[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]
The meaning of Eng. gender revisited
As we saw in the preceding section, English borrowed the word gender from Old French in the late 14th century. Of all the early uses or meanings of this word, only the grammatical one remains. Other early senses are now obsolete, such as ‘a class of things or beings distinguished by having certain characteristics in common’ (OED), one of the meanings Sp. género still has. By the end of the 15th century, Eng. gender is also attested with the meaning ‘males or females viewed as a group; = sex n.1 1. Also: the property or fact of belonging to one of these groups’ (OED). In other words, gender was being used for the first time as a euphemism for the word sex, but only to refer to the sexual groups as a whole, not to an individual’s sex and even less their identity. That would come later, in the 20th century.
Until quite recently, the English word gender could be said to continue to have those two main uses, one to refer to grammatical gender and the other one as a quasi-synonym of the two main senses of the word sex to refer to biological males and females as as groupings or the properties of such groups in a general sense, not so much as an individual’s property. In Table 205, you can see the (abridged) entry for the word gender in the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary (CALD) from 2011.
|
gender noun • Does this test show the gender of the baby? • Discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age or disability is not allowed. 2. countable
+ singular or plural verb formal all males, or all females, considered as
one group • I think both genders are capable of looking after children. GRAMMAR
• I so often get
the gender wrong when I’m trying to speak French. |
Table 205: Entry for gender in Cambridge
Advanced Learners Dictionary (2011)
Note that by this time, ‘social conditions’, not just
physical ones were mentioned as part of the definition of the ‘sex’ sense of the
word gender. That is because around the middle of the 20th century, in
the social sciences, the word gender started to be used, first in the
US, with a socio-cultural sense, which can be defined as follows:
the state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one’s sex. Also: a (male or female) group characterized in this way. (OED)
According to the OED, the first use
of the word with this meaning was in 1945 in the American Journal of
Psychology. Note that the CALD dictionary did not mention this sense as
recently as 2011.
Most dictionaries do not attempt to explain in any depth how
the words gender and sex are used differently. One exception is
the Oxford Dictionary of English (2005), according to which
The word gender has been used since the 14th century primarily as a grammatical term, referring to the classes of noun in Latin, Greek, German, and other languages designated as masculine, feminine, or neuter. It has also been used since the 14th century in the sense ‘the state of being male or female’, but this did not become a common standard use until the mid 20th century. Although the words gender and sex both have the sense ‘the state of being male or female’, they are typically used in slightly different ways: sex tends to refer to biological differences, while gender tends to refer to cultural or social ones. (ODE)
Things
have changed somewhat since 2005 in how these words are used by some speakers of
English, albeit not all. In addition to the ‘euphemism for sexual category’
sense and the ‘stereotypical sexual behavior’ sense, a new sense has come into
use in the last couple of decades in Western societies.
In her book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,
Kathleen discusses the different senses with which the word gender has been
used. identifies four different ways in which the word gender is being
used by people today, resulting in not insignificant confusion, as well as a
fair amount of acrimony. The first two are the ones we have just mentioned. The
first use of the word gender, according to Stock, what she calls gender1,
is the use of the word as a euphemism for sex the ‘biological category’
sense of the word sex, a word that, as we mentioned earlier, had come to
be associated with sexual activity, particularly in the 20th century, the
‘sexual activity’ sense of the word (see above). This change resulted in the
need for an aseptic term for sex when it did not refer to sexual activity and
the word gender was adopted. It is true that the word gender had
been used for centuries to refer to the sex-based groups, but mostly to refer
to each of them—the
masculine gender and the feminine gender—as
a group, not to refer to a property of individuals. Stock defines this sense as
follows:
GENDER1: A polite-sounding word for the division between men and women, understood as a traditional alternative word for biological sex/the division between biological males and females. This word is thought to have the benefit of an absence of embarrassing connotations of sexiness in the copulatory sense. When a passport application, say, asks for ‘gender’, it’s intended in this sense. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, a character refers to the ‘masculine gender’, meaning males/men.[1]
An even more obvious example of the word gender
used this way is when it is used in phrases such as biological gender,
which means, basically the grouping sense that sex has.
The second sense with which the word gender is used
nowadays, what Stock she calls gender2, has to do with the
social and cultural aspects associated with the biological sexes. This includes
primarily social stereotypes, such as the fact that in some societies women
have long hair, wear dresses, and wear lipstick. Many believe, however, that
some sex-connected behaviors are indeed based on biology, such as for example
male heightened aggressiveness and female greater emotional sensitivity. We
already mentioned that this sense arose in the mid-20th century in the social
sciences. Stock defines this sense the following way:
GENDER2: A word for social stereotypes, expectations and norms of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, originally directed towards biological males and females respectively. These can and do differ from culture to culture, though there are many overlaps too.
