[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
Introduction
Classifying people by sex/gender is obviously important to
humans, much more so than other biologically based divisions, such as eye color
or even skin color. This is reflected in languages in many different ways.
Thus, for instance English requires that at least some pronouns be coded for
the sex/gender of their referents. This is the case in the subject pronouns he/she
and the oblique pronouns him/her.[1]
Spanish has the sex-based analog pronouns él ‘he’ and ella ‘she’,
a distinction that in this language is also found in the plural, cf. ellos
‘they masc.’ and ellas ‘they fem.’, as well as for the
direct object pronouns lo ‘it/him’ and la ‘it/her’ for direct
objects (for indirect objects, there is no gender distinction, since there is
only one gender pronouns: sing. le and pl. les). Many languages
do not make such gender distinctions in personal pronouns at all, such as for
instance Basque, where the singular pronoun hura is equivalent to Eng. he/she
and Sp. él/ella. Languages differ as to how and where they
express, obligatorily or optionally, sex/gender distinctions, but there is no
doubt that it is an important distinction for humans, and thus for languages.
You may have noticed that in the previous paragraph we wrote
sex/gender, and not just either sex or gender. That is
because this is an interesting and complex distinction that is one of the
topics we will explore in this chapter. Although sex as a biological distinction
is presumably easy to define, in recent years, the word gender has come
to be used for things the word sex was used for and then for others, in particular
one having to do with identity. The same thing has happened in Spanish with
these words’ cognates: sexo and género. In this chapter we are
going to explore these words, their origins, and the changes in meaning that
they are undergoing. Note that in this chapter we will not be discussing other
issues related to sex/gender, such as the issue of inclusive or non-sexist
language that has become so important for some in recent times.
The male/female distinction that seemed so obvious and basic
to us until has come into question in the last couple of decades. For some
people, being a man or a woman is no longer a matter of biology,
something that could be easily examined, but rather a matter of identity,
so that men now can have uteruses and women penises, something that perhaps
most people have not reconciled themselves to believe yet, but which denying is
anathema to some. This is a societal issue that we will explore here but which
we will not attempt to resolve, of course. There is still much acrimonious
controversy on these matters, even in Western countries where these notions
have mostly surfaced and taken root. In this chapter, we are primarily going to
discuss the meanings and origins of two pairs of cognates, Eng. sex ~
Sp. sexo and Eng. gender ~ Sp. género. In the last
section, we will also briefly discuss the words male and female,
as well as their Spanish semi-equivalents, macho and hembra.
[1] Note
that this binary distinction is not coded in the plural where only the pronouns
they/them are available in English, which are not coded as to
sex/gender.
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