, and moving out through gender-ideologists, a minority are trying to impose their special use of "gender" on everyone else.

But it's not just the word "gender", they're also trying to change the meaning of the word "woman", "boy", "girl", etc., and even the language at a grammatical level, by insisting that the grammatical gender we use must reflect people's imaginary identities.

The argument goes that "the language changes". But this is a red-herring - a trick.

The language does change.

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Even when I was a kid, "gay" primarily meant "happy", now its accepted meaning has changed. OK, fine. But we don't use the word in the same way any more. If you wanted to open a "Happy Bar" now, you wouldn't call it a "Gay Bar" - that would mean something else.

The word "gay" changed - organically - and our use of it changed with it.

But the attempts to change the word "woman", etc., are something completely different. Whether people accept it or not, the sexes are real, women are not men, and wishing to be the opposite sex doesn't make it so.

Claiming the language has changed is a trick. If it were just a change in the language, we'd have a new word for "woman", etc., but everything else would remain the same.

(Before anyone says the new word is "cis-woman", that is a specialist term used only by gender-ideologists, and rejected by the majority of the population. It's also another trick - it makes real women the exception, not the norm.)

When a gender dysphoric male declares that he feels like a woman, what does he mean by "woman"? Simple: an adult female human.

This is why, if you ask a gender-ideologist what his / her / eirs definition of a woman is, they first become evasive, and if you press the point, they become hostile.

Since when was it the rest of society's duty to radically change the language to suit the fantasies of a few?

"Women's sports" are now supposed to include men who "identify" (whatever that means), or pretend to identify, as women. Those who genuinely have gender dysphoria can cry all they like, but the reality of their being male gives them an unfair advantage, so they shouldn't be there. And there are others who are simply lesser males taking advantage of the situation to steal women's prizes, injure the opposition, and get their kicks in the changing rooms.

And putting convicted male sex offenders in formerly women's prisons is not a change in the language either - that is a simple case of criminals exploiting insanely gullible lawmakers.

How the Trans Movement Changed

Twenty years ago, my circle of friends included a transwoman. She (I'll indulge the fantasy) was not immediately apparent as such, but there were tells. Our friend just tried to live as a woman, to fit in, and get along, and was liked and accepted.

I never asked our friend's opinion on this, but transwomen have said words to the effect: "No, of course I'm not literally a woman, that's why I'm a transwoman. But I choose to live as one."

In those days, being trans was rare - one in 10,000 of the population had gender dysphoria, they didn't need "finding", they presented themselves, most were males, and most cases resolved. At that time there were only a few thousand transsexuals (as they were then known) in the UK.

What we've got now is something else. At the edges, we have, for example, men with no sex change surgery, making no attempt to behave or even look like women, who turn up at women's refuges, claiming to be women, and demanding the rest of the world treat them as such.

As a psychotherapist, I can tell you what's going on here, and it isn't gender dysphoria.

But frankly no-one should need a degree to see through this. Too many degrees are part of the problem.

As in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, the higher strata of society are removed from reality, and the kid with just a bit of common sense can see it's all bollocks. (And the emperor's.)

I mean no ill to people who are genuinely suffering emotional struggles. As a therapist, I hold honest self-reflection and analysis as the best balm. If someone consciously chooses to live a fantasy, OK, so long as they don't lose touch with reality, but if they fail, it is not the duty of the rest of society to follow them.

But these vulnerable adults are frankly being exploited by an industry that does drastic irreversible surgery for profit, with minimal psychiatric protections in place, and an ideology that also creates serious risks for women.

In sum:

To most native speakers of English, "gender" means "sex". There are attempts to redefine this word, and related words, but as a group, the new meanings are either specialist, or undefined.

- Antony

Notes

: "Eirs" is an alternative pronoun listed by the Stonewall group. Take note, the trans movement is trying to make "misgendering" a crime.

: In the UK, the most famous case of this at present is Adam Graham - better known by his fantasy persona Isla Bryson - convicted in 2023 of two counts of rape, yet the authorities originally imprisoned him in a female prison until there was a public outcry. In the USA, it's reported that in "female" prisons, many women take oral contraception because the risk of being raped by male inmates who claim to identify as female is so high.

: Shrier, Irreversible Harm, 2021, p xxvii

: In 2004, there were an estimated 2,000 - 5,000 trans people in the UK. Stock, Material Girls, 2021, p1

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