Starting in the second half of the 20th century,
many people thought that these stereotypes, such as that girls prefer to play
with dolls and boys with cars, were fully socially constructed and not based on
biology (sex) at all. Thus, social scientists started to speak about gender
roles, as opposed to sexual roles. Today, however, some think that
there may be a biological component to at least some of these roles in addition
to the socially constructed one, though these biological aspects may not
influence all members of each gender/sex equally. Stock discusses how some
social scientists, the ‘‘blank slate’ feminists’, ‘think all sex-associated
stereotypes of femininity and masculinity must be social, so that in effect
there are no natural or innate behavioral or psychological differences between
males and females at all’, whereas others, ‘‘innatist’ evolutionary
psychologists’, think at least some behavioral and psychological stereotypes accurately
represent pre-existing average biological differences between the sexes’.
The phrase gender nonconforming is often used
nowadays and here the word gender has this sense of ‘behavioral stereotypes’
for each sex (in a particular culture). This adjective, which is sometimes
spelled gender-nonconforming, means what it says, that it does not conform
with gender norms or stereotypes. The verb conform has here its main
meaning, which is ‘comply with rules, standards, or laws. ▶ behave
according to social convention’ (COED). Merriam-Webster defines gender
nonconforming as ‘exhibiting behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits
that do not correspond with the traits typically associated with one’s sex :
having a gender expression that does not conform to gender norms’.[i]
The phrase gender nonconforming is commonly
translated into Spanish using the cognate word conforme, which is not a
very fortunate choice since it means primarily ‘satisfied, happy’—though in some rare contexts
it can also mean ‘in accordance with’, a meaning that is closer to the intended
one—and is related to
the verb conformar ‘to shape, adjust, make up’, which is a false friend
of Eng. conform. (Much more common than conformar is its
reflexive version, conformarse, which means ‘to resign oneself; to be
reluctantly content; to make do’.) Thus, we often see or hear the expression (de)
género no conforme and even worse which use the word conforme, whose
main meaning in Spanish is ‘satisfied, happy’ (estar conforme means ‘to
agree, be in agreement’). Another poor translation of gender nonconforming
is con disconformidad de género, which is just as non-sensical. The
meaning of the English verb conform used here is probably best
translated by the verbs seguir or ajustar. So, gender nonconforming
means something like que no sigue/se ajusta a los estereotipos o normas de
su sexo/género. More succinctly, one could translate it as desajustado/as
de género, as an adjective, or desajuste de género, as a noun.
Stock’s third sense for the word gender, or gender3,
is a minor one. This sense has been used since the late 20th century by some
feminists as a reaction to ‘biological determinism’ and it is based on social roles
associated with each sex, but not in the sense of negative or limiting
stereotypes, as was the case with gender2, but rather in a
positive, affirming sense. This sentiment is what French existentialist and
feminist Simone de Beauvoir had in mind when she said that ‘One is not born,
but rather becomes a woman’ (1949), conveying ‘the idea that being a woman is
not the same as being born biologically female’ (Stock). Stock defines this
sense as follows:
GENDER3: A word for the division between men and women, understood, by definition, as a division between two sets of people: those who have the social role of masculinity projected on to them, and those who have the social role of femininity projected on to them… As mentioned, in the late twentieth century it was enthusiastically endorsed by some feminists as a putative shield against accusations of ‘biological determinism’: the idea that female anatomy is domestic destiny.
Finally, the fourth and last sense of this word, gender4,
has surfaced in recent years, in the 21st century, in which gender is equated
by some as a matter of identity, whether you feel or identify as
a man or a woman, or neither, regardless of what one’s sex at birth. This is
presumably something innate, something that you are born with, independently
from your biological sex according to gender ideology. That is because a small
minority of people do not identify with their birth sex, but rather with the
opposite sex, or even with none of the two sexes (non-binary), for a variety of
reasons which are not well understood. Stock defines this sense as follows:
GENDER4: A shortened version of the term ‘gender identity’… a common idea [of what exactly a gender identity is] is that it is the ‘private experience of gender role’ – roughly, whether you relate to yourself psychologically as a boy or man, girl or woman, or neither, in a way that has nothing directly to do with your sex.
