If Sex and Gender Are Different Things, Why Have Sex-Based Words Been Appropriated, Redefined, & Their Original Meanings Forbidden?

The Case for Taking Back Woman, Man, Girl, Boy, Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, Daughter, Son — and All the Rest

If you’re a regular reader, you probably don’t need me to make the case that sex and gender are different things — but let’s start there, in case new friends are joining us:

Sex Refers to the Type of Body You Have; Gender Refers to the Cultural Stereotypes and Expectations Associated with the Type of Body You Have

This is a simple point, really.

Sex is a simple biological reality. Every culture, every time and place, recognizes that there are two types of humans, male and female. These sex-based labels refer to the fact that biologically, we are a sexually reproducing species. I’ve linked to a basic article about sexual reproduction, but just about everyone knows that in human sexual reproduction, there is a type of person (male) that produces a small mobile gamete (sperm) and a type of person (female) that produces a large immobile gamete (egg), and these two types of gametes need to join in order for there to be a new human.

No disagreement there yet?

Someone’s sex, and the words humans have commonly used for millennia to describe someone in terms of their sex — female, male, woman, man, girl, boy, mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, and all the rest — describe biological realities. These do not vary by time, place, or culture. Every human society has been composed of these two types of people.

The sex you’re born with — male or female — says nothing about your personality (or what it should be), or your preferred activities, friends, or romantic partners (or what those should be).

Sex-based language is only a statement about biological reality.

Gender, on the other hand, is a cultural thing. Gender refers to the cultural baggage that is laid onto people according to the type of (sexed) body they have. It refers to the cultural stereotypes and expectations associated with masculinity and femininity.

So, for example, a man in the West might stereotypically be expected to be outspoken, professionally ambitious, and physically protective of his family. Those stereotypes refer to gendered expectations associated with persons of his sex. Another way to look at it:

Point to any man on Planet Earth:

• He is a man (which refers to his sex: a material biological fact).

• But he is not necessarily masculine (which refers to his gender: whether he conforms to the cultural expectations and stereotypes of his time and place).

If he is like most people, our random man is a mix of all sorts of traits, some stereotypically “masculine” and some stereotypically “feminine” according to the dictates of his particular culture.

That’s why gender is correctly said to be “on a spectrum.”

Sex, meanwhile, is a binary.

We seem to get awfully confused when we mix up those two things. No, Virginia, sex is not a spectrum.

Sex Doesn’t Change; Gender Baggage Changes with Time, Place, and Culture

In the 1950s, a man who cooked or gave his kids a bath would have been considered an oddball, an outlier. Those activities would definitely have been coded as “feminine,” especially in a historical context where a rigid division of labor by sex existed: men were expected to do paid work, and women were expected to take care of the house and kids.

Today, men and women typically both do paid work, and many men now consider bathing kids and cooking to be part of the shared work of running a household. These activities no longer raise eyebrows when done by men. They are no longer coded as strictly feminine, although many people still recognize them as “traditionally feminine, in the past.”

In both examples, the people are men. In both examples, the men bathed their kids and cooked. Seventy years ago, the man who did those things was considered “feminine,” and today, the man who does those things is considered an unremarkable guy, doing typical things.

When I was a child, this riddle could still stump a few people:

A father and his son are in a car accident and rushed to the hospital. The father dies. The boy is taken to the OR and the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy; he’s my son.”

How is this possible?

Today, it doesn’t seem like a riddle at all.

Sex doesn’t change; gender does.

But if Gender Stereotypes and Expectations Have Become More Relaxed and Fluid in the West, Why Is There a Particular Fixation on Gender Now? Can’t People Just…Do What They Want?

A Gen X dinosaur like myself has watched men and women’s lives becoming more egalitarian, decade after decade. Everyone’s options have gradually become more open, more diverse.

A throwback picture of 1970s NFL player Rosey Greer, who became slightly infamous (and the subject of many late-night TV jokes) for being a man who knits, crochets, and does needlepoint captures a much more rigidly gendered time:

But no one suggested that Rosey Grier was “really a woman.” Those ideas were precisely what we were moving away from as the 20th century wore on.

