this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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The fun bit is that the word gender was pulled from linguistics into sociology exactly to try to make a less ambiguous situation.
It literally went "what if we talked about people having gender like the French talk about objects?” Much like people, a table is feminine in French regardless of if it has a penis or not.
Later, people decided to use gender as a synonym for sex and complain about using the word gender in a way that's ambiguous with sex.
Which most tables in France do, of course.
Gender has been conflated with human sex from the fifteenth century, but I like your explanation of the sociological application.