In English, ‘gender,’ a word, began its life as a grammatical designation of noun types in the 14th century; either female, male, or neuter. We have effectively lost this distinction since English, other than for egghead grammarians, gender is no longer taught in schools. When I began elementary school in 1954, grammatical gender was no longer taught, all English nouns were neuter, except that as an educational construct, I never encountered the word ‘neuter’ until 8th or 9th grade, and I had no sense of noun gender, female or male, until I started taking French in 9th grade.
‘Gender’ in the biological sense defining biological, or genetic female and male began as an English word a century later; the 15thcentury. The word ‘gender’ continued its uninterrupted biological definition until the early 20thcentury, when ‘sex’ [which had its own origin in English in the 13th century], and which, until the early 1900s, shared a common definition with gender, began to slide into reference to the sexual act, i.e., intercourse, or coitus.
Thereafter, in the 1960s, among sociologists and psychiatrists, ‘gender’ began to slide from its genetic reference [female and male] to a distinction of social reference as separate behaviors between females and males, and then, including behaviors, slid further in the 1980s to suggest multiple genders as a matter of personal and social choice, regardless of the genetic indicators at birth.
Language use in the modern era [advent of the 20thcentury] tends to be lazy in this “slide,” or transference of meaning, such as has occurred with ‘gender’ and ‘sex.’ Historically, when technology introduced new concepts, academia became adept at coining new words to keep pace with technical changes. Thus, we did not maintain the term, ‘acoustic wire phone,’ coined by Robert Hooke in the 1660s [similar to a “tin can phone”], when Alexander Graham Bell developed the wired telephone in the 1880s.
Technical change was slow enough to allow language syntax to keep up with creation of new words to describe the technical changes by lexography. Computer technology, however, has been so rapid in its development, lexographers have been left in the dust, even with words having naught to do with computing technology. Even science of other disciplines is strained. Consider that, though the typewriter has given way to the keyboard, a now common tool, a mouse is one of those lazy slides. Even now that ‘mice’ no longer even have a tail [wire], they maintain the moniker assigned in the mid-60s. “Floppy disk,” and “hard disk” are antiquated concepts, such that now, any disk is becoming passé in favor of chips. ‘Chip,’ itself, is a borrowed, slide term, isn’t it?
Just so, ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ have both suffered by the slide, when they should have long since had new words assigned to both to allow separate meaning for new concepts.