My childhood and young adulthood saw us moving farther and farther away from those Weird Old Days — treating a guy who knits as an oddity or someone to joke about. Instead you could . . . just be a guy who knits.

Then suddenly about ten years ago, in a strange turnaround, it became fashionable and progressive to ask someone who was gender-nonconforming whether they were “really” not their sex at all — whether they “might be trans” — whether they might want or need to to “explore their gender” (which was mixed up with the idea of sex).

What does “exploring your gender” mean, other than to take stock of the ways in which you conform — or don’t conform — to the remaining stereotypes and expectations that your culture associates with your sex? And . . . why does anyone care about conforming to gender stereotypes or not? It seemed we were moving culturally to a place where the old stereotypes didn’t matter. A boy could choose pink shoes and still be a boy — right? Even Rosey Grier could do needlepoint back in the 70s. Men could wear makeup in the 80s — and everyone could do androgyny.

Is it possible, with our gender stereotypes and expectations so relaxed compared to 50, 60, 70 years ago — with gender stereotypes and expectations nearly conquered, and with there being “no wrong way to be a man or woman” — that the Final Frontier was to claim to change sex entirely, or to be something totally new and different?¹ Perhaps.

The real answer is probably much more complex than that. But this is a post about language.

The Sex Words Are Already Taken; If People Want Words to Discuss Gender, They Need to Create Their Own Words

So finally, to the point:

The words that refer to people’s biological, sexed realities —female, male, woman, man, girl, boy, mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, and all the rest—are taken. They are in use. They serve a useful purpose in every human society that uses them.

They are not available for appropriation and repurposing — not to mention, becoming taboo in the context of their former and commonly understood biological meanings. If we don’t like sex-based words being appropriated, redefined, and forbidden to us, we need to say no to that. We need not to play along with it.

What are some examples of this appropriation and redefinition?

This article describes how the words woman and mother have been professionally expunged from discussions of childbirth:

The Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) formerly referred to clients as "women" and "mothers," but in 2014 changed some (but not all) language in its core competencies document to refer to "pregnant people" and "birthing individuals." The new gender-neutral language recognizes that some transgender, genderqueer and intersex individuals may require midwifery care and do not identify as women.

No?

They “do not identify as [the biological entity that they are, regardless of their gender] women.” Well, that’s their business. They are free to think of themselves however they like, and I wish them happiness. And not just happiness — everyone deserves good, respectful care when they’re pregnant.

The fact remains, however, that anyone who requires the services of the midwife is a woman (because “woman” is a long-established sex-based term, not a gender-based term), and if a group wants a word to describe their special gender status, they need to do something other than to appropriate a sex-based word, redefine it, and berate people who wish to use the sex-based word with its established meaning.

Here’s another example of the problem:

In 2019, a pregnant “transman” delivered a stillborn baby because the nurse didn’t recognize that the person who looked like a man was pregnant. According to the USA Today article, a doctor was quoted as saying,

This is an example of what happens to transgender people interacting with the health care system…. He was rightly classified as a man [in the medical records and appeared masculine] but that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.

Or.

Or it would have been useful, and possibly life-saving, if the patient’s medical records, and the patient herself, had indicated that she was a woman, despite her external appearance. It would have been helpful if one small group of people hadn’t appropriated and redefined the sex-based word “man” to mean something about gender and applied it to themselves — and even got the medical community to play along, even after a stillborn baby was the tragic result.

When calling yourself a man results in a death, perhaps it’s time to reconsider whether changing the meaning of an entire set of medically relevant words, as commonly understood for millennia, is a beneficial idea.

The Lengths to Which We Go to Avoid Using Our Sex-Based Words to Refer to Someone’s Sex Are…Out of Control

In the fall of 2021, the Lancet had a cover proclaiming, “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.”

Bodies. With vaginas.

(Do you know what else is referred to as “a body”? A corpse.)

The long-neglected anatomy and physiology of “bodies with vaginas” (i.e., women) often has little or nothing to do with vaginas. For example, men’s and women’s heart attack symptoms are often very different, with many medical professionals taught to look out for men’s symptoms as “the standard,” and therefore, women’s symptoms are sometimes missed or overlooked with tragic results. This has nothing to do with anyone’s “vagina.”