Stock and other feminists, so-called ‘radical feminists’, object
to this use of the word genre, which they claim is an attack on sex,
since it replaces biological sex with gender identity, and thus of feminism, or
at least a version of feminism that is anchored on biological sex. They object
primarily to the fact that proponents of what they call gender identity ideology
are attempting to change the meaning of words like man and woman to
one in which biology (sex) is absent and all that matters is sexual identity.
In other words, for those who believe in the centrality of gender identity, a
man, for example, is not someone who is born with a penis or has XY
chromosomes, but rather someone who identifies as a man, even if they
were born as a biological female. Likewise, a woman is not someone who is born
with a uterus or XX chromosomes, but someone who identifies as a woman. And
we are not just talking about a change in the definition of the words man
and woman and boy and girl, but more generally the
abolition of biological sex in human affairs and its replacement with gender
identity. For some, even the meaning of the word sex is changed
to mean ‘gender identity’, resulting in the elimination of the notion of
biological sex altogether. Gender identity ideology is a phenomenon that
started in the United States in the last couple of decades and from there it
has spread to other parts of the world, much like the United States has had a
predominant role in many other aspects of culture change since the end of World
War II.
The consequences of the redefinition of all these words
could be great for society, as some feminists have pointed out, but they are
rarely explored in practice. For instance, are transwomen to be allowed in
women’s sports and in women-only spaces such as public restrooms and changing
rooms? There are already some dictionaries that had added an additional sense
for the meaning of the word woman which reflects the new usage based on
gender ideology, though without replacing the traditional sense. The online Cambridge
Dictionary added in 2022 a sense to the meaning of the word woman,
namely ‘an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been
said to have a different sex at birth’, as in the sentence Mary is a woman
who was assigned male at birth.[ii]
(Note that the first sense of the word woman in this dictionary is still
‘an adult female human being’.)
There
seems to be much confusion about the difference between sex and gender in some
quarters at this time. One might have thought that sex had to do with biology
and gender with behavior or identity, but that is not always the case, at least
not for everybody, as we saw earlier. So, for instance, at one point the Obama
administration insisted that sex and gender (identity) were interchangeable
words in some matters of policy.[2]
People who do not identify with their gender that was
assigned to them at birth based on their biological sex are known today as transgender,
a word first attested in 1974 (OED). An earlier word for this phenomenon was transexual,
first attested with that sense in 1956, though this term focuses more on
behavior than on identity per se.[3]
In other words, male-to-female transgender people tend to behave like
stereotypical women and female-to-male transgender people as stereotypical men
in the gender2 sense of gender, that is to say, they are what
used to be thought of as effeminate men and manly women. These words transgender
and transexual are formed with the Latinate prefix trans‑ (cf.
Part I, Chapter 5) that primarily means ‘on or to the other side of : across :
beyond’ (MWC). The English term transexual has been calqued into Spanish as transexual
and the term transgender as transgénero, an invariant adjective,
as in the sentence El 80 % de las personas reconocen que nunca han conocido
a una persona transgénero ‘80% of people admit that they have never met a
transgender person’ (Collins).
There has been a big boom of people coming out as
transgender in recent times. The reasons for this are probably quite varied.
One that has been suggested is that people who are gender nonconforming
(see above), that is, people who do not conform with the behavioral stereotypes
associated with their sex in their society have now been given the option of
opting out of their gender by being told that gender is a matter of identity,
not of biology. All of this is quite confusing, and the debates can bring much
acrimony, which we will steer away from here.
In recent years, the English adjectives transgender
(and transsexual) adjectives are often abbreviated as trans. Thus,
we hear expressions such as trans man, trans woman, and trans
people, for example. The former two expressions have become compounds now, transwoman
and transman. The OED defines transwoman as ‘a male-to-female
transgender or transsexual person’ (1994) and transman as ‘a
female-to-male transgender or transsexual person’ (1996). This abbreviation is
starting to be used in Spanish as well as short for transgénero so that,
e.g., Eng. a trans woman/man = Sp. una mujer/un hombre trans
(Collins).
There is an opposite term to this trans, namely cis,
from the identical Latin preposition and prefix cis that meant ‘on this side
of’. Thus, people whose gender identity matches their biological, birth gender
are known as cisgender, so cis for short. Collins defines the adjective cisgender
and/or cis as ‘someone who is cis has a gender identity which fully
corresponds to the sex assigned to them at birth’ (Collins). The equivalent
Spanish expression is cisgénero, also shortened to cis.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
(2017) defines the adjective transgender as ‘relating to or being a
person whose gender identity does not conform to that typically associated with
the sex to which they were assigned at birth’ (AHD). It also explains its
usage:
Transgender is properly used as an adjective. Its use as a noun is offensive; phrases such as a transgender person or a person who is transgender are preferable. When referring to more than one person, the phrases transgender people or the transgender community can be used. The term transsexual is older than transgender. Although the use of transsexual as a noun was once acceptable, nowadays, such use is usually considered offensive.
