User:AlexR/gender

This is the last version before Njyoder descended onto the article. Will try to rework the article in peace here.

This is a very preamliary version, merely meant to present my idea how the article should be structured, nothing more. That includes a need to find better section heading.

Gender is the perceived or projected masculinity or femininity of a person or characteristic; in systems where more than those two genders exist, it can of course also refer to those other genders (compare third gender). For a discussion on its use as a synonym for sex (see Gender=Sex? below).

What is gender

A person's gender is complex, encompassing countless characteristics of appearance, speech, movement and other factors not solely limited to physical sex, male and female, as conventionaly determined. Gender expression is commonly attributed to self-expression and innate characteristics, nature vs. nurture, and reaction to societal acceptance and oppression.

This aggregate gender is often not easily categorized simply, although societies may tend to assume simple binary categorizations, as Western culture on the basis of what is often seen as natural sex division. The extreme of this belief is called essentialism, while its opposition is constructionism. Gender associations are constantly being renegotiated, as, for example, the color pink, considered masculine in the early 1900s, is now seen as feminine, and vice versa for blue. Gender is also evolving in this usage from noun to adjective: it is increasingly being seen as an attribute (like color) rather than as a distinct entity in itself.

History and etymology

Etymology

Unlike most East Asian, African, or Native American languages, in the grammar of Indo-European languages - e.g., Sanskrit; Greek; Latin and its successors, the Romance languages; and the Slavic and Germanic Languages - nouns and pronouns are said to have a grammatical gender. This is the original use of the term as a metaphor for sex (masculine and feminine nouns from male and female people), dating to Protagoras in the fifth century. The English noun "gender" is derived from the Old French word genre, meaning "kind of thing". It goes back to the Latin word genus (meaning "kind", "species", "rank, clan, family, etc, especially a noble family"); compare gens.

So that would leave this article with a section on the etymology and usage history of the term, including the formation of the idea that there was something that was not based on biological sex alone, and yet was usualy assiciated with it; the Haig article you found should be an excellent source for parts of that.

The rise of "gender"

The feminist perspective

The transgender perspective

The concept of a psychological or social sense of being male or female that was different from sexual characteristics present in a person goes at least back to the mid-19th century, and was first describend in scientific papers in the context of homosexuality.

However, non-scientifc concepts of sex being different from gender can be found much earlier; compare, for example Elagabalus: Whether the reports from the Augustan History are correct or not, obviously the author(s) of this history assumend that people would understand the concept of a person who claimed that their gender identity or their prefered gender role was different from their sex. Similarly, many cases are reported from the middle ages and early modern age where people of one sex tried to pass as the other, and many of those reports refer to earlier cases; although if on inspection no physical anormality was found, people were either forced to live in the gender role appropriate to their (presumed) sex, and/or were punished; that is analogous with the treatment of homosexual acts.

Although the rise of a third gender concept in the 19th century was primarily aimed at homosexual people, transgender people (as well as intersex people, to some extend) quickly took advantage of those early developments, for example compare Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

Gender=Sex?

Gender is in some contexts increasinly used as a synonym for sex, referring to the physical or essential characteristics commonly used to differentiate male from female.

And we need a section on the sex=gender question, because obviously there are at least two schools of thought here who use it that way: One is the school that denies that biological sex and gender (identiy, role, expression, etc) can be unrelated at all, and the other is, quote Haig: "Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation." (That's of course not counting those who simply don't know the difference between the two terms.)

External links