A quick google will yield dozens of examples of the medically relevant differences between men and women, most of which are completely unrelated to anyone being a “body with a vagina.”

It’s not just dehumanizing. It’s inaccurate.

And is it warm and caring — does it inspire confidence or trust — for medical professionals to refer to people (incorrectly) according to their body parts? For a leading medical journal to plaster this language on their cover? For women themselves to be scolded and shushed (“Not ALL women!”) when they use their own words to talk about themselves, their lives, and their experiences?

And by the way: Yes, usually, all women. If not all women, the topic pertains only to women: menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, motherhood, breastfeeding, menopause.

Being recategorized as a “body with a vagina” is simply not an acceptable alternative.

We Need Our Damn Words Back

Part of the reason many people are confused about gender — what they think of it, what they believe is right and fair, how they want to respond to requests for pronouns and email signatures — is this conflation of gender with sex.

If our new cultural norm is that trans girls are girls,² of course the public will be led to think that it’s only right and fair for these “girls” to use the girls’ restroom, to join the girls’ cabin on overnight trips, join the girls’ sports teams, and undress, with their intact male body, with the girls in locker rooms.

Anything else starts to sound like a civil rights violation, doesn’t it? But in fact the problem is caused by the misuse of sex-based words to refer to gender. Excluding males from female spaces and opportunities is not a civil rights violation — in fact it’s the opposite: Including males represents an erosion of single-sex spaces and opportunities that girls and women in earlier generations fought hard to gain for themselves. If “Trans women are women,” Title IX is out the window. So are separate prison accommodations or domestic violence shelters by sex. So is requesting a woman, in the original sex-based meaning of the word to provide physical exams or intimate care.

A lot of people believe it’s right and fair for their kids to undress in same-sex locker rooms, to have same-sex camp counselors, to have same-sex competitors in sports after puberty, to keep Title IX protections for women, and to keep prison accommodations and domestic violence shelters single-sex, and to be able to request a same-sex person for physical exams.

The problem is this: our confusion of sex and gender, the repurposing of sex-based words for gender-based meanings, is preventing us from having those important conversations in any meaningful way.

Most people want to be kind and compassionate to others, including those who are very different from themselves. And yet, many people are uncomfortable — even if they can’t quite identify the source of discomfort — playing an extended game of pretend, acting as if they perceive gender-nonconforming people as the opposite sex or a “they,” when really they don’t. It can feel dishonest and false. You’re lying to them. You’re lying to yourself.

Most people really don’t care how anyone dresses or what hobbies they like. Most people really don’t care if a guy wants to wear a dress and makeup or a girl cuts her hair short and has masculine clothing and mannerisms. Most people really don’t care about whether Sam Smith makes terrible fashion choices and a cringey video. But whether to go along with a person’s request to play pretend — misusing sex-based words to do so — can be a difficult personal choice. Those issues are up to the individual to decide: What is kind and right?

But whether women — in being “kind,” in playing pretend — must abandon the use of the word “woman” with the sex-based meaning it’s had for millennia, because it might hurt a few people’s feelings — a few people who have taken the word for themselves, without our permission, and left us with awkward, inaccurate, dehumanizing constructions like “body with a vagina” or “lactating person” or “menstruator” in its place — I say no.

We have dibs on our sex-based words. We need them. They’re useful. They’re necessary for describing our own human experience. If you want words that refer to gender, create your own. I’ll gladly use them.

1. “Nonbinary,” I’m looking at you. Look, no one is a walking gender stereotype. Everyone by this standard is nonbinary. Nonbinary is the very opposite of special.

2. No, they’re not, because "girls" refers to their sex. “Trans girls" might prefer to match their behavior, activities, and appearance to feminine gender stereotypes or expectations, and that’s fine for them — live and let live — but think about it: How deep do those stereotypical “feminine” traits typically go, beyond the cosmetic and ornamental? Personally, I’ve not come to associate transwomen with stereotypical “feminine” qualities of being nurturing, remembering the extended family’s birthdays, and making sure the toilet paper never runs out. There seems to be only a limited subset of feminine stereotypes associated with “trans” girls or women.