As we saw, not everybody is on board with this radical
change about how men and women are defined and there is currently much heated
debate going on in Western societies about this. Some people who have no
problem with the genre2 or genre3 senses of
genre object to the genre4 sense to the extent that it
changes the meanings of words like man and woman (and boy
and girl, among others) and which makes (biological) sex irrelevant. These
people have been attacked by ‘trans activists’, who accuse them of being transphobic
(Sp. tránsfobo/a, transfóbico/a) and trans-hostile,
calling them TERFs, an acronym that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist
(which has been translated into Spanish quite literally as Feminista
Radical Trans-Excluyente).[iii]
The latter, in turn, refer to the new views on gender as gender ideology.
Those who promote this sense of the word gender and the eclipsing of the
biological sex-based senses of words such as man and woman by the
identity-based meanings are known as trans activists or gender activists
(some who disagree with them call them by the dysphemism biology deniers).
However, ‘radical feminists’ are not the only ones who object to terms like man,
woman, boy and girl being redefined in terms of identity
as opposed to their traditional biologically based definitions. Conservative
forces in society find this sudden and radical change hard to accept. Trans
activists, however, label anyone who questions the relabeling of biologically
based terms such as man and woman as bigots, belonging in the
same category as people who object to homosexuality or to same-sex marriage.
Obviously, not everybody will agree with Stock’s approach. I
have just used her words here to illustrate how complex and confusing this
issue is, one that is in flux in society at the present time. Clearly, the four
different uses of the word gender are confusing enough for most people
and thus it is no surprise that many confuse them or even use the word with
different meanings depending on the context, often without even realizing that
that is what they are doing. In her book, Stock decides to use different
expressions for each of the four senses to avoid confusion:
Because of all this confusion, it will be policy in this book to avoid the word ‘gender’ wherever possible, and in each case substitute more concrete, clearer terms that do whatever job I want them to at the time. So, for instance, I’ll always say ‘sex’ for GENDER1. Rather than say GENDER2, I’ll talk about ‘sex-based’ or ‘sex-associated’ stereotypes, making clear when I mean purely social ones, and when I don’t. I’ll also talk about ‘sex conforming’ or ‘sex nonconforming’, rather than ‘gender conforming’ or ‘gender nonconforming’ behavior. I won’t use GENDER3 at all, except to explicitly criticize the ideas behind it. And for GENDER4, I’ll always use ‘gender identity’.
Recent
editions of English dictionaries are starting to include the more recent
senses. Thus, for instance, the current Collins English dictionary gives
five senses for the word gender.[iv]
The first one is the ‘socio-cultural sex’ sense, gender2 in
Stock’s terminology: ‘gender is the state of being male or female in relation to
the social and cultural roles that are considered appropriate for men and women’.
The second sense is the ‘identity’ sense, gender4 in Stock’s
classification: ‘You can use gender to refer to one of a range of identities
that includes female, male, a combination of both, and neither’. It is curious
that this sense is not expressed as a definition but rather as a possible
use for the word (‘You can use…’), something not commonly done in dictionaries
and which reflects societal divisions about the use of this word.[4]
The third and fourth senses in Collins are about the gender1
sense, as a euphemism for sex, whether applied to individuals or to
groups (the two senses could have been conflated): ‘3. Some people refer
to the fact that a person is male or female as his or her gender’ and ‘4. Some
people refer to all male people or all female people as a particular gender’
(my italics). Note that here too this dictionary mentions that only ‘some
people’ use the word this way, as opposed to mentioning that those are senses
of the word, as dictionaries typically do, even if not all speakers of the
language use a word in a particular way. Finally, the fifth sense of the word gender
in Collins dictionary is the grammatical sense.[5]
As we just saw, the issue of gender identity has led to the
redefinition of words such as man and woman for advocates of trans people.
Another linguistic effect has been in the area of personal pronouns. Transwomen
insist in being addressed with the pronouns she and her and
transmen with the pronouns he and him, which forces others to
acknowledge their identity when referring to them. Listing one’s ‘preferred
pronouns’ in email signatures, for example, has become a act of solidarity with
trans people for many supporters.
Non-binary people who do not identify as either male
or female may prefer that others use the pronouns they and them
for them. The use of they and them as singular pronouns in
English in some very specific contexts in which the sex of the individual is
not known goes back a long way, though grammarians often proscribe this use.
Singular they is found in 14th century Chaucer and 16-17th century
Shakespeare, for instance, though only when the pronoun’s antecedent was
something like anyone, as in Anyone knows they shouldn’t do that.
The new use of they and them as non-binary pronouns is something
quite different. Some dictionaries, however, already reflect this new usage.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary declared the word they its word of the
year in 2019 and added a new subsense for this word. Earlier, Merriam-Webster
had three senses for they, the third one of which was ‘used to refer to
a single person whose sex is not known or specified: Everyone can go if they
want to’. Now, the third sense has four subsenses, as we can see in Table 206,
the last one of which, sense d, is the truly new one.
|
3 a —used with a singular indefinite pronoun
antecedent No
one has to go if they don't want to. Everyone
knew where they stood … — E. L. Doctorow b —used with a singular antecedent to refer to
an unknown or unspecified person An
employee with a grievance can file a complaint if they need to. The
person who answered the phone said they didn't know where she was. c —used to refer to a single person whose
gender is intentionally not revealed A
student was found with a knife and a BB gun in their backpack Monday,
district spokeswoman Renee Murphy confirmed. The student, whose name has not
been released, will be disciplined according to district policies, Murphy
said. They also face charges from outside law enforcement, she said. — Olivia
Krauth d —used to refer to a single person whose
gender identity is nonbinary (see NONBINARY sense c) I knew certain things about … the
person I was interviewing.… They had adopted their gender-neutral name a few
years ago, when they began to consciously identify as nonbinary—that is,
neither male nor female. They were in their late 20s, working as an event
planner, applying to graduate school. — Amy Harmon |
We should note that the personal pronouns of many languages
are not ‘gendered’ the way English and Spanish pronouns are. In Basque, for
example, the word hura is genderless, equivalent to ‘he’ or ‘she’. There
is also one example of a language with gendered personal pronouns whose
speakers have strived to create a new genderless pronoun out of whole cloth and
have managed to get it approved by the language authorities. The language is
Swedish. In Swedish, the gender-neutral pronoun hen was introduced and promoted
by people in the LGBT+ community around the year 2010, as a third pronoun alongside
hon ‘she’ and han ‘he’, the traditional third person singular
pronouns in this language. The new pronoun can be used in any of the situations
described in Table 206
for singular they in English.
Before leaving this topic, we should mention that only in
very recent times has the transgender community come to be connected with another,
unrelated community, namely that of those with sexual orientations differ from
the majority, heterosexual or straight ones. The acronym LGB for lesbian
(female, same-sex attracted), gay (male, same-sex attracted), and bisexual
(male or female, attracted to both sexes) to refer to people with non-heterosexual
or non-straight sexual orientations (referring to sexual attraction),
dates back to the early 1990s or even earlier, coming to replace the
expressions gay or gay and lesbian (at first, bisexuals or
‘part-time gays’ were not included). The T for transgender/transsexual
was added to that acronym, now LGBT, in the late 1990s, not without some
controversy, for this community has nothing to do with sexual orientation.
Other letters were added to the acronym later on.[vi]
[1] All of Stock quotes below come from Chapter 1 of her book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Fleet, London, 2021
[2] So, argues that in orders by this administration that sought to permit the use of single-sex facilities to trans identified individuals, “sex itselfliterally femaleBostock v. Clayton County,lower courts have already started to cite Bostock in support of gender self-identification’Nineteen Eighty-Four
[3] The adjective transsexual is first attested in writing in 1907 but with a different meaning: ‘Existing or occurring between men and women; applicable to or suitable for members of both sexes’ (OED).
[4] Curiously, one of the sample sentences for the first, socio-cultural sense, mentions gender identity, though that is what the second sense is all about: ‘Some people experience a mismatch between their gender identity and their biological sex’ (Collins).
[5] This is the fifth sense in full: ‘In grammar, the gender of a noun, pronoun, or adjective is whether it is masculine, feminine, or neuter. A word’s gender can affect its form and behavior. In English, only personal pronouns such as ‘she,’ reflexive pronouns such as ‘itself,’ and possessive determiners such as ‘his’ have gender. In both Welsh and Irish the word for “moon” is of feminine gender’ (Collins).
[i] Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender%20nonconforming (2022.11.22)
[ii] Sourcr: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/woman (2022.12.16)
[iv] Source: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/gender (2022.07.04)
[v] Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/they (2022.10.15)
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